Everyone says they do ABM. Most of them just bought a tool and kept doing demand gen.

Account-based marketing is the most over-claimed motion in go-to-market. Everyone says they do it. Most of them bought a platform, uploaded a list of two thousand companies, and kept doing exactly the demand gen they were doing before - now with a target-account filter on the dashboard.

That is not ABM. That is a segment with better branding.

ABM is a list you are willing to defend

Real account-based marketing starts with a decision most teams avoid: naming the specific accounts you have decided to win. Not a firmographic filter that returns two thousand rows. A short list - the accounts you would be genuinely annoyed to lose to a competitor - that a human chose on purpose and can explain.

If the list is two thousand accounts, it is not an ABM list. It is your total addressable market with a new label. The discipline is in the smallness. A list you can defend is a list short enough that you know why each name is on it.

Tier it honestly

Not every target account deserves the same effort, and pretending they do is how ABM programmes quietly go broke.

Tier them. A handful worth a genuinely bespoke, one-to-one effort - custom research, a tailored point of view, sales and marketing building a plan per account. A larger set worth one-to-few - grouped by a shared problem, worked with light personalisation. And the rest, one-to-many - your normal marketing, aimed at the right firmographic, with no pretence of bespoke. The mistake is running everything at tier-one intensity until the budget runs out in March, or running everything at tier-three and calling the ads "ABM."

Sales and marketing on the same accounts, or it is theatre

Here is the part that makes ABM different from every other marketing motion, and the part most teams skip because it is organisationally hard.

ABM only works if sales and marketing are working the same named accounts, at the same time, toward the same plan. Marketing warms the account and the buying group; sales works the relationships; each can see what the other did. When marketing is chasing leads and sales is quietly working a separate list they trust more, you do not have ABM. You have two teams doing their own thing in the same building. This is a shared-definition problem before it is a tooling problem - if the two sides do not agree on what a target account even is, no platform will fix it.

Intent is a signal, not a religion

Intent data - the promise that you can see which accounts are "in-market" - is genuinely useful and wildly over-trusted. A spike in intent is a reason to pay attention to an account you already care about. It is not a reason to add an account to the list, and it is not proof anyone is actually buying.

Use it to prioritise the accounts you already chose, to time a play, to decide who gets the call this week. Do not let a vendor's intent score do your account selection for you. The list is a decision. Intent just tells you when to lean in.

Measure account movement, not lead volume

The reason most ABM programmes cannot prove their worth is that they measure themselves with the old ruler: how many leads did we generate. Wrong question. In ABM the unit is the account, not the lead.

Measure whether the target accounts are moving - more of the buying group engaged, meetings booked with the right roles, accounts progressing from unaware to in-conversation to in-pipeline. That means the account has to be the thing you track, with the buying group and the stage attached, which means it lives in a CRM built around who you are actually selling to. We did exactly this kind of one-by-one account classification on a real database - fifty-five per cent of it could not be qualified at all, which is a finding you can only act on once accounts, not leads, are the thing you count.

Buy the platform if you want one. It will not choose your accounts, align your two teams, or tell you an account moved. Those are decisions and disciplines. No tool has ever sold a company either.