Account Based Marketing – Practical Strategies for B2B Technology Companies

Why Everything About Demand Generation Is Being Rewritten

In this third installment, let’s review how the game has fundamentally changed and how we as demand gen practitioners need to potentially veer from what has worked in the past. That’s because the way people buy has changed fundamentally and forever – so our programs and processes must adapt.

Here are the shifts reshaping everything we thought we knew about demand generation.

Buyers Now Own the Process

All the data that used to require a conversation is now online. Buyers complete up to 85% of their decision process before ever engaging with sales. By the time they fill out a form, they’ve already made a short list.

“We used to generate demand. Now we need to make sure we’re discoverable when the buyer interest develops.”

Trust Has Moved to the Network

Prospects now rely on peers, communities, and review sites more than company messaging.
A customer’s voice carries 10x the credibility of the brand itself. This shift has turned advocacy and social proof into the new marketing currency.

“Your customers are your marketing department — whether you plan for it or not.”

Product-Led Growth Has Changed the Sales Cycle

Buyers expect to see and interact with the product, not just hear about it. Trials, freemium models, and self-serve experiences are now core parts of the funnel. If you don’t have some process by which customers can easily ‘experience’ your product, possibly it’s just too hard to use.

“A free trial or product experience used to be a sales event. Now it’s an expected prospect experience before engaging with sales.”

Remote Work Has Changed Reachability

The era of predictable access — phone calls, events, in-person meetings — is over.
Buyers are dispersed, mobile, and selective about what they engage with. So it takes much more effort now to connect live with prospects – and even more effort to make that connection a positive experience.

“When you can’t reach buyers, you have to attract them.”

Digital Filtering Has Rewired Attention

People have systems to filter out ads and email as well as have trained themselves to ignore irrelevant outreach. Spam filters, ad blockers, and notification fatigue make the traditional outbound machine less effective every year. Look to create value-driven, human content that breaks through.

“Attention is no longer bought. It’s earned.”

AI Has Changed Search

Any savvy buyer will use some version of AI to assist their discovery process. Showing up on non-branded keywords has been dropping in value and will continue to do so going forward. How AI presents your product and company will be key to making the short list. How do we do this? It’s evolving quickly now and we are all trying to figure this out.

“Sponsored results have a hard time competing with AI summaries.”

What the Future Looks Like

The answer for every company and product will be different – that is for sure. However, the next evolution of demand generation will look less like a funnel and more like an ecosystem. Companies are beginning to:

Ungate their content to maximize reach and trust
Invest in customer proof via review sites and community engagement
Enhance PLG trials so buyers experience value faster
Create authentic, educational content that earns credibility
Capture intent, not force it — focusing on “request a demo” moments rather than MQL volume

“The goal isn’t to chase buyers. It’s to be the company they find when they’re ready.”

The Takeaway

After 25 years, I’ve come to see demand generation differently.
It’s not a pipeline factory — it’s an ecosystem of trust, proof, and discoverability.

“The most effective marketing today doesn’t push. It proves.”

That’s not the end of demand generation. It’s the beginning of its next chapter.

Why Some Startups Don’t Reach Their Potential

As the second installment of this three article series, I look at common reasons that contributed to less-than-successful financial outcomes for the startups I joined.

As a recap, over the past 25 years, I have had the good fortune to be a part of demand generation teams across 20 technology companies. Recently, I created a summary data set containing each company and key characteristics like product-market fit, messaging focus, marketing-sales alignment, funnel instrumentation, PLG offerings and, most importantly, the financial outcomes achieved while I was there. What becomes evident are several common trends showing what worked, what didn’t, and what separated the companies that achieved strong results — IPOs or high-value acquisitions — from those that fell short.

Lets dig in.

Product–Market Fit Wasn’t Ready

This can take several different shapes. In the most obvious cases, customers tried our product and then decided not to buy it – it just did not create more value than time and cost of acquisition. In other cases, each sale is unique across buying persona and purchase process. It is hard to scale success when every sale is a one-off. While companies can limp along and linger – it is really hard to have a breakout success without a clear product-market fit.

Go-to-Market Process Wasn’t Repeatable or Scalable

I have been a part of companies where early wins came from hustle — founder energy, referrals, or one-off deals. But when the team tried to scale, there wasn’t yet a reliable playbook for targeting, qualification, and conversion. Marketing spend without process maturity leads to inefficiency, not growth.

“Scaling before repeatability just lights cash on fire.”

Better Mousetrap Versus Good-Enough

In some cases, the company had a product clearly better than the alternatives with certain features, product completeness or more. However, if those other products were simpler to deploy and manage (on-prem v SaaS) or good enough in meeting the underlying need (Beta v VHS), the early stage opportunities died on the vine. No amount of demand gen spending can meet an underwhelming response of the customer. The value prop used in the early stage of the sales process must be reinforced all the way through the sales process to achieve reliable and consistent growth.

Category and Value Proposition Weren’t Clear

When prospects can’t easily categorize your product, or, worse yet, don’t understand it easily, the buying journey becomes slow and expensive. This takes more time and effort to drive awareness, engagement and eventually create pipeline. In demand gen, we live under the brand value created by product marketing. If the messaging is not crisp and sharp, this dulls the returns of every program.

“If your category isn’t clear, your campaigns have to work twice as hard.”

The Takeaway:
Some of the most valuable lessons come from the companies that didn’t win big. They remind us that product capabilities, messaging clarity, and scalability are preconditions for marketing success.

“Demand generation is an amplifier. It strengthens what’s already working.”

In my next post, I’ll explore how much the game itself has changed — and why the old rules of demand generation may no longer apply.

Why Some Startups Achieve Great Financial Outcomes

Over the past 25 years, I have had the good fortune to be a part of demand generation teams across 20 technology companies. Recently, I created a summary data set containing each company and key characteristics like product-market fit, messaging focus, marketing-sales alignment, funnel instrumentation, PLG offerings and, most importantly, the financial outcomes achieved while I was there. What becomes evident are several common trends showing what worked, what didn’t, and what separated the companies that achieved strong results — IPOs or high-value acquisitions — from those that fell short.

So in this first article of a three part series, I would like to share the core characteristics that consistently drove success at these companies. Caveat: One thing I know for certain is that one size does not fit all. The mix of what makes any specific company successful is generally a unique set of traits.

Data-Driven Demand Generation Engine

Successful companies treat data as a growth asset. They use KPIs, attribution, and testing to continuously refine performance. Decisions are made from dashboards, not opinions.

“You can’t scale what you can’t measure — and you can’t measure what you don’t instrument.”

When marketing metrics are tied directly to pipeline and revenue, it becomes easy to prove what’s working, cut what’s not, and allocate budget with confidence.

Tight Sales–Marketing Alignment

At the companies that scaled best, sales and marketing worked as one team. Shared targets, common definitions, and regular collaboration made the handoff between functions seamless.

Alignment isn’t a meeting. It’s a system — one where every lead, every metric, and every touchpoint is connected.

Marketing programs only come to life with and through sales team execution so tight alignment is an essential part of creating pipeline that turns into revenue.

Repeatable, Scalable Processes

The best outcomes came from organizations that built systems — not just campaigns.
Quarterly planning, repeatable campaign frameworks, and built-in measurement loops made growth predictable and sustainable.

BUT – this assumes you have a scalable and repeatable sales process. When the persona and sales game plan is well defined, demand gen can pour money into scaling this motion.

Simple Market Story

A great product isn’t enough. The market must be ready and the story must be simple. The most successful startups built narratives buyers could instantly understand. Imagine you are sending a postcard to your ideal prospect – what image and copy in this very limited format will cause the recipient to carry this to their desk instead of the recycle bin?

If the messaging takes more than this, the campaigns have to work too hard to break through. Lets not make the prospect work hard to understand the value prop.

Capital Efficiency and ROI Discipline

Every successful company I’ve worked with understood growth economics: customer acquisition cost (CAC), payback period, and lifetime value (LTV). Certainly early stage companies may not have great numbers, but there must be a path to measure current results and start the relentless effort to improve and optimize.

Growth is impressive. Efficient growth is valuable.

The Takeaway:
The best financial outcomes weren’t accidents. They were the product of many important characteristics: messaging simplicity, repeatable and scalable processes, tight sales-marketing alignment and a constant effort to measure and improve. Here demand gen serves to pour gasoline into the engine built by the product and sales teams. With all three working together, great things happen.

In my next post, I’ll look at the opposite side: why some startups — even with great products and alignment — fail to reach their potential.

Three Factors that Jeopardize Outbound Program Results

Challenge: Identifying Personas Within Buying Centers is Difficult

I had a brainstorm last week that I believe will lead to more productive outbound programs by identifying a problem inherent in many Account Based Marketing (ABM) programs. In sum, we need to improve how we develop our target buyers at the early stage of program launch. Since this is a new insight for me, this post focuses more on diagnosing he problem rather than recommending solutions. Have you found a better way? Love to hear your thoughts.

We must address several layers of issues to accurately target prospects in a scalable way providing the foundation for outbound/ABM programs. These layers act like concentric circles to get to the ideal program target list. Here are a set of three ‘formulas’ or reasons that describe the top three challenges:

Because:

ABM ≠ Buying Center

AND

Buying Center ≠ Persona

AND

Contacts ≠ Updated

Therefore

ABM ≠ $ROI Potential$

Let me explain.

First, we all love Account Based Marketing and understand that greater customization and effort focused on a limited set of accounts who represent your ideal customer will deliver higher conversion rates. However, when targeting enterprise accounts, there are different buying centers. More specifically, your offering may address the needs of and be purchased by multiple departments, so targeting a ‘company’ does not sufficiently address the buying center because there are actually multiple buying centers. For example, if you sell to developers, your target account many have many different groups of developers who will make different purchase decisions. And this raises further questions. Do these different departments (buying centers) have the same needs, pain points and interests? Do your value proposition, primary contacts and other key elements change across every buying center? If so, then many ABM programs may be missing the mark by not tailoring to a specific buying center within a target account. Factor #1: ABM ≠ Buying Center.

As we dig further into our outbound programs, the buyers are often not in the same department. The personas leading the purchase may be part of one department but in most cases there are personas from different departments involved in the buying decision. To accurately target an ‘Buying Center’, your programs need to consider all of the different contacts associated with the buying center (the collective group of people responsible for making the purchase decision). In many outbound/ABM programs, contacts are selected because they fit key personas but their position in the organization may not be identified in terms of how they fit within the buying center. Factor #2: Buying Center ≠ Persona.

Finally, the targets of our programs often shift jobs — up to 20% of contact details may change every year. While many organizations have deployed CRM account alignment solutions (DiscoverOrg, DataFox, D&B, …), few automatically update contact information. As contact take on new roles/responsibilities and as contacts change jobs, is your database staying current? Likely not. (Personal note — I would love to a cloud solution that automatically updated contact details as they change) Factor #3: frequently Contacts ≠ Updated.

While ABM provides a mechanism for better account and contact selection for outbound programs, there remains a huge gap between this method and how internal enterprise B2B purchase decisions are made. Therefore, your ABM may be delivering less revenue than it could if the programs were more carefully targeted. Clearly there are major gaps in our ability to map organizational buying decisions to a level where our systems can help us execute these programs at scale. That’s the bad news — but realizing this gap is the first step to designing better processes.

If we, as a marketing department, take our ABM efforts to the next level with tailored targeting processes, we will be more closely aligned with the actual purchase process. For now this starts with a careful examination of the purchase process, personas, target accounts and more, in order to develop a strategy with available tools. As we identify target accounts, we must identify all of the personas across the organization associated with the buying decision to increase success rates. We will need to lean harder on our tech stack providers to give us greater insights into these areas for better and easier segmentation at scale. In the end, this will be an optimization of outbound programs to have more precision and greater results.

Lesson: If we take the time to identify and target all of the contacts associated with organization buying centers, our outbound campaigns will be more productive and drive greater revenue.

Eliminating Leads: Migrating CRM to Support Account Based Marketing

Orchestration

Here is a recent presentation I gave at the OpStars event alongside Dreamforce. It describes the motivation behind eliminating the Lead object in CRM to support ABM and gives the experience of one startup making the transition.

Moving to Account Based Marketing – OpStars Event Presentation

The Road to ABM: Baby Steps Not Leaps

Challenge: To Cutover Hard or Migrate Gradually – that is the Question.

During a recent conversation about migrating from traditional inbound marketing to Account Based Marketing (ABM), a colleague noted that the optimal method was a hard cutover but that this would put a serious hole in his pipeline. He reasoned that this would entail a complete shift in targeting, team capabilities, tools, programs and more. Given that there is a certain sales cycle associated with driving Leads and Opportunities in this fashion, he believed this would blow a hole in the pipeline for six to twelve months due to the product sales cycle. This colleague is super smart leader with deep demand gen experience. However, I disagree agree with this assessment and I have yet to see this method in practice so I thought I would share my thoughts with my network for feedback.

My experience for over 20 years has been as a content and funnel marketer building programs to scale inbound leads and automate qualification into the sales funnel (see my recent blog on ‘continuous pipeline’). The concept of ABM is compelling, with benefits including increased focus, activity orchestration and higher conversion rates due to customized messaging targeting specific accounts and personas. Since I have also seen funnel conversion rates drop over the last five to ten years, ABM is a natural solution. However, in my experience at several different companies, the migration to ABM was a gradual process, not a hard cutover.

At one company where the focus was to drive end user trials in a land-and-expand model, we developed a target Account list based on the past customer lifetime value (LTV) selecting a prospect list most likely not only to land but also to expand. These prospects were run through a series of phone, email and postal outreach programs. The results were quickly positive resulting in significant pipeline in just two to three months. Gradually we added additional components including digital marketing and more fully integrated our online and field events to better address all stages of the customer journey. The result was positive pipeline impact in just a few months all while we continued most of our inbound marketing programs.

At another company with a SaaS based enterprise software application, the goal was to add-in a focused outbound ABM program to the existing inbound programs. We started by identifying the use cases where we had high win rates and successful deployments. We then selected accounts based on size, industry, technologies deployed and other key criteria as a target list from which the sales reps selected the specific accounts based on their past experience. The marketing team then built out contacts lists using agreed upon personas, designed email and phone outreach programs and rolled out the new systems and processes to the reps. In just two to three months we drove over $500K in new pipeline – again while we continued all the inbound programs. Going forward the plan is to add-in both digital marketing and events.

In neither case did we stop our inbound funnel, rather we designed the new programs to work with existing programs while we developed outbound ABM muscle. We made sure that there was capacity within the lead qualification teams to run the outbound ABM programs while still qualifying inbound leads. Also in both cases we started with simple email and phone campaigns and later moved to a more fully orchestrated ABM program. Some might not consider these programs “true ABM” but rather a targeted sales play — but I believe that’s just semantics. The bottom line is that my job is to drive pipeline and deals and these methods have been successful.

My experience has been mostly positive gradually migrating to ABM. How about you?

Lesson: I believe that the adage ‘moderation in all things’ applies to ABM migration. What have you seen?

Account Based Marketing Migration Plan

Here are the presentation slides from a DemandBase seminar I gave in January of 2016 describing a planned migration to ABM. I believe the structure and approach has stood the test of time and is still relevant today. Does this look like your ABM approach?

Account Based Marketing Migration Plan

Continuous Pipeline: from Inbound to ABM Outbound

Challenge: As Pipeline Demands Increase Year over Year, How Does Marketing Keep Up?

For early stage startups, building demand generation functions often takes a common path. The first marketing employees purchase and deploy CRM and marketing automation systems while they build out inbound programs such as events, webinars, roadshows, paid search, nurture programs and dashboards to track progress and ensure optimization. The early years are typically a success as marketing supports sales with an increasing pipeline by selecting the easiest and highest yielding programs. However, over the next few years, pipeline demands increase at a faster rate than budget or headcount allows, putting pressure on marketing for more pipeline with fewer resources. At some point, these (mostly) inbound programs experience diminishing marginal returns – with lower conversion rates or higher costs. Suddenly the marketing team goes from ‘heroes’ to ‘zeroes’.

I have been on this journey more than a few times. How does the demand generation manager/leader continue to deliver over time with increasingly difficult targets? Generally, I have seen marketing groups enrich pipeline in two major waves. The first wave is to expand marketing programs to include customer advocacy, upsell/cross-sell, new market segments/applications/use-cases, etc. Each of these can be very effective and support more pipeline creation within cost targets. But with the ongoing march to profitability, marketing departments need even more pipeline growth at even lower cost.

The second wave of additional marketing programs involve going back to a time when there was little or no marketing and just a few reps using the phone and personal email to drive opportunities. But what’s different at this point is doing this at scale to support the business with orchestrated and targeted outbound efforts. Marketing can create a continuous account based marketing program acquiring ideal customer profile Accounts and Contacts and placing them into scripted sales plays to drive sales outbound efforts efficiently. Each week select number of accounts per rep that fit the ideal account profile and have target personas added to outbound cadences with optimized content and offers supporting the customer journey. Sales is likely already running email/phone programs anyway – why not make their efforts part of a defined and continuously optimized marketing-driven process to drive net new opportunities.

Because marketing is creating a structured process, the messaging and team activity can be measured and optimized. These programs can test and optimize messaging, CTA, # contacts, types of outreach, etc… This requires marketing to take a leadership role in ongoing ABM review and to communicate these results across both sales and marketing teams. Creating standard processes, funnel definitions, SLA’s and more will enable simple dashboards to provide transparency and insight into ABM program productivity. The team can also evaluate the vendors and tools used in the program – in some cases testing these as well.

Is your sales team still doing individual outreach? Are you leaving outbound programs up to your reps using their own emails or call guides? This does not scale and certainly is difficult to optimize. With a standardized process, then the management team can review and improve performance. Most importantly, as inbound programs that meet target ROI criteria become harder to find, this structured and coordinated outbound program can help fill the gap and support overall revenue targets. This ongoing dialogue between marketing and sales also makes the increasing targets a joint challenge to solve. (OK so we might not all be holding hands and singing kumbaya quite yet…).

Lesson: When looking to cost-effectively increase your pipeline, ensure marketing and sales are collaborating closely on inbound and outbound efforts to optimize content, flows and success.

NOTE – special thanks to Chris Newton for term Continuous Pipeline.

Managing Leads as Contacts: A Marketing CRM Use Case Enhancing Account Based Selling

structured

Challenge: With Sales Increasingly Adopting Account Based Sales, How Do Marketing Systems Support the Effort?

I recently asked a simple question on LinkedIn:

Anyone know of an organization that has eliminated Lead management in Salesforce.com and moved to prospecting solely using Contacts/Accounts? Love to chat with them about their experience.

I was quite surprised to see a resulting 23 comments and over 10K views. Clearly this struck a nerve. Full disclosure: I am currently working with a client to migrate the management of prospects as Contacts rather than Leads.

In most B2B environments, sales reps have long thought about their efforts on an account basis. In fact, this recognition has driven the rise of Account Based Marketing to better support their efforts. Even when selling solutions with smaller ASPs (lets say ~$5-10K annually), reps map out their target account with key target personas. Further they use an array of modern account prospecting tools brought in by Sales Operations to support their outbound activities – tools like Tout, Yesware, Outreach.io, LeadSpace and LinkedIn Sales Navigator, to name just a few. This complexity combined with the marketing team’s involvement in attempting to manage the customer journey at the Account level caused me to rethink CRM structure.

Certainly there is a data sync between CRM and these sales outreach tools, but it is far from perfect in creating a complete view of a given account. As new Leads enter CRM from a variety of sources, how does a rep maintain that complete view of their target prospect or customer? As more tools are added, reps find it increasingly challenging to view Account details – such as people, relationship, and activity – in both CRM and prospecting tools. Just a few short years ago, CRM was the central database as well as the destination for prospecting. That is no longer the case.

Back in the day, marketers used the CRM Lead object for qualification and nurturing until they were ‘sales ready.’ Best practices were for marketers to nurture Leads with content relevant to their sales stage (still a great guiding principle). However, because there is a visibility and reporting gulf between the Lead and Contact objects, this makes rep outbound efforts much more challenging. There are some newer solutions to help both Marketing and Sales ‘see’ an Account view of all Leads and Contacts like Engagio, LeanData and ZenIQ. Mapping or matching Leads to Accounts is nice – IF the reps lived in SFDC – but as noted above, this is becoming less common with new prospecting tools.

With a more complex martech infrastructure and with reps ‘living’ in systems other than the primary CRM, how can Marketing best support these efforts with CRM structure?

I now believe that most sales organizations with heavy outbound prospecting in third party tools would benefit by managing Leads as Contacts. Both marketing and sales teams will enjoy improved Account visibility. Making an effort to map key personas within the account, to convert matched Leads to these Accounts and to update the Account information will prepare marketing to best support sales in their outreach efforts. However, making this move requires a close look at several things, including: lead to account matching, Lead/Contact enrichment, management of Leads that don’t match to Accounts, Account statuses and progression, funnel stages for both Leads and Contacts, MQL processes, Lead/Contact scoring and Lead Development Rep process to submit opportunities — to name a few. As we progress through the customer journey, there will likely be other benefits like improved Contact and Account scoring, better Opportunity management, improved customer lifecycle marketing, etc.

I believe the modern marketing and sales tech stack has matured to a point where managing prospecting efforts in a more structured, account-based way will make sense for many more organizations today, even with lower ASPs. There are certainly many details to consider because this represents a fundamental shift and will require a new set of best practices that will be different for each organization. Additionally, for companies migrating a mature CRM instance, it will take careful thought and deployment.

Lesson: Marketing can better support sales and the account buying journey with an Accounted-based process for managing Leads as Contacts – and this may fit many B2B sales organizations.

Define Your Sales Motion First Before Applying Demand Generation

Challenge: When to Invest in Demand Generation?

Demand generation is a perennially ‘hot topic’ because every organization needs to ensure a consistent flow of prospects ongoing to ensure it can meet its sales objectives. Take the recent focus on Account Based Marketing as refinement of programs, processes, systems and data to orchestrate and optimize demand generation results. Every emerging organization must have a clear customer acquisition strategy – or at least a plan to get to one. These involve go to market channels/programs, MarTech stack, programs and ultimately the expected cost of customer acquisition. Since all early stage companies need to quickly scale sales, isn’t investing early in demand generation the sure fire way to do this?

All too often, companies are pouring money into the demand generation programs and systems without a clear understanding of the customer journey. Demand generation is a set of tools and processes designed to support successful customer acquisition, onboarding through to customer success and advocacy. Without clearly understanding both the buyer persona and their journey, marketing cannot hope to make this process faster and more reliable.

This thought was raised in a recent article posted by a CEO entitled “How I Burned 10 Million Dollars So You Don’t Have To”. In the article, Matt Munson notes:

“We went ALL IN on an inside sales driven model. For good reason. With solid proof. But we nearly broke the company. We certainly caused incredible heartache for dozens of people.

I wish we’d tested earlier. More thoughtfully.

I regret not staying smaller for longer. Living off $3M to find product-market fit, with a real, scalable acquisition channel. And keeping the other $5M in the bank for scaling powder.”

Matt’s quote is spot on. It is so clear that we need to get this right. Every discretionary dollar is precious – and we can’t start data gathering and testing early enough. Moreover, before we spend anything, we need to clearly understand where in the customer journey this program or tool will have impact and how we will measure its effectiveness.

The best early stage companies I have seen most recently focus solely on sales in the early stages before engaging marketing to help scale. Even later, with a defined sales process, these early investments need to be scoped and measured appropriately. Over the past several years, I have been continually surprised with results and had to make significant resource allocation changes. Matt’s advice is true for us all. First identify the buyers and their process from awareness to engagement to purchase and to ongoing success. Set in place expectations for your programs – in cost, conversion rate, timing and more. Doing this on a shoestring marketing and sales budget is the right place to start and forms the basis of ongoing testing and optimization.

Investing in demand generation people, systems and processes too early can easily drive interest and engagement that does not result in revenue. The result is a recipe to burn cash and miss key milestones.

Lesson: Understand your sales motion first and only then scale demand generation with a measurement and test plan in place.