What Is Account-Based Marketing (ABM)?

The difference from lead generation lies in the starting point. Lead generation attracts many people and then filters out the interested ones. ABM works the other way round: it first chooses the companies it wants to sell to, then looks for the decision-makers inside them. The unit of work is the account, and the contacts come after.

The term comes from ITSMA, a US association for the marketing of IT services. In a press release from September 2017, ITSMA states that it coined the term "Account-Based Marketing" in 2003; the opening line of the same release speaks of "the early 2000s". That is the organisation's own claim. The oldest dated ITSMA document on ABM that can still be viewed is a survey by Bev Burgess published on 1 October 2004. In 2007, ITSMA's website described ABM as an approach that treats an individual account as a market in its own right.

The work can be organised in five steps: - Choose the target accounts. In 2007 ITSMA proposed an account prioritisation tool that ranks potential targets against the company's own strengths and priorities. - Understand each account: its business, its plans, who influences the purchase and who decides it. - Prepare messages and proposals for those specific people, based on the buyer persona for each role. - Execute together with sales. In 2007 ITSMA stressed aligning sales and marketing to avoid turf battles over who owns the account. - Measure. ITSMA recommended tracking how the account perceives the company alongside revenues, leads and conversion rates.

By breadth, three models are distinguished. In 2017 ITSMA called them the three established approaches: - One-to-one (1:1): a tailored programme for each strategic account. - One-to-few (1:few): lightly customised campaigns for small clusters of accounts with similar business issues and initiatives. ITSMA described this approach in November 2016 as ABM Lite. - One-to-many (1:many): the same approach for a larger number of accounts, with less tailoring to each.

Tools reflect this logic. In HubSpot's help pages, for example, a company is flagged as a target account through a dedicated property, and another property sorts into three tiers how closely it matches the ideal customer profile. The natural home for this data is the CRM, where contacts and companies are linked.

ABM makes sense when a few accounts hold a lot of value and the purchase is decided by a group of people rather than one person. In that case, a high volume of leads from companies that will never buy costs sales time. ABM replaces the question of how many contacts come in with the question of whether the chosen accounts are moving forward.

It also changes how marketing and sales work together. The account list has to be agreed between the two teams, and measurement no longer belongs to marketing alone. Alongside the lead scoring of individual contacts comes a rating of the whole company; HubSpot, for example, sorts companies into three tiers by how closely they match the ideal customer profile.

Contacting people in an account follows rules. In the EU, Article 13(1) of the ePrivacy Directive allows email for direct marketing only to subscribers or users who have given prior consent; under Article 13(5), that rule applies to natural persons, and member states must protect the legitimate interests of other subscribers. National rules therefore differ for business addresses. In the UK, regulation 22 of PECR applies to individual subscribers. Names, job titles and email addresses of contact people are personal data under the GDPR even when they work for a company.

• Agree the account list and the selection criteria with sales before you start.
• Start with a few accounts and a one-to-one or one-to-few model before scaling.
• Track how each account develops, not only how many contacts were captured.
• Review the account list regularly with data from the CRM.
• Check the legal basis before emailing contacts at the accounts.

• Calling a lead generation campaign with a longer company list ABM.
• Choosing accounts by size alone without checking whether they fit the offer.
• Launching the programme before sales has accepted the list.
• Measuring ABM with the same volume metrics as lead generation.
• Assuming that emails to companies never need consent.