Create a fast-lane to sales by giving high-value accounts the white-glove treatment through account-based marketing.
A long time ago, marketers solely focused on casting a super-wide net in the hopes of pulling in as many leads as possible. Blogs became content farms, covering topics that were meant to attract anyone and everyone. As far as marketers were concerned, the more traffic they could send to their sites, the better. The underlying philosophy that drove marketing and sales at the time was: Attract enough fish into the net, and you were bound to have a few keepers in there somewhere.
However, over the years, an alternate philosophy began to evolve, one that does away with the net and replaces it with a spear. Instead of tossing out content like a fishing net in the hopes of landing a few, this approach targets high-value accounts and gives them the white-glove treatment through extremely relevant and personalized campaigns. Focusing on a single account or prospect, this type of marketing uses a “spear” to go after a single prospect with one unified tool.
Why is Account-Based Marketing Essential?
After years of working with many B2B clients, one thing that’s clear as day is that no two businesses are alike. They don’t just vary in the services being offered, but also how they want to market their products and solutions. Every B2B marketing company has a different brand language, different target audiences, and may employ an entirely distinct strategy while communicating with their prospects.
If the clients are so immiscible, you can only imagine how different their prospects will be from one another. There are unique experiences that shape individual prospects, brands and companies. Thus, following a default template-based model for servicing and marketing B2B clients has been unanimously shunned in marketing circles- opening the doors to a more personal, account-based approach.
Instead of relying on blanket campaigns that are meant to appeal to an entire market, account based marketing makes use of highly targeted, personalized campaigns to win over particular accounts. It treats every individual account or prospect as a market within its own rights. Particularly, when it comes to closing enterprise deals, there are many people involved in the decision-making process, and ABM acknowledges all of those different people, different viewpoints – that comprise each account, flipping the traditional marketing funnel on its head.
Lead Generation vs. Account-Based Marketing
Unlike lead generation, account-based marketing assigns values to various accounts and segments them on the basis of it. Instead of filtering out all the bad leads and ending up with a target company that’s a good fit for your sales, you identify the biggest opportunities at the beginning and then proactively go after them, tailoring the content curation, sales pitch, and the buyer’s journey according to particular clients from start to finish.
In fishing terms, rather than waiting for a hundred fish to swim into your net, hoping you’ll catch the one fish you actually want, account-based marketing is laser-focused on that one fish from the start, and you’re devoting all of your energy into hauling that one, beautiful fish into the boat. It is a highly efficient system that eliminates the “by-catch” problem of traditional marketing, i.e. when you generate a ton of low-quality leads that will never convert.
Just so we are clear, this is not a claim that ABM is superior to any other inbound marketing strategy. The reality is that ABM and lead generation through inbound marketing are two entirely separate strategies that can be used in parallel for the best results. Instead of thinking lead gen vs. ABM; think lead gen and ABM.
In fact, think of lead generation as feeding into your account-based marketing funnel because if an inbound lead ends up being a part of a target account, ABM can pick up right where inbound left off. To use the fish analogy again, once you’ve got a bunch of fish in your inbound net, you can use your ABM spear to pick out the ones that look promising.
What Makes Account Based Marketing Different?
Both inbound marketing and traditional lead generation have served us well over the years, but there comes a point in every strategy when you’re seemingly maxed out. You have saturated the entire market, exhausted your content syndicators’ lists, and are nowhere close to hitting your pipeline numbers. Once the quality drops and you reach a state of diminishing returns, it’s time to switch gears and double-down on account-based marketing services which has been lauded by marketing leaders and influencers as a pipeline savior, ROI amplifier and a powerhouse of an overall strategy when merged with lead generation and inbound marketing.
While the two strategies may take separate paths, adopting a blended approach will ultimately ladder up to the same goals- pipeline and revenue. Switching to ABM doesn’t mean you will stop using your inbound lead-based marketing channels and programs altogether. But you will implement a much more targeted approach to engage those leads that fit your ideal account profile once they’ve entered the funnel.
Most ABM companies employ a double-funneled approach
That being said, an account-based marketing approach is different from what we have been always been doing and here is how-
a) Account-based marketing is highly targeted: In order to source highly qualified prospects, an account-based marketing agency builds ideal customer profiles (ICPs) using firmographic and technographic data- sometimes even predictive analytics.
b) ABM focuses on accounts, not markets or industries: Unlike content curation addressed to a broader market, account-based marketing professionals collect intelligence on their target accounts in order to deliver content and campaigns optimized for them.
c) ABM targets both prospects and customers: The end goal of account-based marketing is to “land and expand” using personalised campaigns to bring in new customers and act on opportunities to grow current accounts, i.e. cross-sell or upsell.
How to Launch a Successful ABM Strategy in B2B Marketing
An inherent characteristic of the account-based marketing model is that the more personalized your campaigns and approach, the greater returns you’ll see. If you are able to calculate roughly what ROI you expect on your efforts beforehand, then you can start with mapping out the key areas where your ABM budget and resources should be allocated.
A good starting point will be with segments. Smart marketers have long been using segmentation to cut the pie of humanity into more easily digestible chunks. This allows your target demographic to be subdivided by certain characteristics – age, location, socioeconomic class, gender, hobbies, and marital status, to name a few – so that a product can be placed in front of only the most relevant eyes.
Segmentation followed by targeted personalisation will ensure more bang for your marketing bucks. But if your account-based marketing company services small business owners, mid-market, and enterprise, try using a more traditional inbound marketing model. It’s easier to reach out to small and mid-sized businesses using a broad-based approach at the top of the funnel.
As soon as you move up the market size, it gets more and more difficult to convert leads from large enterprises and engage them long enough to achieve sales-ready status. In this case, a large buying committee and long sales cycles- all contribute to the need for a more targeted approach for these accounts. So it’s here where you may want to begin applying ABM tactics from programmatic to 1:1.
Finally, while you, the marketer, might have pipeline goals you need to meet, you shouldn’t shoulder all the responsibilities of cinching those numbers. Ensure that both your sales and partnership teams contribute to a percentage of that pipeline and have those targets outlined in writing before each quarter begins. Since you’re already employing inbound demand generation as part of your go-to-marketing strategy, use these existing programs as cover while you get started with account-based marketing.
To start with ABM, create a small pilot program and test a few accounts first. Implement account-based marketing for one or two segments like large enterprise accounts in the financial services vertical. Focus your efforts on targeting existing programs on specific accounts and, if you’re worried you won’t have the budget to bankroll your ABM pilot, simply transfer budget from poorly performing B2B lead generation programs.
Moving beyond that, you need to leverage your current team and look at current programs. Consider how you’re currently appealing to broader demographics and how you can tweak those existing programs for account-based plays for the right accounts.
6 Business Benefits of Adopting Account-Based Marketing
Since, ABM is geared towards marketing very specific and customized services to particular clients with certain needs; it has been most successful in B2B marketing circuits. Having said that, account-based plays can work in B2C industries as well, but more often than not, businesses in these lines of work tend to sell very uniform products.
However, the concept of personalisation and nurturing key accounts is as old as marketing agencies themselves and has withstood the test of time, even more so today, as we enter a marketplace that is primarily driven by customers. But with the advent of modern technology and automation, the risks associated with such a meticulous and precise strategy has been further minimized to a greater extent.
Since, account-based marketing flips the traditional funnel on its head so that you’re only marketing to the right audience for your product, it eliminates the classic inbound problem of attracting lots of low-quality leads, making it a “zero-waste” strategy. If you haven’t yet incorporated an ABM framework into your workflow, here are some reasons you should:
1) Improved Customer Acquisition
Every service seeker wants to be treated specially, even more so, when they are C-level business executives. They know what makes their company unique and want their account managers and brand spokespersons to be able to imbibe and reflect the core values of their business. Hence, a B2B marketing company espousing the principles of account-based marketing will have a greater chance of landing high-value targets.
2) Simpler Metrics and ROI Analysis
It can be hard to gauge a fair evaluation of your marketing efforts. You need metrics for all stages of your marketing cycle to measure a campaign’s effectiveness. But “ABM is the sniper’s way of marketing” because it allows you to spend more time analysing each aspect of your effort, since you’re working with a smaller set of targeted accounts.
ABM campaigns are executed on an account-by-account basis; so there will be smaller set of data points and case-by-case analytics, making it easier for you to draw conclusions on the impact of your work. With well-documented plans for each of your accounts, you can easily compare each segment to your goals, making you more equipped to adjust your efforts going forward.
3) Reduction in Junk Lead Chasing
There are many stakeholders involved in B2B marketing, many of whom de-accelerate the sales cycle. But employing ABM will ensure all of these stakeholders are personally involved in the sales process, thus reducing the number of poor leads, which cannot be converted into useful transactions.
Treating each client as an individual account, your ABM strategy could be customized to win these high-profile accounts. This saves valuable time and money as you focus only on those accounts that are interested in buying your services.
4) Shorter Sales Cycles
Removing non-viable leads and prospects from the initial stages of your sales funnel or marketing campaign will reduce the time period of the sales cycle significantly. ABM naturally allows you to focus on accounts that are deemed beneficial, displaying a higher potential to be converted into buyers, making the most of your marketing budget and generating a higher ROI. A shorter sales cycle also means that more products can be sold over a calendar year or a fiscal quarter, as more such cycles can be iteratively implemented.
5) Building An Expertise
Instead of being the jack of all trades across many business verticals, ABM challenges you to think on a more personalized level as you get to know your audience and their intent, making you the master (or a subject matter expert) of one particular specification.
Granted, there’s more research going into the process but this also means that you are gaining expertise in an area where most people just have a broad idea. Slowly, over time you will start having your unique selling points, which will make you stand out in the oversaturated marketplace and attract more like-minded clients to your services.
6) Sales and Marketing Harmony
In ABM, sales and marketing are treated as two sides of the same coin, both of which equally contribute to the success of the entire process. Since, an account-based marketing agency is focused on accounts instead of individual leads; they end up speaking the same language as their sales counterparts. This makes for an incredible alignment between sales and marketing departments as they both focus on target accounts, working towards a common goal.
Forrester Research found that organizations with aligned sales and marketing teams see an average of 32% annual revenue growth, while less aligned companies see a 7% decline in growth. With account-based marketing, the arguments over lead quantity vs. lead quality dissipate, as your sales and marketing executives align to become a single unit. It also means the transfer of knowledge from one department to another is easier, bringing everyone on to the same page.
Top ABM Tools and Platforms to Scale Personalization in 2025
All successful account-based marketing in today’s hyper-personalized B2B environment requires not only having a strategy but also relying on the tech stack to enable success. ABM tools empower B2B marketers to automate personalization at scale, aggregate account intelligence, and deploy personalized campaigns that truly connect with decision-makers in complex buying committees.
Here are some best ABM tools that will shape personalization in 2025:
1. Demandbase One
Demandbase combines account intelligence, intent data, and AI insights to enable marketing and sales teams to deliver hyper-targeted experiences throughout the B2B buying journey.
2. 6sense
6sense, which has predictive analytics as its core purpose, employs intent signals, AI, and behavioral data to reveal in-market accounts before they raise their hand to indicate interest—allowing B2B marketers to act on the opportunity at the right moment.
3. HubSpot ABM Tools
For companies already using HubSpot for inbound marketing, the built-in ABM tools let companies define ideal customer profiles (ICPs), build smart lists, and customize their journeys.
4. RollWorks
RollWorks is offering B2B account targeting along with engagement and measurement in an all-in-one ecosystem – making it easier to scale ABM for mid-market companies without creating unnecessary complexities in their workflows.
5. Triblio
Best suited for content-heavy strategies as it offers account-level personalization and taps into actionable sales enablement. Good for content heavy B2B brands looking to develop account-level experiences that are dynamic.
6. ABOPT
Sourced in Oxper’s proprietary framework ABOPT (Account-Based Optimization Playbook & Targeting), encompasses analytics, segmentation and creative deployment as a comprehensive strategic execution framework, offers B2B clients white-glove targeting that can be scaled.
With ABM being the center of B2B marketing, your investment into the right platforms will elevate your personalization approach from simply engaging others to driving real revenue.
Expert Tips to Maximize Your B2B ABM Strategy
Implementing an account-based marketing strategy is one thing, implementing an account-based marketing strategy that can consistently grow the business is something altogether different. At Oxper, we’ve helped B2B brands from all corners of the world rewire their go-to-market firepower using ABM, and these are our expert-backed tips for helping you to do the same:
1. Align to an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Get sales, marketing, and leadership on the same page when defining who your “best fit” accounts are. Before we start campaigns we need firmographics, technographics, intent signals, and revenue potential aligned.
2. Leveraging Intent & Predictive Data Earlier
Don’t wait for form fills! Leverage solutions like 6sense or Bombora to uncover early intent signals. Treasuring intent and predictive data helps identify accounts already in a buying cycle, enabling you to prioritize target accounts that will move quickly into the pipeline.
3. Prioritize Segmentation
Not every account gets the same effort. Apply a tiered approach: define 1:1 for high-value enterprise accounts, 1: few for industry prototypes, and 1: many for scalable targeting to mid-market accounts. Your content and energy need to match your target account.
4. Don’t Forget About Creative Personalization
ABM is not only about targeting, it’s about connecting. Personalizing outreach must reach deeper than job title or company name. Make it a challenge to try and personalize by pain points, market trends, or even language for that account.
5. Align Sales and Marketing Daily, Not Quarterly
Account-based marketing in B2B is dependent on sales-marketing harmony. Have daily stand-ups or weekly syncs, share dashboards, and co-own KPIs. The quicker and easier the hand-off, the higher your chances of converting.
6. Repurpose Content—Smarter
Don’t create new stuff. Repurpose existing content that works for target accounts. For example, turn a case study into a customized deck. Turn a white paper into a custom landing page. Account based marketing is about relevance, not scale.
7. Pilot > Scale > Optimize
Start with a few high-value accounts and run targeted plays to prove it before you scale the full program. Measure progress through account engagement during the initial campaigns and optimize account messaging before you plan to scale your efforts. Once you have a repeatable and optimized process in place, you can leverage automation and analytics for scaling your account based marketing efforts.
8. Build Account Experiences for the Long-Term
Account based marketing doesn’t stop when it leads to an account conversion. It is equally effective at targeting existing accounts to expand that account’s engagement with your company too. Customized on-boarding experiences, contextual and personalized nurture campaigns and upsell/cross-sell campaigns can increase the lifetime value of your customers.
In 2025 and beyond, B2B account based marketing is not only a tactic… it is a competitive advantage. You can build relationships with accounts that matter most to your organization by using human insights and intelligent tools.
Conclusion
To put it bluntly, if you want to engage decision-makers in today’s customer-centric market, you have to stop using outdated marketing tactics, as they are only going to spread your resources thin. To drive predictable pipeline growth, marketing leaders need to stop using broad-based marketing strategies and start using precision-account based marketing strategies to cut through modern marketing clamor.
ABM provides the ultimate personalization and return on investment, but it takes far more than great intentions to properly implement an ABM program. It takes the right strategy, tools, and alignment between marketing and sales; this is where Oxper comes in.
As a B2B digital marketing agency with deep experience in ABM strategy, we help you build nimble, scalable, and data-driven engagement models that convert high-value accounts into long-term customers.
Are you ready to future-proof your B2B marketing? Let’s build on your ABM advantage—together.
FAQS
1. What is account based marketing and how does it work in B2B?
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is an extremely targeted B2B methodology in which you identify high-value accounts and engage with those accounts using personalized marketing and sales initiatives. Instead of a spray-and-pray approach, ABM utilizes a “spear” approach to marketing; aligning content, messaging, and outreach to meet the precise needs of each individual account. In B2B, we think about ABM as treating each target account as their own singular market, orchestrating campaigns for numerous buyers on the buying committee, creating high-value, and longer-lasting client relationships.
2. How is ABM different from traditional lead generation strategies?
Lead generation strategies create large amounts of leads from wide-spread marketing initiatives, which are later filtered for qualified leads. ABM upends this approach by honing in on the most relevant accounts before defining their strategy, and delivering highly personalized messages and outreach. Rather than hope that relevant quality leads will emerge from a wide pool of volume, ABM is a quality-first approach that builds and delivers custom experiences based on prospects’ needs in order to convert and expand those accounts. In that sense it is waste-free and highly effective for B2B.
3. What are the key benefits of implementing an ABM strategy?
ABM can be extremely beneficial for B2B organizations. It can help produce higher ROI and pipeline predictability since ABM targets high-potential accounts. ABM also has shorter sales cycles as low-quality leads can be eliminated sooner. ABM can also help with sales and marketing alignment as they are utilizing common goals and metrics. When you deploy ABM you have a personalized approach that will resonate with decision-makers. ABM allows for better secure acquisition and retention, as value will be delivered at every stage. Overall, you have clearer performance measures as you track success account per account.
4. How can you measure ROI from account-based marketing campaigns?
Measurement for ABM ROI typically happens at the account level, not the lead level, so you will want to monitor your engagement metrics for touchpoints, pipeline velocity, deal size, win rates, and the number of influenced opportunities attributed to each account. Since ABM campaigns are targeted, attribution becomes much clearer, and impacts can be traced directly to marketing initiatives and closed deals. Using platforms such as 6sense, Demandbase, and custom CRM dashboards are available to help analyze ROI with accuracy, and visual display.
5. What kind of personalization is required in ABM for best results?
ABM personalization is much more than putting a company name in an email. It is:
- Messaging based on segmentation for each industry or vertical
- Content that is stakeholder specific and addresses the role of different decision-makers
- Behavior-triggered touchpoints are based on where the account is in its journey
- Custom assets like landing pages, case studies, or proposals built for specific accounts
When it gets to this level, personalization enhances trust and increases engagement with your audience—when you make your marketing feel more like a conversation and less like a campaign.
