ABM FAQ: What Actually Works in Account-Based Marketing (From Practitioners, Not Textbooks)
Most ABM content reads like it was written by someone who's never run an ABM program. "Select your target accounts. Personalize your messaging. Align sales and marketing." Thanks, very helpful.
This FAQ is different. Every answer comes from practitioners who've actually built and run ABM programs at scale — the people who know that your biggest enemy isn't bad strategy, it's sales leadership asking you to add 50 more accounts to the list.
If you're running ABM (or thinking about it), these are the questions you're actually asking behind closed doors.
How many accounts should each ABM team member own?
This is the single most important question in ABM, and almost everyone gets it wrong.
The traditional trap: sales appetite increases, they want more accounts added, and suddenly your ABM team member is "covering" 200 accounts. At that point, you're not doing ABM anymore — you're doing slightly more targeted demand gen with a fancier name.
Here's what actually works:
- Major/strategic accounts (think Disney, Capital One-sized): 20 accounts max per person. These are accounts where your rep knows the CEO's golf handicap. That level of intimacy requires a hard cap.
- Prospect team (non-customers you're trying to land): 2–3 ABM accounts per rep, in addition to their broader book.
- Total ABM coverage: 120–150 accounts per ABMer when you add up the pods.
The hard rule: maximum 20 accounts per AE regardless of account size. Can you switch accounts? Yes, but only with decision-chain approval. No random "Hey, can you add Acme Corp to my list?" swaps. That discipline is what separates real ABM from a rebranded target account list.
Where MarketBetter fits: Visitor identification helps you spot which of your 20 accounts are actually on your site right now, so your reps focus energy on accounts showing real activity — not just the ones they happen to remember.
How do you pick which accounts to target?
It's a partnership between data science and sales leadership — not a marketing committee with a spreadsheet.
The best programs work like this:
- Data science builds the model. It identifies accounts that are both a good fit (firmographic, technographic) and showing high intent (behavioral signals, content consumption, site visits).
- Sales leadership whittles down the list. Data science might surface 300 candidates; sales picks the 150 they actually want to pursue and parcels them across reps.
- The list changes throughout the year. This is a dynamic process. Based on sales feedback, accounts rotate in and out. A "set it and forget it" target account list is a dead ABM program.
The critical thing most teams miss: intent data isn't just a marketing signal — it's the tiebreaker when sales is debating which 20 accounts to focus on. If two accounts look equally promising but one is surging on your site, that's your answer.
How do you actually measure ABM? (Because MTA looks terrible.)
If you measure ABM the same way you measure demand gen campaigns, you'll kill the program in two quarters.
Here's the measurement framework that works:
Control groups are non-negotiable.
Split your universe into ABM accounts and non-ABM accounts (the control group). Measure the lift between them across down-funnel metrics:
- Qualified opportunity creation rate
- Conversion rates through pipeline stages
- Average deal values
- Win rates
This is the only honest way to show ABM impact. Traditional multi-touch attribution models will make ABM look terrible because ABM influence is diffuse, long-cycle, and relationship-driven. MTA was built for campaigns with clear start/end dates — that's not ABM.
Pre-opportunity awareness stages matter.
The best ABM programs define 6 awareness micro-stages before an opportunity even exists:
- Completely unaware — they don't know you exist
- Lightly aware — someone's visited your site, maybe once
- Early engagement — downloading content, attending a webinar
- Medium engagement — multiple stakeholders interacting
- Quite engaged — active conversations, demo requests
- Opportunity ready — sales has a path to proposal
Each stage gets different treatments. And critically, each stage is verifiable through data queries — not gut feel.
Pro tip: Prime your finance team early. Tell them: "MTA is going to look terrible for ABM. Here's why that's expected, and here's how we're measuring real impact instead." If you don't have this conversation before budget reviews, you'll spend those reviews defending your program instead of growing it.
Do paid social ads work for ABM?
They work for about three weeks. Then they become wallpaper.
Here's the uncomfortable truth: paid social for ABM brand awareness morphs into targeted demand gen faster than you think. And for small ABM audiences, digital saturation makes it dramatically less effective.
The math is brutal. When you're targeting 20 accounts, even a modest ad spend means those people are seeing your creative 300+ times per day. At that point, you're not building awareness — you're creating creative fatigue and potentially negative brand impact.
If you're going to run paid social for ABM, here's the rule:
- Refresh creative every 2–3 weeks minimum for small audiences
- Accept that supersaturation is inevitable and plan for it
- Don't measure it like a demand gen campaign — it's air cover, not a conversion engine
Better use of that budget? Read on.
What ABM tactics actually move the needle?
The most effective plays are sales-led ideas, not marketing-led campaigns.
This is the part that makes marketers uncomfortable: the best ABM activations come from reps who know their accounts intimately. Marketing's job is to operationalize and fund those ideas, not to come up with them in a conference room.
High-touch, in-person activations that actually work:
Hyper-specific dinners around pain points or industries. Not "thought leadership dinners" with a generic panel. We're talking about booking a table at a place like Cezanne — an expensive SF restaurant — for 8 people from mid-funnel accounts who all share a specific operational challenge. The conversation IS the value. The deal acceleration is the ROI.
Coffee truck activation. Park a branded coffee truck in NYC's Financial Services district. Your target accounts' employees walk past every morning. It's not scalable and it's not measurable in your MAP. It works anyway.
Super Bowl suites for top-tier accounts. Yes, it's expensive. Yes, it's worth it when the account is worth $5M+ in ARR. The relationship acceleration in one evening beats six months of email sequences.
Beyoncé concert for women CFOs — bring the family. This is real. One team identified that their target buyer persona was senior women finance leaders. They bought a block of Beyoncé tickets and invited targets to bring their families. It's memorable, it's personal, and it shows you see them as humans — not just a logo on your target account list.
The key success factors nobody talks about:
- Only do these for accounts you already know somewhat. Cold invites to expensive dinners feel desperate, not impressive. These are mid-to-late funnel plays for accounts already in motion.
- Immediate follow-up is mandatory. The AE calls the next morning — not 8 days later. The half-life of event goodwill is measured in hours.
- Field marketer + AE pod structure. One field marketer paired with a small group of AEs. The marketer handles logistics and accountability; the AE owns the relationship. Without this structure, events happen and nothing comes after.
Where MarketBetter fits: The daily playbook keeps AEs accountable for those next-morning follow-ups. When a dinner guest hits your site the next day, your rep sees it immediately — no chance of the lead going cold because someone forgot to check Salesforce.
What tech stack do you actually need for ABM?
You probably don't need 6sense or Demandbase. There, we said it.
The conventional wisdom says you need a $100K+/year ABM platform. The practitioners we've talked to prefer something leaner:
The preferred stack:
- Snowflake + HighTouch — More flexible and dramatically more cost-effective than 6sense or Demandbase. Snowflake gives you native account grouping capabilities. HighTouch lets you pipe that data to any downstream platform.
- Gifting vendor — ReachDesk or Sendoso for scaled gifting. Bespoke partners for Fortune 100 accounts (generic gift boxes don't cut it when you're sending to a Disney VP).
- Visitor identification — You need to know when target accounts are on your site. MarketBetter's person-level identification gives you individual visitors, not just anonymous company-level pings.
- CRM + a way to track account progression — Whatever you're using now, plus the 6-stage awareness model we discussed above.
The point: your ABM stack should be modular and data-first, not a monolithic platform that locks you into one vendor's view of intent.
How do you budget for ABM when finance doesn't "get it"?
Start small. Test with existing digital spend. Don't ask for a massive new budget on day one.
The budget approach that works:
- Redirect existing digital spend. You're probably wasting money on broad display ads anyway. Take that budget and focus it on your target accounts.
- Don't measure it like traditional campaigns. This is worth repeating: if you run ABM through your standard campaign reporting, it will look like a failure. ABM deals take longer to close but close at higher values. Your quarterly campaign dashboard can't capture that.
- Focus on holistic account progression. Show finance that accounts in the ABM program move through stages faster, convert at higher rates, and close at larger deal sizes. That's the story — not cost-per-lead.
The single most important conversation: tell finance upfront that MTA attribution will look terrible. If they're expecting to see "ABM campaign → $500K pipeline" in HubSpot, you've already lost. Set expectations before the first dollar is spent.
When should you stop an ABM tactic?
When it starts feeling like demand gen, it's already too late.
The clearest signal: you're refreshing creative for the same paid social audience for the fourth time in two months and engagement is flat. At that point, you've crossed from ABM into targeted demand gen — and not even good targeted demand gen, because your audience is supersaturated.
Rules of thumb for killing tactics:
- Paid social ads: If engagement drops after 2–3 weeks despite creative refreshes, stop. Reallocate to in-person activations.
- Generic email sequences: If open rates are declining on your target account list, your "personalized" emails aren't personalized enough. Go back to the drawing board or switch to truly personalized outreach.
- Any tactic where marketing is driving and sales isn't engaged: ABM without active sales participation is just marketing. If your AEs aren't contributing ideas and following up, the tactic is dead regardless of the metrics.
How do I know if my program is real ABM or just targeted demand gen?
Ask yourself three questions:
- Can your ABM team member name every key stakeholder at their accounts? If the answer is "they can look it up in the CRM," that's demand gen.
- Are your activations things a sales rep suggested? If every play was designed in a marketing brainstorm, that's demand gen.
- Is your account list stable enough that reps build real relationships? If accounts rotate every quarter based on marketing's scoring model, that's demand gen.
Real ABM is intimate. It's 20 accounts that your rep knows cold — the org chart, the politics, the pain points, the CEO's kids' names. If you can't get to that level of knowledge because you're spread across 200 accounts, you're doing something else. That "something else" might still be valuable, but call it what it is.
Ready to add intent signals to your ABM program?
The best ABM programs combine relationship intelligence (what your reps know) with behavioral signals (what your data shows). MarketBetter bridges that gap — identifying the specific people from your target accounts visiting your site, surfacing them in a daily playbook your reps actually use, and tracking engagement through every stage of the buying journey.
No $100K platform contract. No 6-month implementation. Just the signals your ABM team needs to focus on the right accounts at the right time.