72% of marketing leaders surveyed by Momentum ITSMA and the ABM Leadership Alliance believe that account-based marketing delivers a better return on investment than other forms of marketing. The same study finds that only 17% of their programs are fully integrated into the company's sales strategy (ABM Benchmark Study, 6th edition, 279 respondents). ABM therefore pays off when marketing and sales run it together, and remains just another marketing program when they do not.
Yet the marketing setup of most B2B companies is built for the opposite: attracting a volume of contacts, qualifying them one by one and passing to sales those who exceed a score threshold. The most important accounts enter this flow at the same pace as the others, and sometimes not at all.
Account-based marketing (ABM) starts from the opposite observation. The company designates in advance the accounts it wants to win or develop. Marketing and sales then concentrate their resources on these accounts, with messages adapted to each one and shared management.
The method has a cost. It ties up marketing and sales resources on a few companies for an entire sales cycle: it is profitable in some contexts and costly in others. The following sections are for marketing, sales and RevOps leaders in B2B organizations with long cycles: conditions for relevance, target account list, buying committee, implementation in HubSpot and measurement.
Contents
Classic B2B marketing works like a funnel. It attracts a broad audience, gradually filters contacts according to their interest and profile, then passes a qualified fraction to sales. ABM reverses the order of operations: selection happens at the start, on named accounts, and the marketing work consists of building the relationship with the right people in these accounts.
The change of unit changes the whole setup. An ABM program tracks companies, not leads. It addresses several people in the same organization, with different roles and concerns. And it does not let the prospect move forward at their own pace: marketing and the sales rep responsible for the account decide together on the sequence of interactions.
There are three levels of intensity:
The third level is the one most often proposed and the furthest from ABM. Beyond a few hundred accounts, personalization becomes industry-level and the setup amounts to advanced segmentation. The option remains valid if it is called that and if you do not expect the results of an account-based program from it.
ABM does not replace inbound. Inbound continues to feed the incoming flow; ABM handles the designated accounts. One requirement: a target account that downloads a white paper must be recognized as such and assigned to its sales owner, not to the standard qualification circuit.
ABM is not a universal method. It becomes relevant when several conditions are met at the same time:
When the value of a contract does not cover this work, ABM is not the right tool. This is a frequent case. A well-built scoring and nurturing setup will then produce a better return, and in that case we recommend it rather than an ABM program with reduced resources (see our article on marketing automation workflows that generate pipeline).
Another condition is often underestimated: ABM is a sales decision before it is a marketing campaign. A program launched by marketing alone, on a list sales leadership has not approved, results in engaged accounts that nobody calls back. In the situations we encounter, this is the leading cause of ABM programs being abandoned, ahead of budget and tooling.
The list is the program's structuring decision. A list that is too broad dilutes resources; a list chosen on the wrong criteria focuses efforts on accounts that will not buy.
The starting point is the ideal customer profile (ICP), defined from the most profitable existing customers: revenue, margin, length of the relationship, sales cycle length.
Three families of criteria then qualify an account:
Situational criteria are mainly used to choose the timing of outreach.
A three-tier ranking is common practice, and the model HubSpot uses for its ideal customer profile tier property: a plan per account for tier 1, group treatment for tier 2, a segment-based approach for tier 3.
A static list ages quickly. Intent signals identify, among the targeted accounts, those showing interest at a given moment: repeated visits to offer or pricing pages, research on related topics, company news. They do not replace targeting; they prioritize the week's sales effort. Our article on HubSpot's Prospecting Agent and buying signals details how to use them.
Source: HubSpot knowledge base
The final list is co-signed by marketing leadership and sales leadership. Each account is assigned to a named sales owner, and the list is reviewed on a fixed schedule, at least every quarter, to remove accounts that have signed or are no longer a priority and add new ones.
A complex sale involves several people with distinct roles: the final decision-maker, the budget holder, the technical evaluator, the future users, purchasing, and sometimes someone opposed to the project. A target account where you only know one operational user is not an engaged account, even if that contact is very active.
Mapping the buying committee identifies, for each account, the people who hold these roles and the missing roles. Messages are then built by role: executive management cares about risk and growth, finance about total cost and return on investment, IT about integration and security, users about day-to-day operation. A single piece of content sent to everyone meets the criteria of none of them.
In HubSpot, the Buying Groups feature represents this committee as an org chart attached to the company: each expected persona (executive management, marketing, IT…) is linked to the contact who holds the position, with their buying role, and positions with no identified contact appear immediately. It is in beta and requires Sales Hub or Service Hub in the Professional or Enterprise edition (HubSpot documentation).
Source: HubSpot knowledge base
Orchestration combines several channels, each with a specific function:
Advertising alone does not get meetings. It makes the brand familiar to the account's contacts; the meeting is obtained through direct contact. A program reduced to advertising campaigns produces awareness among the right accounts, but rarely pipeline within the expected timeframe.
Coordination between channels is the hardest point to maintain. Without a plan per account, three employees can approach the same CEO in the same week with three different messages. The plan specifies, for each tier 1 account, who intervenes, on which channel, in what order.
Nfinite, a French SaaS publisher of 3D e-commerce visuals with around 130 employees, had been working with Markentive for more than three years on inbound marketing and advertising. The company wanted to engage its strategic accounts directly: retail chains, with C-level decision-makers and a long sales cycle.
The setup combines marketing email campaigns (customer cases, key figures), automated sales sequences, LinkedIn messages and LinkedIn ads personalized by account. The whole is orchestrated by HubSpot workflows that create sales reps' tasks and notifications, with a tracking dashboard and a synchronization with Salesforce for the pipeline. One methodological point is worth noting: deliverability was monitored continuously to protect the reputation of the main domain, a real risk as soon as sales sending volumes increase.
The published results:
+127%
marketing-sourced demos compared with the previous year
25%
of the sales pipeline created by outbound ABM
6 months
to sign a target account
17
personalized touchpoints at most per account
The six-month lead time and the seventeen touchpoints are the most instructive figures. They are a reminder that an ABM program is judged over a full sales cycle, and that a strategic account is won through a succession of coordinated interactions.
Read the Nfinite customer case
HubSpot's ABM tools are included in Marketing Hub and Sales Hub in the Professional and Enterprise editions (HubSpot documentation). They rely on three properties:
The target accounts home centralizes activity on designated accounts. The account overview brings together contacts, deals, activities and page views; it requires a Sales Hub Professional or Enterprise seat, to be included in license costing (see our HubSpot pricing guide).
HubSpot also creates contact segments in an “Account Based Advertising” folder and, with a connected LinkedIn Ads account, syncs a company audience to LinkedIn. A workflow template assigns the profile tier based on annual revenue. We advise against using it as is: revenue alone puts companies in tier 1 that do not match the ICP. The tier should reflect all the criteria, and the final decision should rest with sales leadership. The same caution applies to the accounts HubSpot recommends in the target accounts home: they are suggestions, not a list.
Source: HubSpot knowledge base
The buyer intent feature identifies companies that visit the site or research chosen topics, in connection with the target markets defined in the portal (HubSpot documentation). Three conditions should be known before including it in the program:
Source: HubSpot knowledge base
The documentation carries the beta label at the time of writing: check the scope in your portal before turning it into a process.
HubSpot's ABM tools work at company level. Each contact must therefore be associated with the right company record, and each company must exist only once. A target account duplicated across three records (for example one per subsidiary domain) produces three partial histories, and its overview becomes unusable. Checking for duplicate companies, the Company domain name property and automatic association of contacts by domain is part of the launch.
The marketing qualified lead (MQL) makes no sense in an ABM program. An account can be very advanced without any contact having reached the score threshold, and vice versa. The relevant indicators are calculated at account level:
The last comparison is the one that makes it possible to judge the program. If target accounts sign neither more often, nor for higher amounts, nor faster than the others, the extra cost of ABM is not justified. HubSpot offers an ABM dashboard template built on the ABM properties: it provides a starting point, to be completed with this comparison against accounts outside the list.
The measurement schedule must follow the sales cycle. A 30-day review on a six-month cycle only measures marketing activity, not its sales effect. We set activity indicators for the first quarter (coverage, engagement) and outcome indicators at the end of a full cycle.
Three causes come up in programs that stop after a few months.
The symptom. Target accounts show engagement (visits, opens, clicks) without any sales rep contacting them.
The root cause. The list was built by marketing, with no sales owner or follow-up commitment.
How we avoid it. The list is approved in a workshop with sales leadership, each account has a named owner in HubSpot, and the marketing-sales SLA sets a deadline for handling signals on tier 1 accounts.
The symptom. So-called personalized messages differ only by the account's name in the subject line and its logo on the banner.
The root cause. Nobody has studied the account's priorities, news or buying committee.
How we avoid it. Each tier 1 account has a profile (challenges, news, buying committee, relationship history) before the first outreach. AI speeds up its preparation; validation and the choice of angle remain human.
The symptom. The program comes down to LinkedIn Ads campaigns, and the reporting shows impressions, clicks and cost per lead.
The root cause. The provider was chosen for its mastery of one channel, whereas ABM involves the CRM, data, content, outbound and coordination with sales. It is a question of fit: a very good advertising specialist is not necessarily the right partner for an account-based program.
How we avoid it. We work on the entire setup, from structuring data in HubSpot (Elite partner agency) to outbound and advertising, and we measure the program by pipeline. In pre-sales, we also say when ABM is not suitable and when a scoring and nurturing setup will better serve the objectives. See our growth agency.
The order we recommend fits into five steps:
One limitation must be stated clearly. ABM focuses efforts on accounts likely to buy; it does not create a need where there is none. If the targeted accounts have no project within the program's timeframe, the best orchestration will produce awareness, not contracts.
An ABM program assumes that marketing and sales share the same definitions, the same commitments and the same reporting. To scope the account list, HubSpot tooling and the outbound setup, our growth consultants support you; the details of the offer are on the page of our growth agency.