# Account-Based Marketing (ABM) — Standard Operating Procedure > Source: https://b2bprocess.com/account-based-marketing > Last updated: 2026-07-11. Adapt owners, tools, and thresholds to your organization. ## 1. Purpose Account-based marketing is a go-to-market motion in which marketing and sales jointly select a defined, named list of accounts — rather than a broad audience — and run coordinated, personalized programs (content, ads, outbound, events) against that list to generate pipeline and expand existing relationships. The unit of measurement shifts from the individual lead to the account: success is a target account engaging and progressing, not a raw count of form fills. ## 2. Scope & prerequisites Fits best where average deal size or account lifetime value is large enough to justify the higher cost per account of personalized programs — typically enterprise or upper-mid-market motions with fewer than a few hundred realistic target accounts. Prerequisites: a jointly built target account list with sales sign-off, enough account-level firmographic and intent data to personalize meaningfully, and sales capacity committed to work engaged accounts — ABM without sales follow-through produces expensive marketing with no pipeline to show for it. ## 3. Roles & responsibilities | Role | Responsibility | | --- | --- | | ABM Marketer / Program Owner | Owns account research, program design, and cross-channel campaign coordination per tier. | | Account Executive | Co-builds the target list, executes coordinated sales touches, and works engaged accounts. | | Sales leadership | Signs off the account list, commits rep capacity, and holds the program accountable to pipeline results. | | Marketing Operations | Builds account-level scoring, routing, and reporting infrastructure. | | Content / Creative | Produces tiered content, from bespoke one-to-one assets to scaled personalized templates. | | Revenue Operations | Maintains the ICP definition and account data that the tiering and targeting depend on. | ## 4. Procedure ### Step 1: Define the ideal customer profile and account tiers **Owner:** Revenue Operations + Marketing + Sales leadership Before selecting accounts, agree the ICP the program targets and tier accounts by strategic value — typically a small one-to-one or one-to-few tier of named accounts, a larger one-to-many tier addressed with lighter personalization at scale. Tiering determines how much production investment each account justifies. - [ ] Confirm ICP definition with sales and customer success - [ ] Segment candidate accounts into tiers by deal size, strategic fit, and win probability - [ ] Cap the one-to-one tier to a number sales can realistically multithread ### Step 2: Build and sign off the target account list **Owner:** Marketing + Sales leadership Compile the named account list per tier from ICP fit, intent signals, existing pipeline, and sales nominations, and get explicit sales sign-off account by account. A list marketing builds alone without sales buy-in gets ignored the moment it reaches a rep's desk. - [ ] Score candidate accounts on fit and intent - [ ] Circulate the draft list to account owners for veto/addition - [ ] Freeze the list for the program period and set a change-review cadence ### Step 3: Research each account and map the buying committee **Owner:** ABM Marketer + Account Executive For one-to-one and one-to-few tier accounts, research the account's business priorities, org structure, and likely buying committee roles before building any content — personalization that isn't grounded in real account context reads as a mail-merge with a logo swapped in. ### Step 4: Build tiered, personalized programs **Owner:** ABM Marketer + Content/Creative Produce content and campaigns matched to the tier: bespoke microsites, executive briefings, and tailored proof points for one-to-one accounts; templated-but-personalized content (industry or persona variants) for one-to-few; scaled personalization (dynamic ads, account-aware landing pages) for one-to-many. - [ ] Draft account-specific value narratives tying the product to the account's stated priorities - [ ] Coordinate paid media (display, LinkedIn, programmatic) targeted at named accounts and buying-committee roles - [ ] Plan a signature engagement moment per one-to-one account — an event, executive briefing, or custom asset ### Step 5: Coordinate multichannel execution with sales **Owner:** ABM Marketer + Account Executive Sequence marketing touches (ads, direct mail, email, events) and sales touches (outbound, LinkedIn, calls) against the same account and timeline so the account experiences a coherent effort rather than disconnected marketing and sales motions. Give sales visibility into which touches are landing and when. ### Step 6: Track account engagement, not just leads **Owner:** Marketing Operations Build account-level engagement scoring that rolls up individual contact activity to the account (multiple stakeholders engaging matters more than one person opening many emails), and surface it to sales as an account is warming up, not just when a single contact hits an individual lead-score threshold. ### Step 7: Hand engaged accounts to sales with context **Owner:** Account Executive + ABM Marketer When an account crosses an engagement threshold, brief the account owner on which stakeholders engaged, with what content, and what that suggests about priorities — a warm account with no context handed to sales wastes the personalization work already done. ### Step 8: Report account-level pipeline and revenue impact **Owner:** Marketing Operations + RevOps Measure the program by target-account pipeline coverage, win rate, and deal size versus non-ABM accounts — not by leads or MQLs, which are the wrong unit for this motion. Report to sales and marketing leadership jointly on a shared dashboard. ### Step 9: Review and refresh the account list quarterly **Owner:** Marketing + Sales leadership Retire accounts that have closed, disqualified, or shown no traction after a defined window, and add new nominations, keeping the list live and sales-endorsed rather than a static artifact from the program's launch. ## 5. Metrics to monitor | Metric | Definition | Formula | Target | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Target account engagement rate | Share of named target accounts showing meaningful engagement (multiple stakeholders, high-intent actions) in a period. | Engaged target accounts ÷ total target accounts | typical target: 30–50% | | Target account pipeline coverage | Pipeline generated from the target account list relative to the revenue goal it's meant to support. | Pipeline value from target accounts ÷ revenue target for those accounts | typical target: 3–4x coverage | | ABM win rate vs. non-ABM | Win rate on opportunities sourced or influenced by the ABM program compared to the rest of the pipeline. | ABM opportunity win rate − baseline win rate | typical target: meaningfully positive, program-dependent | | Average deal size, ABM vs. baseline | Whether ABM-influenced deals are larger, reflecting the higher investment per account. | Average ABM deal size ÷ average non-ABM deal size | typical target: above 1.0x | | Multithreading rate | Share of target accounts with more than one engaged contact from the buying committee. | Accounts with 2+ engaged contacts ÷ total engaged accounts | typical target: above 50% | | Sales-marketing account alignment | Share of the target account list actively worked by an assigned account owner. | Target accounts with active sales engagement ÷ total target accounts | typical target: above 80% | ## 6. Known failure modes | Failure | Symptom | Corrective action | | --- | --- | --- | | Marketing builds the list alone | Sales ignores the accounts marketing is investing in; reps work their own list instead. | Require sales sign-off account by account before the program launches, and let reps nominate additions. | | Personalization in name only | Content is a template with the company logo swapped in; prospects notice and disengage. | Ground one-to-one and one-to-few content in real account research — priorities, org context, specific pain — not just firmographic mail-merge fields. | | Measuring leads instead of accounts | Program looks like it's underperforming demand gen on a lead-volume basis, and gets deprioritized. | Report account engagement, pipeline coverage, and win rate — the metrics the motion is actually designed to move. | | No sales follow-through on engaged accounts | Accounts show strong engagement signals but no rep ever follows up; the program generates warmth with no conversion. | Build an explicit handoff trigger and SLA for engaged accounts, with account context attached. | | Target list too large for the tier | One-to-one-level production commitments made against hundreds of accounts; nothing gets finished well. | Cap each tier to a volume the available production and sales capacity can actually sustain; move overflow to a lighter tier. | | Static list, never refreshed | Program keeps running ads and content against accounts that closed, churned, or went cold months ago. | Quarterly list review with explicit retire/add decisions tied to pipeline and account status. | --- This SOP is maintained as part of the B2B process encyclopedia at https://b2bprocess.com. 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