Account-based marketing (ABM)

ABM flips the usual funnel: instead of attracting many leads and filtering them, you start with the accounts you want, map the people who influence the decision and aim content, ads, events and outreach at them. Programs are usually tiered: one-to-one for a handful of strategic accounts, one-to-few for clusters of similar accounts and one-to-many for hundreds of accounts with lighter personalization.

It suits companies with large deal sizes and long sales cycles, where one account is worth months of work and several people have to agree. Success is measured per account: engagement across the buying committee, meetings, opportunities and revenue from the target list.

Example: a logistics software company picks 150 manufacturers with more than 500 employees. For each one it finds 5 to 8 people across operations, finance and IT, runs LinkedIn ads to all of them and sends each role its own email sequence. In this example, 38 accounts take a meeting within a quarter.

Outbound is often the engine of ABM. SDRs work the target list with multi-threaded email and LinkedIn sequences, so several people at each account hear a consistent message while ads and content warm them up.