ABM (Account-Based Marketing)

What is Account-Based Marketing (ABM)?

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a B2B marketing strategy that focuses resources on a defined set of high-value target accounts rather than casting a wide net across a broad audience. Instead of generating as many leads as possible and filtering them down, ABM flips the funnel: marketing and sales teams identify the accounts most likely to convert and grow, then work together to deliver personalized content, campaigns, and outreach tailored specifically to those accounts.

The approach is widely adopted across industries. ITSMA, one of the organizations that helped popularize ABM, defines it as treating individual accounts as markets in their own right, and coordinating all marketing and sales activity around the specific needs, challenges, and goals of each one.

What are the key features or benefits of ABM?

Learn more about how Xperience by Kentico supports the capabilities that underpin a successful ABM program:

Targeted account selection. Focus budget and effort on the accounts with the highest revenue potential rather than volume-based lead generation.
Personalized content and campaigns. Tailor messaging, landing pages, and email sequences to the specific industry, role, and stage of each target account.
Sales and marketing alignment. ABM requires both teams to agree on which accounts to pursue and how, creating a unified go-to-market approach.
Shorter sales cycles. Highly relevant, account-specific outreach reduces the time it takes to move prospects from awareness to decision.
Stronger customer retention. ABM principles apply beyond acquisition. The same personalized, high-touch approach supports expansion and renewal within existing accounts.
Clearer ROI attribution. Because ABM is account-specific, it is easier to measure marketing's contribution to pipeline and revenue for each target.

Industry Insight

The business case for ABM is well established. According to research from ITSMA and the ABM Leadership Alliance, 87 percent of marketers say ABM delivers higher ROI than any other marketing tactic, and ABM drives three times more pipeline per account compared to traditional go-to-market approaches. Win rates are 26 percent higher and deal sizes 33 percent larger for ABM accounts versus non-ABM accounts.

How does ABM work, and why does it matter?

A traditional demand generation approach markets broadly, collects leads, and hands the most qualified ones to sales. ABM inverts this. The process starts with account selection: marketing and sales agree on a target account list based on firmographic fit, revenue potential, and strategic priority. From there, teams research each account, build content and campaigns tailored to that account's specific challenges, and coordinate outreach across web, email, ads, and direct sales contact.

Because every touchpoint is relevant to the account's world, engagement rates are higher and conversations progress faster. As Kentico's guide to B2B lead scoring automation explains, B2B purchases involve multiple stakeholders, long decision cycles, and careful business analysis, which means generic, volume-based outreach rarely moves the needle. ABM addresses this directly by making every interaction feel like it was built for that account specifically.

For teams worried about data silos undermining this coordination, Kentico's blog on multichannel content marketing challenges captures the core issue well: reaching the right person at the right time on the right channel requires deep audience knowledge, and that knowledge only comes from unified data.

How does Xperience by Kentico support ABM?

ABM is not a single software feature, it is a strategy that depends on the quality of your underlying platform. Xperience by Kentico provides the capabilities that make ABM executable at scale:

Contact Management and segmentation. Build account-level and contact-level profiles using behavioral and demographic data, then segment by company, role, industry, or any custom attribute relevant to your target accounts.
Personalization. Serve account-specific content on landing pages, website sections, and email campaigns based on which account or segment the visitor belongs to, without developer involvement.
Marketing automation. Set up automated nurture sequences triggered by account-level behaviors, such as visits to a pricing page, a form submission, or a lead score threshold being reached.
Lead scoring. Assign scores based on behavioral signals and firmographic data to identify when a contact within a target account is ready for a sales conversation.
CRM integration. Connect Xperience by Kentico with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and other CRM platforms to keep sales teams informed in real time and ensure marketing and sales work from the same account data.
Customer Journey Mapping. Visualize how contacts within target accounts move through the buying journey and identify where engagement drops off or accelerates.

Kentico's blog on ROI through platform consolidation explains how having these capabilities in one platform, rather than stitched together from separate tools, is itself a competitive advantage for ABM teams. Disconnected data and integration friction are among the most common reasons ABM programs underperform.

How does ABM fit into a digital experience strategy?

ABM and digital experience strategy are natural partners. A Digital Experience Platform is designed to personalize and orchestrate experiences across channels, which is exactly what ABM requires. The Content Hub ensures that account-specific content is managed centrally and deployed consistently across web, email, and other channels. The CDP layer ensures that every interaction is tracked and fed back into the account profile, making the next touchpoint smarter than the last.

For organizations already investing in personalization, segmentation, and journey mapping, ABM is a strategic layer that focuses those capabilities on the accounts that matter most. Rather than personalizing for broad audience segments, ABM teams use the same tools to personalize at the account level, sometimes even at the individual stakeholder level within a single company.

What is the difference between ABM and traditional demand generation?

Traditional demand generation casts a wide net to attract as many leads as possible, then qualifies and filters them down through a funnel. Volume is the starting point, and conversion rates are the main lever.

ABM starts with a pre-qualified list of high-value accounts and focuses all marketing and sales effort on converting and growing those specific relationships. Quality and fit take precedence over volume.

Most mature B2B marketing programs use both. Research cited by Marketing Scoop shows that 58 percent of companies blend ABM and inbound demand generation, applying each approach where it fits best in the go-to-market strategy. ABM is typically most effective for enterprise and mid-market accounts with complex, multi-stakeholder buying processes. Demand generation handles broader top-of-funnel awareness and smaller, faster-moving deals.

Frequently Asked Questions.

ABM targets a pre-selected list of high-value accounts with personalized campaigns, while traditional lead generation casts a wide net and filters leads after the fact. With ABM, marketing and sales agree upfront on which accounts to pursue, then build content and outreach specifically for those companies. Most mature B2B teams use both: ABM for complex, high-value deals and inbound demand generation for faster-moving, broader top-of-funnel work..

No, you do not need a standalone ABM platform to run an effective program. The core capabilities ABM depends on, including contact segmentation, personalization, lead scoring, marketing automation, and CRM integration, are available within a Digital Experience Platform like Xperience by Kentico. Dedicated ABM tools like Demandbase or 6sense add value at scale, but many teams get strong results by making the most of what their existing platform already supports.

The shared target account list is what keeps marketing and sales aligned in ABM. Both teams agree upfront on which accounts to prioritize, what good engagement looks like, and when a contact is ready to hand off to sales. Research from ITSMA shows that 93 percent of marketers consider tight sales and marketing alignment essential to ABM success, and companies that achieve it report significantly higher win rates and deal sizes.

ABM delivers the strongest ROI for deals with long sales cycles, multiple stakeholders, and high contract values, which often means enterprise accounts, but mid-market B2B companies benefit just as much. The one-to-few ABM model, where you personalize campaigns for a cluster of similar accounts rather than one at a time, makes the approach scalable for smaller teams. According to ITSMA, 75 percent of companies use this one-to-few model rather than fully bespoke one-to-one ABM.

The most meaningful ABM metrics are account-level, not lead-level: target account engagement, pipeline generated from named accounts, win rate for ABM accounts versus non-ABM accounts, and deal size. Because ABM is inherently account-specific, it is easier to draw a direct line between marketing activity and revenue than with broad demand generation. The challenge most teams face is that only 52 percent of companies actually measure ABM ROI consistently, so setting up account-level tracking from the start is one of the most important steps you can take.