Two things, in my experience, will never change. The first is that
companies will always want to reach larger, often enterprise accounts for
big-ticket purchases. The second is that success in that pursuit will always depend on finding
curious people: the ones forever exploring new ways of doing things, adopting
new technology, and adapting to a business world that refuses to sit still.
With that framing in mind, consider Account-Based Marketing. ABM has
existed, in substance, since B2B selling began. But it has been through many
permutations — and several name changes: from “Major Account Selling” in
the 1950s, to “Target Account Marketing” (TAM) in the early 1990s, to
the “Strategic Marketing to Named Accounts” that I was practising at
Visual IQ and Zscaler through the 2010s. The label “Account-Based Marketing”
only took hold around 2015, pioneered by Jon Miller, founder of Marketo and
later Demandbase.
Whatever you call it, ABM is here to stay. The newest chapter in this
long-running need — to penetrate enterprise businesses at many levels and
across many parts of an organisation in order to secure large recurring deals —
is the application of AI.
The AI inflection point
Next week I'll be attending a workshop with Demandbase built around
exactly this question: how do we turbo-charge and extend an already strong
understanding of ABM using AI? In my experience, AI can 10x — sometimes 100x —
what you're already achieving in this realm. But the point is not that machines
replace the craft; it's that they amplify it.
The
AI revolution is about leveraging and accelerating the best of what humans can
do — by teaching machines how to perform tasks, and then using AI as an “Iron
Man” suit to accomplish our goals, together as one unit.
— Teresa
Barreira, CMO at Publicis Sapient (and a fellow Northeastern University MBA
alumna)
That is the right mental model. The judgement about which accounts
matter, why they matter, and how to reach the humans inside them remains
stubbornly human work. AI simply lets you do far more of it, far faster, and
with far better signal.
This is not a new interest of mine. About two years ago, content strategist Damien Seaman and I convened a virtual roundtable with leaders across B2B SaaS — CMOs, heads of demand generation, and others — to examine how this account-based approach was proliferating.
A year later, in August 2025, I
worked alongside AI go-to-market experts like Jasper Ruijs (the organizer), including senior leaders from Adobe
and Semrush, together with Clay and ABM specialists, to understand how AI was
reshaping the way large B2B deals get done: “fishing with spears” —
precise, one-to-one marketing — as opposed to the “fishing with nets”
typical of smaller, more transactional B2B.
As with everything AI touches, ABM is moving fast. Rather like the Red
Queen in Through the Looking-Glass, you have to keep running simply to
stay in the same place. Getting ahead of the curve takes even more talent,
open-minded thinking, momentum, organisational backing, and investment.
Two stories from the field
I fear I'm getting too technical, so let me set the acronyms aside and
tell some stories instead — because the principles are best seen in practice.
Visual IQ: 50 accounts, a pair of
binoculars, and a category-defining survey
When I joined Visual IQ in 2013, we had a crack team. On the sales side,
most had been poached from Adobe by our Chief Revenue Officer, formerly head of
sales at Omniture (which Adobe acquired). These were people with realms of
experience closing multi-million-dollar-a-year accounts for digital marketing
attribution with global names like TK Maxx, Walmart, Johnson & Johnson,
Mastercard and P&G — where, incidentally, many of my fellow marketing MBAs
had done their internships.
I learned an enormous amount about ABM from these people. At least once a
week I'd sit down with a regional VP of marketing in the US, along with the VPs
for Europe and APAC. We would draw up a list of the top 50 accounts they wanted
to penetrate and debate the best way in: outbound calling? A physical
promotion? An email campaign? LinkedIn InMail or sponsored content? Once the
strategy was agreed, the hard, patient work of spear-fishing began.
The physical promotion is worth dwelling on, because it captures the
essence of ABM better than any framework. Because we sold attribution —
helping marketers see clearly — we had branded binoculars made, embossed with
the Visual IQ logo, and sent them to the heads of marketing and digital at our
50 target accounts. In the US it did exceptionally well. The head of marketing
at ESPN loved it, and it helped open the door to a roughly $1m deal. That is
spear-fishing: a memorable, relevant, one-to-one gesture aimed at a named
individual inside a named account.
Visual IQ also taught me the power of owning a category conversation. We published an annual State of Marketing Attribution survey report, built on the views of 500 CMOs. It generated a huge amount of SEO and some of the strongest leads we produced — because it made us the reference point for a question the whole market was asking.
I've since replicated that playbook more
than once, most memorably at a video-game advertising company where a segmented
State of Video Game Advertising survey drew around 300 responses in what
was essentially virgin territory, with tailored question sets for game
companies, advertisers and agencies. The segmentation itself became a form of
personalisation, and the response was excellent.
None of this was happening in a vacuum. The reason those spears landed
was that the market already regarded Visual IQ as a leader. Forrester placed us
in the Leaders quadrant of its Cross-Channel Attribution Wave — the
analyst validation that made a cold outreach warm before a single word was
exchanged.
The Forrester Wave™: Cross-Channel
Attribution Vendors, Q2 2012 — Visual IQ positioned in the Leaders segment
(Source: Forrester Research, Inc.).
What made the Visual IQ machine work was that ABM ran on two engines at
once. The outbound engine penetrated named strategic accounts in defined
regions; the inbound engine qualified the demand our category leadership and
content were creating — web downloads, CMO reports, Forrester Wave enquiries,
newsletter opens, referrals — and handed genuinely qualified opportunities to
field sales. Marketing and sales weren't two departments lobbing work over a
wall; they were one motion. I still have the pipeline reviews from that period,
and the discipline is striking: strategic accounts analysed for why prior
efforts had won or lost, contact reach expanded through ZoomInfo, Salesforce
and LinkedIn, and bespoke material built for specific verticals and named
targets — never generic blasts.
Zscaler: the free security audit, and the
confidence to be expensive
Zscaler taught me the same lesson from a different angle. Our whole
proposition was cyber security delivered from the cloud — breaking companies
free from the tangle of on-premise security appliances. Once again, we started
with the biggest game. We drew up a list of 50 companies we wanted to penetrate
and offered each of them something substantial: a free consulting engagement in
which we would go in, examine their security posture, find the weaknesses, and
hand back a report.
That offer is expensive to fulfil. You cannot make it to 5,000 companies;
you can barely make it to 50. Which is precisely why account selection mattered
so much. We had to be genuinely confident that the accounts we approached were
strong potential customers before we committed real consulting hours to them.
Get the targeting wrong and you don't just waste money — you burn your best
asset, your experts' time, on accounts that were never going to buy.
Here too, analyst standing did heavy lifting. When you walk into a global
enterprise's CISO office offering to audit their defences, the first unspoken
question is “why should we let you?” Being named a Leader by both
Gartner and Forrester answered it before we did. Gartner's Magic Quadrant for
Secure Web Gateways placed Zscaler firmly in the Leaders quadrant, alongside a
very short list of credible names — and well ahead of the challengers and niche
players.
Gartner Magic Quadrant, Secure Web
Gateways, May 2015 — Zscaler positioned in the Leaders quadrant (Source:
Gartner).
The through-line from Visual IQ to Zscaler is simple: in enterprise
ABM, credibility is the spearhead. The binoculars, the free audit, the
survey report — these are the shaft. But analyst recognition, category
leadership and social proof are what let the spear actually penetrate. Both
companies went on to strong exits — Zscaler to a landmark IPO, Visual IQ to
acquisition by Nielsen — and in both cases the account-based motion was central
to how the enterprise pipeline was built.
What the practitioners
told us
I don't want to leave the impression that ABM is a solved problem, or
that my own experience is the last word. It isn't. The roundtable Damien Seaman
and I hosted brought together eight senior B2B marketers — from a
cyber-security demand-gen lead to a portfolio CMO to a private-equity Chief
Development Officer — and what struck me most was how early most
organisations still are on this journey, and how mixed the results have been
even for experienced hands. A few themes emerged that map almost exactly onto
what I learned in the field a decade earlier.
Intent is the modern equivalent of my
top-50 list
At Visual IQ and Zscaler we built our target lists from a blend of engagement data and, crucially, sales-team feedback — confirming that accounts which looked engaged were also accounts sales agreed were worth an opportunity. I've always liked the Bezos line that when the stories and the data disagree, trust the stories.
John Blackmore, who leads demand generation
at a cyber-security firm, described the modern,
instrumented version of the same instinct: rather than cold-calling phone
books, his team listens for intent signals — someone researching endpoint
detection, or evaluating a competitor — and inserts itself only into
conversations that are already live. In his words, intent now accounts directly
for around a quarter of his pipeline and lifts the efficiency of his other
tactics by 10–15%. Same philosophy as my top-50 list; far better sensors.
The tool is the assist, not the goal-scorer
The most quotable insight of the day was also the most important, and it
validated something I'd seen go wrong more than once. John — a Canadian, so the
metaphor is fitting — argued that ABM platforms like 6sense and Demandbase are
not the killer app but the assist:
ABM
is the assist. It's not necessarily the goal-scorer, but it sets up all your
goal-scorers in a great way to put the puck in the net. It can improve the
efficiency of every tactic by 10 to 20%. It's worth its weight in gold, even if
it never delivers one sale for you.
— John
Blackmore, Global Director of Demand Generation
I've lived the counter-example. At Tricentis, the team had the full
Demandbase package — and left it on the shelf. Rocio Sasson, VP of Demand
Generation at Checkmarx, described the same trap from her seven years using
both 6sense and Demandbase: the platform is only as good as the cross-team
effort behind it, and personalisation “takes a long time and still doesn't
guarantee success.” A tool bought and un-used is worse than no tool at all,
because it tells the organisation that ABM doesn't work when in fact ABM was
never really tried.
ABM is really a sales-and-marketing
alignment strategy in disguise
This, for me, is the deepest point — and it's the one my Visual IQ pipeline reviews prove out in retrospect. Every roundtable participant with real success traced it back to alignment. Blackmore holds two standing weekly meetings with two different sales teams purely to interrogate lead quality — are these good, do you like them, who do you actually want to talk to?
He put
it memorably: you're not buying 6sense; you're buying collegial alignment, and
the tool is simply the expression of it. Rocio was blunt about the failure
mode: however beautiful the asset, if sales won't work the leads, the whole
effort collapses.
This reminds me of Jim Collins, of ‘Good to Great’ fame, made a similar
point about using technology. Jim said that in his analysis of top performing
companies, technology was not even in the top ten of most important factors
driving their success. It was the utilisation of technology to enable other
high performing functions (So just like Teresa Barreira, CMO of Publicis
Sapient, points out in her ‘AI as Iron Man suit’ analogy).
John Blackmore’s point also matches my lived ABM experience exactly. I've
produced thousands of leads that fell to the floor because sales wouldn't pick
them up. The reverse — the two-engine Visual IQ motion where marketing
qualified and sales closed as a single unit — is what actually produced
million-dollar accounts. ABM, done properly, forces that alignment because the
model simply cannot function without it.
Personalise the message, not just the list
Damien shared the campaign I still think is the gold standard of spear-fishing: a Canon campaign targeting C-suite executives at listed companies across six European countries. The team printed each target's annual report, found the passages where the company itself flagged document-management pain, and hand-wrote tailored messages on Post-it notes placed at exactly those pages — each package arriving under a cover letter from Canon's country head, peer to peer.
The result was an 80% response rate across more than 100
accounts. The lesson isn't the Post-it notes; it's that the value
proposition to different personas for the same product is genuinely different,
and the personalisation has to reach the message, not just the mailing list.
There is far more in the full write-up — including a candid debate on
whether LinkedIn produces real pipeline or only brand awareness, the mechanics
of preferential paid-search bidding on target-account segments, and geo-fencing
as an alternative to trade-show spend. I'd encourage anyone serious about ABM
to read it in full: Account-BasedMarketing Roundtable — full write-up.
Where this leaves us
Put the field experience and the roundtable side by side and the pattern is hard to miss. The fundamentals of ABM have not changed in decades — pick the right named accounts, reach the right humans inside them with a message that speaks to their specific pain, and make marketing and sales a single motion rather than two teams.
What has changed is the instrumentation. Where I
once built a top-50 list from engagement data and a weekly conversation with a
regional VP, today's intent platforms surface that signal continuously and at
scale. And where personalising a hundred accounts once meant hand-writing
Post-it notes, AI now makes genuine one-to-one relevance achievable across
thousands of them.
That is the opportunity in front of us — and, per Blackmore's hockey
metaphor, we are still in the early, high-advantage days of learning to use it
well. Now we are also in the early stages of AI, and so those two nascent
approaches are combining to produce an effect that is both hard to replicate,
and potentially will provide a quantum leap in sales and marketing performance
for those rare companies able to harness them both effectively.
So going back to that original Jeff Bezos point – what will stay the same
in the next ten years, and what will change? What will stay the same is that
there will always be a huge demand for clever, innovative new ways to penetrate
large accounts, craft compelling personalised value propositions to those
companies, and therefore to drive up B2B deal values.
What will change is that those most able to navigate the massive changes
going on in the industry, and to capitalise on them, will increasingly
influence the marketing strategy of those successful B2B companies.
Demandbase AI ABM Session next week
Demandbase is hosting an AI in ABM Essentials Certification workshop next week in London.
Details: You will learn practical AI strategies for modern Account-Based Marketing and Go-To-Market teams to prioritize accounts and interpret buying signals.
So I will report back – and either add to this blog post, or create a new
one specifically on AI in ABM.
