B2BTimes’ Marketing & Sales desk covers go-to-market strategy for B2B revenue teams, drawing on primary research from Gartner, Forrester, and ITSMA alongside patterns we track across client programs and industry benchmarking reports. This piece was reviewed by our editorial team for accuracy against the sources cited below.

Key takeaways

• The average B2B purchase now involves around 11 individual stakeholders, according to Gartner, and that number can flex up to nearly 20 on larger deals. That’s a big reason single-persona demand gen keeps underperforming for complex sales.
• A 2020 ITSMA and ABM Leadership Alliance benchmark study found 76 percent of marketers reported higher ROI from ABM than from any other marketing strategy they ran.
• Programs that work treat the account list as a shared asset between sales and marketing, not a marketing-only deliverable.
• Measurement has to go past engagement metrics and into pipeline velocity, deal size, and win rate, or the program can’t prove it moved revenue.
• There’s a readiness checklist near the end of this article. Use it to sanity-check a new program before launch, or to diagnose one that’s already stalled.

Most B2B marketing teams are still running campaigns built for a world where a single lead form fill meant something. That world is gone. A modern account-based marketing strategy exists precisely because the old model no longer matches how B2B buying actually works. Gartner puts the average at 11 individual stakeholders involved in a single purchase, a figure reported by Allego, with that number occasionally flexing up to nearly 20 on larger deals. Each of those people is doing their own research, weighing their own priorities, and each one is capable of stalling a deal that looked closed the week before. Chasing volume in that kind of environment wastes budget on people who were never going to buy. Worse, it quietly ignores the ones who actually decide.

ABM turns that model around. Rather than generating as many leads as possible and sorting out quality later, you pick the accounts worth winning first, then build both marketing and sales motions around those specific companies. Said out loud, it sounds obvious, yet it fails constantly in practice, mostly because most organizations still treat it as a side project instead of a real strategy. In the programs that actually deliver, the difference usually isn’t the software stack. It’s whether sales and marketing agreed on the account list before anyone touched a campaign brief.

This piece walks through how to choose accounts, get sales and marketing pulling in the same direction, personalize at the account level, and measure what matters instead of what’s easy to pull into a slide. It’s basically everything you need to build a program that survives past its first quarter. There’s a short checklist at the end you can use to sanity-check a program before launch, or to diagnose one that’s already wobbling.

Why ABM Keeps Beating Broad Demand Gen

The numbers here aren’t new, but they’ve held up across several survey cycles, and they’re worth trusting for a specific reason: the study behind them is named, dated, and sized. A 2020 benchmark study from the ABM Leadership Alliance and ITSMA surveyed more than 400 B2B technology marketers and found 76 percent saw higher ROI with ABM than with any other marketing strategy they were running. That’s more than can be said for a lot of the “2026 ABM statistics” roundups now circulating online, many of which cite contradictory adoption figures with no traceable source at all. ITSMA’s Rob Leavitt, SVP of Consulting, called the ROI finding one of the study’s standout results, as reported by Demand Gen Report at the time. The same research tied mature programs to stronger relationships with target accounts, and larger deal sizes tend to follow too, mostly because the accounts were already qualified before a single campaign went out.

The mechanism is straightforward. A generic content strategy has to appeal to everyone, which in practice means it ends up appealing strongly to no one. An account-based approach can speak directly to what a specific company’s finance director, IT lead, and procurement team each care about, because you’re not writing for a persona anymore. You’re writing for a company you’ve already researched, by name.

None of this replaces a broader marketing plan. Think of it as a layer built on top of one. If your overall positioning and funnel aren’t nailed down yet, it’s worth working through a strategic B2B marketing plan first. ABM tends to work best when it reinforces a message the market already half-recognizes, not when it’s introducing a brand-new one.

Build the Account List Before You Build Anything Else

The single biggest mistake teams make is treating account selection like a list-building exercise instead of a strategic one. Pulling five hundred companies off a firmographic filter (right industry, right headcount, right region) gives you a spreadsheet. It doesn’t give you a target list.

A workable list starts with your own win data, not a template. Pull the last twelve to eighteen months of closed-won deals. Look for the pattern that actually predicted success, not the one written on your ideal customer profile slide. Sometimes it’s a specific piece of the tech stack. Sometimes it’s a trigger event: a funding round, a new VP walking in the door. Sales usually already knows this pattern even if nobody’s written it down, which is exactly why sales needs to be in the room from day one, not brought in after the list is finalized.

Once you’ve got a short list, tier it. Tier 1 covers a handful of accounts worth building fully custom campaigns for: personalized landing pages, direct mail, executive-level outreach, the full treatment. Tier 2 is a larger group that gets a semi-personalized motion: industry-specific content and targeted ads, but nothing bespoke. Tier 3 is the broadest segment, run through programmatic ABM using intent data and firmographic targeting at scale rather than one-to-one attention.

Trying to run every account at Tier 1 intensity will burn out a marketing team within two quarters, guaranteed. Here’s a rule of thumb worth stealing: Tier 1 should be small enough that a marketer could name every account from memory. If they can’t, it isn’t really Tier 1.

Get Sales and Marketing Working Off the Same List

This kind of program fails more often from misalignment than from weak creative. If sales is prospecting a different set of accounts than the ones marketing is targeting, you end up with two teams working in parallel instead of one team compounding the same effort. The account list needs to be a shared, living document both teams review together on a regular cadence, not something marketing hands off once a quarter and forgets about.

This is also where most of the actual ROI comes from. When a target account sees a relevant ad, reads a piece of content addressed to their specific challenge, and then gets outreach from a rep who clearly already knows the context, the whole experience feels coordinated instead of accidental. That coordination is basically the whole advantage ABM has over a generic outbound sequence. B2BTimes covered why this alignment gap is the real bottleneck for most B2B revenue teams in Why B2B Marketing and Sales Alignment Is the Real Growth Lever in 2026, worth a read alongside this one.

Personalize Where It Actually Moves the Needle

Personalization doesn’t mean swapping a company name into an email template. That trick is so common now that most buyers register it as spam before they finish the first line. Real account-level personalization means the content reflects something specific: an initiative the company has publicly announced, a regulatory shift hitting their industry, or a competitor move creating urgency they can’t ignore.

For Tier 1 accounts, that might mean a single landing page built around the account by name, with case studies pulled from similar companies in their exact vertical. Tier 2 and Tier 3 usually get personalization at the segment level instead: industry-specific pain points, role-based messaging for the different people on the buying committee, and content timed to where the account actually sits in the funnel rather than a one-size-fits-all drip sequence.

Search visibility matters here too, more than most programs give it credit for. Target accounts research vendors long before anyone talks to sales, and a growing share of that research now happens through AI-assisted search as much as traditional Google queries. Making sure your content shows up when a target account’s stakeholders search for a solution category is its own discipline. B2BTimes breaks that down further in B2B SEO Strategy in 2026: The Revenue-First Playbook.

Measure Pipeline, Not Just Engagement

Engagement metrics (page views, ad clicks, content downloads) are useful diagnostic signals. But they aren’t the point. The real question is whether target accounts are entering and moving through pipeline faster, or in greater numbers, than they would have without the program.

A measurement approach that holds up tracks three layers. Account engagement tells you whether the right people at target accounts are interacting with your content and ads at all, which is more of a targeting check than anything else. Pipeline velocity and value tell you whether target accounts are converting to opportunities faster and whether those opportunities are larger than your average deal, which is where the program is supposed to earn its keep. Win rate and retention tell you whether you’re actually closing these accounts more often, and whether they expand once closed.

Engagement and pipeline value tend to move first once a program is running properly, usually before win rate or revenue numbers have had time to catch up. That’s normal. It’s also why judging a program on its first-quarter close rate is premature. If your reporting stops at engagement, though, you’ll end up with something that looks busy without ever proving it moved revenue. That’s usually about the time finance starts asking uncomfortable questions about the budget line.

The Pattern Behind Most Failed ABM Programs

Most rollouts that stall out share the same root cause: they were launched as a marketing initiative rather than a joint revenue one. Marketing picks the accounts. Marketing builds the campaigns. Sales finds out about the target list secondhand, if at all. Six months later the program gets quietly folded because nobody can point to closed revenue that clearly traces back to it.

The fix isn’t more software or fancier personalization tools. It’s treating the account list itself as a shared asset both teams are accountable to, backed by a measurement framework both teams agreed on before the first campaign ever launched. Everything else (the content, the ad targeting, the outreach sequencing) is execution detail sitting on top of that foundation.

ABM Readiness Checklist

Run through this before launching a new program, or while diagnosing one that isn’t performing. If you can’t answer yes to most of these, that’s usually where things are actually breaking, regardless of what the campaign reporting shows.

• Can someone in sales name every account on the current Tier 1 list without looking it up?
• Was the account list built from closed-won deal patterns, not just a firmographic filter?
• Does marketing know which trigger events (funding, leadership changes, expansions) matter most for your ICP?
• Is there a shared document both teams review on a set cadence, not a list marketing owns alone?
• Does at least one piece of content per Tier 1 account reference something specific to that company, not just its industry?
• Does your reporting go beyond engagement into pipeline velocity, deal size, and win rate?
• Has anyone actually reviewed the account list this quarter, or is it running on autopilot from when it was first built?

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources referenced in this article:

• Gartner B2B buying-group research, via Allego: https://allego.com/blog/identifying-stakeholders-in-b2b-sales
• ABM Leadership Alliance and ITSMA, 2020 ABM Benchmark Study (primary report, 400+ B2B technology marketers surveyed): https://abmleadershipalliance.com/ebook/rethinking-abm-2020-benchmark-study/
• Demand Gen Report’s coverage of the same study, including comments from Rob Leavitt, SVP of Consulting at ITSMA: https://www.demandgenreport.com/industry-news/new-research-76-of-marketers-using-abm-experienced-higher-roi-in-2020/6596/