In Cold Blood
If this were your traditional murder mystery, the famous detective would have gathered everyone in the drawing room for the big reveal. But since this is B2B marketing, we’ve gathered all our suspects into the big conference room at Conan Doyle Industries. It’s late. A carafe of water sits on the table next to a plate of untouched donuts. Everyone is too nervous to eat, fidgeting anxiously in their rolling chairs.
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We begin our slideshow. “Over the course of the last many weeks, we interviewed everyone close to ABM, from Vega List to Mark Ketting,” we say with a long, patient pause, looking around. “... hoping to discover the real truth of what happened that fateful night.”
An ambulance peals and thunder cracks.
We continue. “Everyone here had means. Everyone had motive. Everyone had opportunity. But everyone also had an alibi. How could this be?”
Sal Parson crosses her arms. Ted Nology’s logoed stress ball makes a soft squishing noise as he nervously kneads it.
“I was stumped, for a long, long time, until Mark told me something,” we nod to Mark Ketting, leaning against the wall corner of the room. “‘It could have been anyone,’ he said.”
We flip to the final slide.
“The truth is, it wasn’t anyone. It was everyone. We all did it. We’re all guilty…even me.” Everyone stares ahead in shocked silence. Vega List emits a squeak.
“I know, I know—it’s a lot to take in. Let me explain.”
Denouement: We’re all guilty
No single one of our suspects could have killed ABM on their own. But put their actions together, and it was death by a thousand cuts. It wasn’t intentional. But everyone’s guilty.
The truth is, we made the B2B buying journey too hard. Instead of having the basic dignity to empathize with our customers—really understanding what they needed and how they wanted to be helped—we got caught up in our petty, daily concerns. What would make our jobs easier, make us look good to our higher-ups, allow us to hit our numbers (whether or not those metrics had anything to do with the actual success of the business)?
ABM was exciting, yes, but when we realized how much effort it would actually take to accomplish, we were all guilty of letting things slide. We may have each gotten our parts right once or twice, we shout, scattering the crumpled journey maps and printouts.
Like Vega List, we’ve created target account lists with too-broad parameters.
Like Brian Journey, we failed to meaningfully map our buyer’s journey.
Like Strata Ji, we slapped the veneer of ABM on our programs while still running the demand waterfall.
Like Sal Parson, we resisted changing our sales processes (or failed to meaningfully empathize and collaborate with sales so they’d be willing to change).
Like Trent Zishion, we believed the comforting lie that ABM would be easy and didn’t invest in meaningful change management when it proved otherwise.
Like Ted Nology, we bought the idea that software equals ABM, hoarded too many tools, and let them languish in disuse.
Like Mark Ketting, we overpromised on what ABM could do and didn’t own up to our mistakes when it failed to deliver.
“So…what happens to us now?” Strata Ji ventures. The room is practically humming with nervous energy.
Before we can answer, the door slams open and a voice from the corridor replies, “It’s a compelling story you’ve spun for yourself, detective. Pity it isn’t entirely true.”
A woman appears. She’s wearing casual, loose-fitting cotton trousers and looking bronzed from the sun. She’s cool, relaxed, and purposeful. If we didn’t know better we’d think it was—
“ABM!” Vega List cries, leaping, her chair falling away.
We are all stunned. It’s her. She looks rested, healthy, glowing in fact—a far cry from the downcast and skeletal self who Mark Ketting saw fading away, Zoom camera off.
Everyone stares in shock. “ABM,” we stammer. “How could it—how are you—you’re alive!” We manage to choke out.
“Took you long enough to realize,” she says, brushing a dark curl behind her ear as she enters.
ABM…alive?!
We can hardly believe our eyes. “Explain.”
“May I?” she gestures to an empty seat at the conference table, next to Brian Journey. She sits.
“You’re probably wondering where I’ve been,” she starts, as everyone looks on, wide-eyed. “The truth is, I was tired. No matter how hard I worked, nothing I did seemed to stick. I was burnt out and fantasized about leaving it all behind—so I did.”
“How?” we asked.
“It wasn't as hard as I thought,” she shrugged. “When everyone else was busy blaming each other for why my strategies weren’t working, I just—slipped away. I never intended to make my death look like a murder. But when it played out that way, I was glad. I was still checking Slack. I hoped you’d all think it was a tragic accident and move on.”
“Where did you go?”
“The Bahamas. I spent a few months on the beach and just recovered from the toll of the past few years in marketing. But I got bored—and curious. So I secretly logged on and checked our systems. What I discovered astonished me.” She pulls up a dashboard on her phone and expands it.
“All the programs I’d worked so hard to create—they’re still running. There are more than 20 companies enrolled in 1:1 ABM at Conan Doyle Industries. When did that happen, Vega?”
Vega List blushes.
ABM continues excitedly, “And look, the program is global now, these companies are based all over. And Sal, your sales team is absolutely crushing it, we’re landing seven-figure deals! Did you really expect anyone to believe those were all outbound?”
Sal’s stern expression melts into a smile and she covers her mouth.
“In that moment, I knew you hadn’t forgotten me,” ABM continues, breathlessly. “I knew you cared. And I knew I had to come back—and this time, I have ideas to make it the best damn program the world will ever see.”
She turns to her colleagues and smiles. “So, who’s with me?”
Everyone cheers and applauds. Despite ourselves, we tear up a little. It turns out this hard-boiled detective is a sucker for a happy ending.
ABM’s second act
The truth is, ABM never went away—it went underground.
The company we’ve been following throughout our tale, “Conan Doyle Industries,” is a real company that Inverta has worked with, just with a mystery-themed pseudonym (we hope Sherlock Holmes fans don’t mind). Every event in the timeline that we’ve shared is true—just personified as our “suspect” characters to give it a little more literary flair.
Because the truth is, ABM works. It always has. But as a strategy, you need to adapt it to the practical realities you might be facing. It’s rarely as simple or clear as the hundreds of ABM guides have been telling us. That’s why we wanted to tell a true story, of how this really happens in a company with its own entrenched processes and inertia. The road to great ABM never did run smooth—but those who succeed are the ones who persevere and are creative about circumventing the obstacles.
A lot has changed since ABM first came onto the scene in the mid-2010s. But the principles underlying good ABM are still the time-tested strategies that have served marketers since the broadcast era: knowing your audience and sharing the right message with them at the right time. None of that needs to change.
However, we can tweak the practice of ABM to make it more realistic—and ultimately successful. Because the best ABM program is the one you’ll actually stick to.
Here are the five main changes we think ABM needs to thrive today:
- Know your customer: The buyer’s needs are always the first casualty. They repeatedly lose out to us inward-focused marketers targeting them (which evokes, chillingly, targets and scopes!) based on the tech they already have. With the plans they already made. With the budgets they already set. Skilled ABM marketers know that the whole point of account-based is to step back, talk to customers, dig for substantive insights and epiphanies, and build this apparatus to meet buyers where they are.
- Adjust your expectations: ABM is not easy. It’s hard, iterative, and takes time. Great ABM doesn’t happen overnight and you need to be patient with the process. It also takes time to change and to convince other teams (like sales) that adopting ABM is worth it. Practice patience, set realistic expectations with your team, and don’t assume that you’ll start to see ABM results this month or even this quarter. Give it a fair test before you write it off.
- Develop the right expertise: Marketers need to learn the lost art of segmentation and research and put the majority of their effort into understanding their target list and how they are engaging them. This isn’t just a box-ticking exercise, it’s the main work involved in successful ABM. On the other side of those screens and mailboxes are actual breathing people who you are in relationship with. All of your technology and strategy should be in service to them.
- Be willing to evolve: In 2015, the height of cutting-edge marketing was multi-touch attribution. Today, we’ve moved far beyond that. New strategies and tools—from partnerships to intent to generative AI—are developing all the time. While those weren’t a part of traditional ABM in its heyday, modern ABM involves synthesizing these newer, more effective approaches into your strategy.
- Keep it simple: If it doesn’t make sense to you on paper, do not launch it. The best ABM is simple and obvious. Right account, right cycle, right stage, right message. If you cannot whiteboard the process and it make a lot of sense to strangers, keep simplifying. If you cannot believably explain why buyers would love to read your content, keep researching.
Over the next few months, we’ll be unveiling new content and templates around ABM’s second act. We’ll be tackling topics you don’t want to miss like operating as one revenue team, nearbound ABM, and AI for ABM—all written in the context that it often hasn’t worked. But that it can. And it did for Conan Doyle Industries and dozens of other real-life clients. We aim to show you how, step-by-step, template-to-template, meeting-to-meeting.
When that’s live, we’ll place it here. Or if you haven’t been getting the emails, sign up. We’ll notify you when it launches.
And if ABM has mysteriously disappeared at your organization, and you need some help bringing it back—well, you know who to call.