The popularity of ABM marketing is increasing
Account-based marketing is one of the clearest tests running inside commercial functions today of whether sales and marketing operate as one system or two. When it works, it looks like precision: the right message reaching the right buyer at exactly the right moment. When it fails, the postmortem almost always traces back to the same root cause: two functions that were never designed to run one relationship together.
ABM assumes something most commercial functions don’t yet have: a single, shared view of the account, the buying committee inside it and what each member has already seen, said or ignored. Without that shared view, the programme doesn’t fail loudly. It underperforms quietly, because “account-based” only means something if both functions are working from the same account.
Why they struggle to gain traction
Gartner finds sales and marketing leaders collaborate on only three of the fifteen commercial activities that drive growth. Eighty per cent of the activities that actually move revenue have no shared contribution between the two functions at all, and ninety per cent of leaders admit their priorities conflict outright. That’s the backdrop every ABM programme gets built on top of, and it isn’t a problem two workshops fix. It’s the predictable result of running one buyer relationship through two separately accountable systems.
90%
Pulling in different directions is common
of sales and marketing leaders say their functional priorities conflict outright (Gartner)
Why buying isn’t sequential
By the time a rep opens a sales conversation, the buyer has usually already decided who’s credible enough to be in the room. Bain’s research shows 86% of B2B buyers already hold a shortlist of suppliers, a “Day One list,” before they start researching formally, and 92% go on to buy from that list. For an ABM programme, that means the committee has often already formed a view before a targeted campaign reaches them, built through reputation, recommendation and prior contact rather than the campaign itself.
The ABM payoff
Where sales and marketing do share buyer-journey insight, the kind ABM depends on, the return is measurable. Gartner found organisations that share this insight are 1.6 times more likely to exceed revenue growth expectations and 2.3 times more likely to see higher conversion. Yet only 17% currently collaborate on mapping that journey at all. That gap isn’t a talent gap. It’s an architecture gap, and it’s the single biggest reason most ABM programmes underdeliver against what they promise on the slide.
The real measurement problem
ABM reporting frequently inherits the same flaw as the rest of commercial measurement: the MQL standing in for revenue, and the last click standing in for the relationship that actually won the account. Attribution models built around the final measurable touchpoint reward whichever channel fired last, not the event, referral or relationship that moved the committee. For a programme built around influencing several stakeholders over months, that’s close to the worst possible lens to measure success through. When each function is held to a different half of the same account, the disagreement over whether the programme “worked” is what that measurement system produces by design.
The Fix: Architecture, not etiquette
ABM doesn’t need better alignment between two teams. It needs a single, shared architecture: one view of the account, one set of commercial priorities for it and joint accountability for the outcome neither function can deliver alone. That’s a leadership decision, not a marketing decision or a sales decision, because no one inside either function has the standing to make the other’s system legible to their own, or the mandate to fund one shared account view instead of two competing dashboards.
One system, working as one
The ABM programmes that actually deliver rarely look remarkable from the outside. They look like good commercial architecture always looks: one view of the account, shared by everyone with a reason to touch it, carried from first signal to renewal rather than handed between two teams competing for credit on the way through.
