8 min read

Traditional business-to-business (B2B) marketing often follows a simple formula: generate leads, nurture them, and hope they convert. The strategy is usually broadcasting messages to the masses and praying for the right people to listen.

In reality, many businesses only need to engage a small, highly targeted segment of their total market. Utilising traditional marketing strategies results in wasted budget spent on unqualified leads, diluted messaging, and missed opportunities to connect with the decision-makers.

Account-based marketing (ABM) addresses these challenges by creating highly personalised, account-specific campaigns for meaningful engagement.

What is account-based marketing?

ABM is an evolution of sales and marketing team alignment. It fuses the highly targeted, focused prospecting techniques used by leading sales teams with personalised inbound marketing approaches.

By working together as a collaborative unit, organisations can develop highly targeted, individualised marketing and sales funnels aligned to high-value prospects within the organisation’s core area of competence.

By focusing on a smaller group of high-value accounts and then tailoring a marketing strategy to best serve each account, early adopters of ABM have reported increases in deal size, pipeline opportunities and customer retention.

In other words, ABM doesn’t wait for leads to come in; it proactively identifies and engages specific accounts through ultra-targeted outbound strategies.

Key components of ABM:

Collaboration Between Sales and Marketing

ABM requires tight alignment between sales and marketing teams. Instead of operating separately, both teams work together to identify target accounts, develop personalised messaging, and nurture relationships throughout the buyer’s journey.

Personalisation at Scale

ABM leverages data and technology to create customised content, messaging, and campaigns that address each target account’s specific pain points, goals, and preferences. Whether it’s a tailored email sequence, a personalised landing page, or a bespoke product demo, ABM ensures that every interaction feels relevant and valuable.

Focus on ROI and Efficiency

Unlike traditional marketing, which often involves significant spend on broad outreach, ABM directs resources toward a select group of high-potential accounts. This approach increases efficiency and ensures a higher return on investment (ROI) by focusing on the accounts most likely to convert and generate long-term value.

Types of ABM Programs

As ABM has matured, businesses have also recognised the need for scalable strategies that cater to different types of accounts. This has led to the development of multi-tiered ABM programs, which typically include:

One-to-One: Highly personalised engagement for a select group of high-value accounts
One-to-Few: Targeting clusters of accounts with shared characteristics using semi-personalized content
One-to-Many: Leveraging automation and AI to reach a larger volume of accounts with tailored messaging at scale

Examples of multi-tiered account-based marketing programs:

One-to-one

When GumGum wanted T-Mobile’s business, they faced a problem we all recognise: how do you get the attention of someone who everyone wants attention from?

The CEO of T-Mobile, John Legere, wasn’t exactly sitting around waiting for another sales pitch. He was busy disrupting an entire industry and building a personal brand that blended corporate leadership with rock-star energy.

So GumGum created a comic book – T-Man and Gums – casting Legere as the superhero he probably secretly believed he was.

The comic book demonstrated three things simultaneously:

We understand who you are
We’re willing to invest in this relationship before you’ve given us a penny, and
We think differently from everyone else knocking at your door

That’s the essence of one-to-one ABM.

One-to-few

One thing that makes marketing difficult is the tension between personalisation and scale.

Go too personal, you can’t reach enough people. Go too broad, you’re just adding to the noise. One-to-few account-based marketing lives in that magical middle ground where messages still feel personal but can reach more than one decision-maker at a time.

Consider BlueBotics, which makes autonomous navigation technology – not exactly a commodity you pick up at the corner store. They faced a classic B2B challenge: a complex product, a niche audience, and prospects who don’t wake up thinking, “I wonder what’s new in autonomous navigation today?”

What they did was they grouped their automotive industry prospects into clusters that shared similar challenges. Their content addressed the specific operational headaches that manufacturing and logistics executives lose sleep over: efficiency bottlenecks, safety concerns,and labour challenges.

This clustering approach allowed BlueBotics to prod each prospect to think, “These people get my industry” rather than “These people get me specifically” – and that distinction makes all the difference in the one-to-few approach.

Here’s the lesson: When you can’t customise everything for everyone (and who can?), find the meaningful commonalities that make personalisation scalable. Your marketing budget will thank you, and more importantly, so will your sales team.

One-to-many

One-to-many account-based marketing takes the “Dear Customer” out of mass marketing without requiring you to write individual letters to each prospect.

Orbit Media’s approach to manufacturing companies shows exactly how this works in practice. Instead of shouting, “We do websites!” into the void, they analysed 100 manufacturing websites – the very thing their prospects struggle with – and turned those insights into the value they could share.

Then, they created a research-backed webinar specifically for manufacturing marketers called “What the Top 100 Manufacturing Websites Get Right (and Wrong).” Not “Why Orbit Media Is Amazing” or “10 Reasons to Hire Us.” They led with value.

Think about the signals this sends:

First, “We understand your industry enough to study it thoroughly.”
Second, “We’re going to give you actionable insights before you pay us a dime.”
Third, “We respect your intelligence enough not to disguise a sales pitch as education.”

The delivery mechanism was equally smart. They didn’t just blast this to anyone with “manufacturing” in their LinkedIn profile. They used specific tools to identify the exact marketing leaders who would find this valuable, then created targeted ads and personalised outreach to invite them.

The beauty of this approach is that it scales without feeling generic. Each recipient gets the same content, but it’s so precisely targeted to their specific challenges that it feels custom-made.

Note: To learn more about these case studies, read Equinet Media’s full article.

Is ABM Still Relevant In 2025?

B2B buyers are drowning.

Drowning in generic emails. Drowning in irrelevant webinar invites. Drowning in “thought leadership” that leads nowhere.

This isn’t working anymore. For anyone.

ABM cuts through this mess by treating businesses like the complex organisms they actually are, not just email addresses in a database.

Plus, account-based marketing has transformed into an account-based experience.

Traditional ABM was largely about identifying and pursuing key accounts with personalised outreach, but it often ended once a deal was closed. ABX expands on this by integrating customer journey mapping and experience-focused strategies, ensuring that accounts receive consistent, personalised engagement throughout their lifecycle.

This shift recognises that customer retention and expansion are just as important as acquisition. In other words, ABM was about targeting accounts. ABX is about understanding them. And in a world where every B2B company claims to be “customer-centric,” account-based experience is how you actually deliver on that promise.With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and predictive analytics has transformed how businesses identify, engage, and nurture target accounts. These technologies enable:

More precise account targeting – AI can analyse vast datasets to identify high-intent prospects more accurately.
Real-time personalisation – Machine learning helps tailor content and messaging dynamically based on account behaviour and preferences.
Automated engagement – Chatbots, AI-driven email sequences, and predictive lead scoring enhance scalability without sacrificing personalisation.

With these innovations, ABM has become more agile, data-driven, and scalable, allowing companies to engage accounts with greater relevance and efficiency.

So yes, ABM is still relevant in 2025. And it’s only going to get better.

Practical Steps for Implementing ABM in 2025

So you’re convinced ABM matters. Great. Now what?

Most ABM implementations fail not because the strategy is wrong but because the execution is half-baked. Companies buy the shiny new ABM platform, send their marketers to a certification course, and then wonder why the magic isn’t happening.

Here’s how to actually do this thing right in 2025.

Build The Right Tech Stack

Your tech stack is the plumbing that makes your strategy possible.

Start with the foundation: your CRM. If your Salesforce instance looks like it was organised by a toddler during a sugar rush, fix that first. Even the best intent data cannot overcome broken account hierarchies and duplicate records.

Once your data house is in order, layer on these essentials:

Intent data platforms that tell you which accounts are actively researching solutions like yours
Advertising platforms with genuine account-level targeting (not the “we think maybe this might be someone from that company” variety)
Personalisation tools that can customise web experiences based on account, industry, and buying stage
Conversational intelligence that helps you understand what’s actually happening in sales conversations

But if your stack consists of point solutions that don’t talk to each other, you’re just creating expensive data silos.

The most effective tech stacks in 2025 share three characteristics:

they’re integrated,
they’re accessible to non-technical users, and
they’re focused on insights rather than just data collection.

And please, for the love of all things sacred in marketing, stop buying technology because it looked good in a demo. Buy technology because it solves actual problems your team has identified.

Align Cross-functional Teams

Effective ABM in 2025 requires alignment across the entire revenue ecosystem: marketing, sales, customer success, product, finance, and, yes, even legal. This can be achieved only through alignment meetings that discuss shared goals, metrics, and systems.

Start with the money. If marketing is measured by MQLs while sales are measured by closed revenue, you’re incentivising conflict. If customer success is measured by retention while the product is measured by new features, you’re baking disappointment into your business model.

The companies excelling at ABM have created unified revenue teams with common goals and compensation structures tied to account-level outcomes. Their organisational charts might still show separate departments, but their incentive systems don’t.

This kind of alignment isn’t easy. It requires executive sponsorship, cultural change, and sometimes difficult conversations about territory and attribution. But the alternative – continuing to operate in functional silos while pretending to be customer-centric – is a recipe for mediocrity.

Develop a Multi-tiered Approach

The greatest gift of ABM is focus. The greatest challenge is knowing where to focus.

The most sophisticated ABM programs in 2025 operate across at least three tiers: One-to-One, One-to-Few, and One-to-Many.

But what separates great ABM from good ABM is that these tiers aren’t static. Accounts move between tiers based on behaviours and opportunities.

Your tiering strategy should be as dynamic as your market. It should be reviewed and adjusted regularly based on account potential and actual engagement with your ABM efforts.

Do as the Romans Do

If your company operates globally, a one-size-fits-all ABM approach will fail spectacularly.

The best global ABM programs maintain consistent strategic frameworks while adapting tactics to local business cultures. They recognise that “personalisation” means something completely different in Seoul than it does in Sydney.

Smart global ABM programs consider:

Communication preferences across cultures (direct vs. indirect, formal vs. informal)
Decision-making structures (top-down vs. consensus-based)
Relationship-building expectations (transactional vs. relationship-first)
Digital platform preferences (LinkedIn works everywhere…except where it doesn’t)

The companies getting this right have global ABM playbooks with clear guidance on cultural adaptations. They train their teams on cross-cultural communication and provide market-specific resources rather than expecting local teams to adapt global templates themselves.

Remember: the goal isn’t to be different in every market. It’s to be relevant in every market. There’s a difference.

Ensure Privacy Regulations Compliance

By 2025, privacy regulations have expanded, not contracted. The most sophisticated ABM programs have redesigned their processes with privacy at the centre, not as an afterthought. They’ve embraced what we call “privacy-forward ABM” – approaches that deliver personalisation without crossing ethical or legal lines.

This includes:

Building first-party data strategies that reduce dependence on third-party cookies
Creating transparent preference centres that give prospects control over how they’re engaged
Implementing robust data governance to manage consent across channels
Designing region-specific engagement rules that respect local regulations

In Sum…

Account-based marketing is transforming how B2B organisations engage high-value accounts throughout their entire journey. What started as clever targeting has evolved into a comprehensive philosophy for how businesses connect with accounts that actually matter.

The companies winning in 2025 aren’t debating whether ABM works; they’re executing it with precision across the entire customer journey while their competitors waste resources on anonymous lead generation that nobody asked for.

If you’re tired of marketing that doesn’t work to people who don’t care, call Sam. Your competitors already have.

What is ABM and is it Relevant in 2025?