In a recent interview, Jeff Bezos, founder and long-time CEO of Amazon, made a point that has stayed with me.
Everyone, he said, asks, “What is changing in my industry?” But the far more interesting and useful question is, “What will stay the same?” You can build a business around the answer to that.
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 — or more — 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 signals.
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 organiser), 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.
Three 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 Boston, Massachusetts, 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 reams 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. Many times 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 segment 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 (a list-building and sales intelligence tool I pioneered using at LMTech in 2011 and at Visual IQ in 2013), 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. I worked at the Demand Generation HQ in Austin, Texas, before I moved over to the UK in 2015.
As at Visual IQ, I worked with some of the best salespeople in the business — typically from companies like Cisco, Palo Alto and Fortinet. Our ‘sales bible’ was The Challenger Sale, based on thousands of sales data points across hundreds of companies: a data-driven approach to enterprise sales success.
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 (up to $5,000 per company). 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).
At Zscaler, in Europe, I also pioneered the use of Sales intelligence to aid us in spearing the top accounts. How it would work is this: We would identify five leads for Barclays Bank (A Key account). I would see in our Intelligence system, Discoverorg, that Barclays was looking to invest $5 million in various Cyber technologies this year. I would pass that on to the sales team, as well as crafting additional messaging around that proposition.
Funnily enough, Discoverorg was acquired by Zoominfo (which I had been a big evangelist of before at several companies), a few years later.
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 conduit. 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.
I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention my time as Demand Generation Manager at Hansen Technologies. We provided CPQ solutions for the telco and media sectors. Our entire universe of accounts was under 1,000, and our average deal size was $1 million. It was a pure ABM play.
I still remember our star sales engineer closing the Australian telco Telstra for $5 million ARR, where they would also be paying a $250,000 switching cost. That sales engineer, Pedro Jose, is now the CTO at Snowflake.
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.
What struck me most from this session 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.
Marketing and sales then insert themselves 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%. This is the same philosophy as my top-50 list, but with far more advanced technology and 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 ice hockey 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
To extend the analogy: in ABM, you want to skate to where the puck will be, not where it is, to paraphrase Wayne Gretzky’s famous line.
I’ve also lived the counter-example. At Tricentis, the team had the full Demandbase package, but 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 unused 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, who made a similar point about using technology. Collins said that in his analysis of top-performing companies, technology was not even in the top ten of the most important factors driving their success. It was the utilisation of technology to enable other high-performing functions — so, just like Teresa Barreira’s ‘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 (referencing the notoriously long LinkedIn lead sales cycle), 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: B2B SaaS Leaders ABM Roundtable.
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.
Spear fishing, with AI
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. 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 a quantum leap in sales and marketing performance for those rare companies able to harness them both effectively.
John Blackmore, a veteran marketer, likened the state of ABM today to the early days of Google Ads. The combination of formidable intent-capturing platforms — Clay, HubSpot, Demandbase, 6sense — with fast-developing AI means the opportunities in this field are enormous.
But the platforms are available to everyone; the advantage was never the tools. It belongs to the companies with the talent and judgement to aim them, and the discipline to make marketing and sales fire as one.
