Why ABM is the operating system your business has been waiting for

Budgets are tighter. Boards want results. And the old ways of selling aren't working.

ABM expert Robert Norum makes the case for the customer-centric strategy for the entire C-suite. 

Let's start with an uncomfortable truth. In most organisations, sales, marketing, customer success, and delivery teams each have their own targets, their own priorities, and their own version of the customer. Nobody's deliberately trying to make things harder, but the result is a fragmented experience that isn't credible and doesn't serve the accounts you're trying to win or keep.

What if there were a single architecture that could connect all of those moving parts? One that gave every function—from the CFO to the CRO and the CMO—a shared lens on the accounts that matter most?

That architecture already exists; it's called account-based marketing. And it's time for the rest of the business to take it seriously.

Why the old playbook is broken

According to 6sense's 2025 research, 61 percent of the buying journey happens before a buyer speaks to any vendor. By the time they make contact, they have typically shortlisted three to five suppliers and already know what they want to buy. 

More striking still: the vendor in pole position on day one wins 81 percent of the time.

This isn't a marketing problem; it's a business one. If your organisation isn't actively shaping how target accounts think before they come to market, you're already behind.

Then there's the buying group. Research from LinkedIn and Bain confirms what most practitioners know: it's complex, and getting more so. It isn’t uncommon to see 10 or more decision-makers—sometimes as many as 17 or 20. What’s more, they split evenly between active and passive buyers. 

Active buyers are the people your sales team are talking to, whereas passive buyers sit in the background; think, C-suite, legal, or procurement. Passive buyers may not shortlist vendors, but they do have the power to say no. If you're not reaching the full buying group, you're not really in the game.

The fragmentation problem—and the fix

Most organisations recognise the fragmentation problem. Few tackle it head-on.

ABM gives you the position (and the permission) to connect marketing, sales, customer success, operations, and even third-party partners, around a single coherent account strategy. Rather than see it as a marketing programme, consider it the central architecture that joins the business together.

That means it matters to every leader at the table, not just the CMO.

For the CRO or sales leader, it's about ensuring revenue teams are focused on the right accounts with consistent, compelling messaging. For the CFO, it's about concentrating resources on the accounts most likely to generate return. For the CEO, it's the difference between a business that feels joined up to its customers and one that does not.

As long-established ABM thinking holds, the most effective programmes are built around three commercial outcomes:

1. Building reputation with the accounts that matter most, 

2. Deepening relationships across the full buying group, 

3. And driving revenue across the entire customer lifecycle. 

Get all three working in concert and you have a genuinely powerful commercial engine.

ABM as your primary go-to-market (GTM) strategy 

Here's where many organisations get this wrong. They treat ABM as a tactic that sits within their go-to-market strategy—a premium add-on for a handful of key accounts. That undersells ABM’s potential significantly.

When ABM is properly deployed, it doesn't sit within your GTM motion; it becomes your GTM motion.

The traditional volume-based approach to GTM (generate as many leads as possible and let sales filter them out) is increasingly ill-suited to the complexity of modern B2B buying: it's expensive, it's inefficient, and it produces exactly the kind of fragmented customer experience described above. A precision-based GTM built on ABM logic flips that model on its head.

Instead of asking "how do we reach as many prospects as possible?", you ask "which accounts matter most to us, and how do we become indispensable to them?" That shift has profound implications across the business:

• For marketing: activity is accountable to pipeline and revenue, not just engagement metrics. Every campaign connects to a named account or set of accounts
• For sales: account selection becomes a strategic exercise, not a gut-feel one. Resource is concentrated on the opportunities most likely to convert and grow
• For customer success: the post-sale relationship is treated as a continuation of the same account strategy, not a handoff to a separate function
• For the board: GTM becomes legible. You can see exactly where you're investing, which accounts you're targeting and what return you're generating

This is what it means to make ABM your primary GTM strategy. It's a fundamental rethink of how you go to market, with focus, precision and commercial intent baked in from the start.

The operating system: shift left and shift right

ABM can be thought of as an operating system with two distinct application suites.

First, shifting left is about engaging accounts before they come to market. Shape their thinking and build your reputation. Make sure you're already in the frame when the purchasing journey begins. The key applications here are:

• Account-based branding (ABB): targeted micro-branding aimed at your most important prospects, not the mass market. This is about being present and credible long before any RFP lands–across traditional channels and, increasingly, through AI Positioning: ensuring your organisation shows up accurately and credibly when buyers at target accounts use tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity to self-educate and shortlist before engaging any vendor.
• Buyer group marketing (BGM): reaching every relevant stakeholder in their language, about what matters to them in their role. Not just the active buyers, but the passive ones too.
• Account-based engagement (ABE): the coordinated, multi-channel approach to building genuine relationships with target accounts before they come to market

Second, shifting right is everything that happens after you win the account. And this is where many ABM programmes fall short, because closed-won is the starting line, not the finish line.

Think of it as a four-stage arc: Win → Land → Grow → Multiply.

• Win: deal-based marketing (DBM) is a hyper-focused one-to-one play built around the RFP and the bid. One deal. One team. One story. What can the business do from day one to maximise the chances of winning?
• Land: the onboarding experience is the first retention campaign. Apply ABM account tiers from day one, map every stakeholder across the account, and run coordinated onboarding campaigns from the moment contracts are signed. ABM doesn't stop at the signature
• Grow: adoption is a revenue metric, not a customer success metric. Use intent data to spot upsell windows before they close, align the full GTM team around a single account plan, and run targeted value realisation campaigns that demonstrate ROI at the right moment
• Multiply: your best prospects are already inside your existing accounts. Apply the same ABM precision to customers as to prospects – map and engage new buying centres, mobilise internal champions, and for your most strategic relationships, run dedicated one-to-one advocacy programmes. 

What separates ABM that works from ABM that doesn't

After more than 15 years working with B2B organisations on ABM programmes, I've seen what delivers—and I've seen what doesn't. The failure modes are largely predictable. Most come down to a handful of recurring mistakes that are entirely avoidable.

1. Treating ABM as a campaign rather than a strategy. The most common one. ABM bolted on to an existing volume-based GTM motion rarely delivers. It needs to be the operating system, not an add-on.

2. Weak account selection. Gut feel is not a selection methodology. The accounts you choose to focus on should reflect a rigorous assessment of strategic fit, revenue potential and propensity to engage. Get this wrong and everything downstream suffers.
   Building it in marketing and handing it to sales. ABM designed without sales won't get sales buy-in. It has to be built together from day one – shared account plans, shared metrics, shared accountability.

3. Measuring the wrong things. If you revert to volume metrics – leads generated, emails opened – you'll never demonstrate the value of ABM to the board. Define the right measures before you start: pipeline influence, revenue from target accounts, engagement depth across the buying group.

4. Expecting results too quickly. ABM, particularly at the one-to-one level, operates on longer timescales than traditional demand generation. Senior sponsorship and organisational patience aren't optional extras. They're prerequisites.

None of these are reasons not to do ABM. They're reasons to do it properly.

The time is now

We're at an inflection point. The commercial pressure is real. The complexity of modern B2B buying demands a more sophisticated, more coordinated response. And AI is making ABM scalable in ways that weren't possible even a few years ago.

The pitfalls are known; the frameworks are proven; the technology is ready. This isn't the moment for pilots, experiments, and endless proof-of-concept discussions. It's the moment to commit  to ABM as your primary GTM strategy, a company-wide initiative that unifies the organisation, concentrates resources on the accounts that matter most, and builds the long-term relationships that drive sustainable growth.

ABM is the operating system. It's time to install it.

Robert Norum has over 30 years’ experience in B2B Marketing. He specialises in providing ABM advisory & training services to B2B companies on a global basis.  He is the ABM and demand strategy expert for Propolis, B2B Marketing's global community and has trained more than 1200 marketing professionals in ABM since 2020.