A hundred leads mean very little if the salespeople are chasing companies that can never buy. For B2B companies with complex sales, the real question is not how to get more names into the CRM, but how to create relevance with the accounts that can truly change your pipeline. Creating account-based marketing is about getting marketing, sales and customer data to work towards the same business opportunities, with clear ownership all the way to revenue.

Account-based marketing, often called ABM, is not a new campaign discipline. Done right, it is a go-to-market way of working. You select priority companies, understand their buying situation and coordinate efforts around the right people, problems and next steps. It sounds obvious. Yet ABM is often treated as an ad audience with a higher CPM.

That is where many initiatives lose impact. A strong ABM programme does not start in the ad platform. It starts with commercial priorities, a usable CRM structure and a shared plan between sales and marketing.

Create account-based marketing from the deal

ABM does not suit every situation equally well. If you sell a simple product with a short decision process and low deal volume, broad demand generation can be more efficient. But when a deal requires several decision makers, tailored advice, integrations or a long procurement, the account is the natural unit to steer by.

Start by defining which accounts are actually strategic. It is not enough to ask the salespeople to write down their dream customers. The prioritisation must be based on data and business logic: your ideal customer profile, geographic potential, technical environment, growth signals, existing relationships and likely deal size.

A good first target group is rarely a list of 2,000 companies. For a focused pilot programme, 20 to 50 accounts can be perfectly sufficient. That lets the team learn what works without spreading resources thin over a far too large market. When the model works, you can scale segment by segment.

Also be brutally honest about what is missing. If the companies lack the right industry profile, purchasing power or need, they should not be included just because they are well-known brands. An account that looks good in a sales presentation but lacks a real match drains both marketing budget and sales hours.

Make the ICP operational, not decorative

Many B2B companies have an ICP that describes industry, size and revenue. That is a start, but not a steering tool. An operational ICP for ABM also needs to say why an account is likely to buy, what usually triggers a change and which characteristics increase or decrease the chance of winning.

For a company that sells CRM or RevOps services, for example, rapid international expansion, a fragmented system landscape or a growing sales team can be stronger signals than company size itself. For a SaaS company, a specific tech stack or a regulatory requirement can be decisive. It depends on your market, but the principle is the same: prioritise by buying probability, not just potential on paper.

Then translate the ICP into fields and processes in the CRM. If the criteria only live in a spreadsheet or in the head of a senior salesperson, they cannot be followed up, automated or improved.

Build a plan for the buying journey, not for one contact

Complex B2B purchases are rarely decided by one person. The finance director assesses risk and investment. An operations manager wants to understand the change in ways of working. IT reviews security and integrations. The future user wants to know whether the solution makes things easier or creates more administration.

That is why it is not enough to find a contact with the right job title. For each priority account, you need to map a reasonable buying committee and understand each person's role in the decision. You do not need to know everyone from day one, but you should know which functions need to be engaged for a deal to move forward.

The message should then be adapted to both account and role. Adaptation does not mean producing a separate ebook for every company. It means having a clear value proposition for a relevant segment and adding specific context when the account requires it. A landing page, a customer case, an analysis or a sales email becomes stronger when it shows that you understand the customer's business situation.

The important thing is that marketing and sales work from the same hypothesis. If marketing communicates efficiency while sales opens with global expansion, the buyer gets two different stories. That creates friction just when you are trying to build trust.

Decide the next step before you activate channels

ABM often fails because the activity lacks a defined commercial outcome. The team runs ads, sends emails and arranges webinars, but cannot answer what should happen when an account shows interest.

So decide which signals should lead to which action. When several relevant people from an account engage with content about a specific problem, it may be time for a personal sales outreach. When an existing contact returns to pricing or integration material, the account owner can get a task with clear context. When an account still has no known contact, the next step may be research, not an automatic meeting proposal.

This is where CRM and marketing automation do real good. Not by replacing judgement, but by making signals visible, creating consistent follow-up and reducing manual waste. Automate handovers, data enrichment and tasks. Do not automate a generic buying experience that pretends to be personal.

Gather data around the account

A lead-centric CRM is a common brake. If every form fill, email open and sales call is handled as an isolated contact activity, it becomes hard to understand what is happening at account level. Sales cannot see the marketing engagement. Marketing cannot see which relationships are being built. Leadership sees a pipeline without a clear link to the efforts that influenced it.

Instead, structure data so that account, contacts, opportunities, activities and intent can be analysed together. Define account statuses that both sales and marketing understand, for example prioritised, engaged, qualified, active opportunity and customer. The names matter less than that they have clear criteria and owners.

Lead scoring can be useful, but a lone contact score often leads astray in ABM. A better approach is to weigh account-level engagement together with the quality of the buying signals. Two decision makers reading relevant material can be more valuable than ten opens from a junior user. A visit to a general blog post is not as strong as recurring interest in implementation, security or pricing.

Data quality is not an administrative sideline. Missing company associations, duplicates and incorrect ownership mean priority signals land with the wrong person or disappear completely. That costs more than most campaigns.

Measure movement in the pipeline, not just reach

ABM should be judged by business impact. Reach, clicks and new contacts can help you optimise content and channels, but they are not the end goal. Instead, follow whether the right accounts are engaged, whether more relevant roles become known and whether opportunities move forward in the sales process.

Look especially at coverage within the buying committee, engagement from priority accounts, meetings with the right accounts, pipeline created, pipeline velocity, win rate and average deal value. Preferably compare ABM accounts with a similar control group. That makes it easier to separate actual effect from general market development.

Attribution requires judgement. A large B2B deal can be influenced by content, ads, sales work, partner conversations and product demonstrations over many months. Giving all the credit to the last click is misleading. But that is not a reason to forgo measurement. Document how accounts move from prioritised to engaged, on to opportunity and deal. Look for bottlenecks and adjust where the process stalls.

What we do differently

A consulting team should not sell ABM as a campaign package and then hand a contact list to a more junior production team. That is not the problem that needs solving. The problem is usually the lack of shared steering between commercial strategy, CRM, data, automation and sales behaviour.

Purasu therefore goes in where the revenue engine actually leaks. Sometimes the problem is an unclear ICP. Sometimes the correct account structure is missing in HubSpot or the CRM. In other cases both data and technology exist, but there is no agreement on when sales should act and what they should say. The effort should follow the bottleneck, not a ready-made agency package.

It also means we do not recommend AI to increase the volume of generic outreach. AI can help the team compile account research, identify patterns in CRM data and prepare relevant next steps. But if positioning, data foundation and sales process are unclear, AI only makes a weak process faster.

Start smaller than you think, but with higher demands on quality. Choose the right accounts, create a shared working model and build follow-up in the CRM from the start. When marketing and sales see the same signals and take responsibility for the same pipeline, account-based marketing does not become yet another initiative on the side. It becomes a more disciplined way of winning the deals that actually matter.