ABM Blogs

Venture capital is a relationship business. You need to identify companies in your thesis, understand their trajectory and funding status, and build relationships with founders before anyone else does.

Marketing Automation and ABM Integration

Marketing automation platforms (Marketo, HubSpot, Pardot) were designed for lead-based marketing: nurture leads, score leads, route leads to sales. Account-based marketing requires a different approach: target accounts, nurture buying committees, orchestrate multi-stakeholder engagement. Integrating these two models-automation infrastructure with ABM strategy-is where the magic happens. This guide explores the integration challenges, technical patterns, and operational changes needed to run ABM at scale using marketing automation.

Demand Generation vs ABM: Strategic Choice Framework

Demand generation and account-based marketing represent fundamentally different growth philosophies. Demand generation casts a wide net to fill funnels with qualified leads. ABM narrows focus to high-value accounts, treating each as a market of one. Most successful B2B growth organizations don't choose one-they run both simultaneously, allocating resources based on account value, sales cycle length, and market dynamics. This guide helps you understand when each excels and how to operate both strategies in parallel.

Mapping Buying Committees for ABM Success

The foundation of effective account-based marketing is understanding who makes (and influences) purchase decisions within target accounts. This is buying committee mapping: identifying all stakeholders involved in a deal and understanding their roles, priorities, and influence levels. While it sounds straightforward, buying committee mapping is often poorly executed. Many organizations identify only the champion or initial contact, missing critical influencers and blockers. This guide walks through systematic approaches to buying committee mapping and how to use that intelligence to accelerate deals.

Account Targeting vs Lead Targeting - Strategic Implications

B2B marketing has evolved from lead-centric to account-centric thinking, but the shift is incomplete. Many organizations still optimize for lead volume while claiming to practice account-based marketing. Understanding the strategic difference between account targeting and lead targeting is critical for aligning marketing and sales, allocating budgets effectively, and measuring success accurately.

Sales Development in Account-Based Marketing

Account-based marketing fundamentally changes the role of sales development representatives (SDRs). In traditional lead-gen models, SDRs manage high-volume inbound/outbound prospecting: qualify leads, schedule meetings, pass to AEs. In ABM environments, SDRs shift to orchestrating multi-stakeholder engagement within target accounts. This is a significant role evolution. This guide explores how SDRs excel in ABM and how to transition SDR teams from lead-gen to account-based workflows.

ABM Platform Comparison: Terminus, Demandbase, and 6sense

Account-based marketing has matured from a strategy practiced with spreadsheets and Salesforce to an entire category of purpose-built platforms. The three leading players-Terminus, Demandbase, and 6sense-represent different philosophies and feature sets. This guide compares them across key dimensions: architecture, pricing, ease of implementation, and ideal use cases.

Account-Based Marketing for Customer Success Teams in SaaS

Customer success teams have become increasingly critical to SaaS growth. While customer success traditionally focused on retention and support, forward-thinking teams now understand that account-based marketing (ABM) principles can drive measurable expansion revenue alongside churn prevention. This post explores how CS teams can leverage ABM tactics to identify upsell opportunities, deepen customer relationships, and maintain competitive positioning within existing accounts.

Account-Based Marketing for Partner Ecosystems

Many B2B companies grow through partner ecosystems-resellers, system integrators, technology partners, OEMs. These partnerships create a unique challenge for account-based marketing: you don't own the customer relationship, your partner does. ABM must therefore coordinate between vendor, partner, and end customer. This guide explores how ABM works in partner-driven sales models and how to align with partners for mutual success.

The Hand-Off Problem

Marketing passes leads to sales. Sales rejects 60% of them. Marketing blames sales for not working them. Sales blames marketing for unqualified garbage. Both sides lose.

The Sales Enablement Gap

Your marketing team has built a rich ABM targeting strategy. You've identified 50 target accounts, you've mapped their buying committees, you've loaded them into Salesforce. You hand them to sales. And then... sales ignores them or works them generically.

The Reverse GTM Problem

Most ABM playbooks chase greenfield demand: high-intent accounts with no vendor, building from zero. That's backwards. Your highest-ROI targets are accounts with installed competitors you can displace. They've already decided to buy your category-they're just buying the wrong vendor.