Why so many companies misunderstand account-based marketing
By Robin Zhang, December 2025
It always pains me when I hear statements such as these:
"Our pipeline needs a lift. Can we do ABM?"
"Let's implement ABM so sales can generate more leads."
Somehow, account-based marketing (ABM) has become the answer to every sales problem. At the same time, a growing ecosystem of ABM technology providers has given B2B marketing teams even more reasons to embrace the label.
The problem is that many people have forgotten what ABM was originally designed to do.
To explain why, I have to go back almost twenty years.
When I joined Deloitte, I was hired to help build an ABM function. At the time, Deloitte was the only member of the Big Four that had not separated its audit and consulting businesses. As a result, the firm invested heavily in growing its non-audit portfolio, where opportunities to cross-sell and expand existing client relationships were greatest.
As one of the world's largest professional services firms, Deloitte already had relationships with most large enterprises in some capacity. The challenge wasn't identifying target accounts. We already knew who they were. The challenge was understanding where opportunities existed, strengthening relationships, and expanding into new areas of the business.
Our approach to ABM reflected that reality.
Each member of my team was assigned a portfolio of accounts. Their role wasn't simply to generate leads. Instead, they were responsible for ensuring that account teams extracted the maximum value from every marketing activity, including events and thought leadership programs.
Each account team operated almost like a small company, consisting of a lead client service partner, specialists from multiple disciplines, relationship managers, and an ABM marketer.
My team was deeply involved in account planning, industry research, and monitoring developments within individual clients. We routinely followed earnings calls, leadership changes, mergers and acquisitions, regulatory developments, technology investments, and other strategic signals that might reveal opportunities.
I describe these activities in detail because I want to illustrate how resource-intensive enterprise ABM can be.
Many of the accounts in our portfolio represented annual revenue opportunities of at least $10 million. For smaller accounts, we adopted an affinity-based approach, grouping companies according to industry, geography, size, and other characteristics so that we could scale our efforts more efficiently.
That experience has shaped the way I think about ABM ever since.
Whenever startup founders or corporate executives ask me whether they should "do ABM," I find myself asking a different question:
"What problem are you actually trying to solve?"
The ABM technology landscape has expanded dramatically over the past decade, and many of these tools are undeniably useful. They aggregate buying signals, track online behavior, identify patterns, and help sales and marketing teams prioritize their efforts.
However, these signals are often derived primarily from browsing activity and other digital interactions. They can tell us that interest exists, but they rarely tell us who is involved, how decisions are made, what internal priorities have changed, whether budgets exist, or how urgently a company needs to act.
That distinction matters.
In my view, these platforms can be incredibly valuable for companies with shorter buying cycles, larger prospect pools, and more standardized buying processes. In these environments, the go-to-market motion often begins to resemble B2C performance marketing, albeit with a slightly different technology stack.
Large enterprise clients are entirely different.
The sales cycles of large whale accounts frequently extend beyond a year and often last two years or longer. Buying decisions involve not only business leaders but also procurement teams, information security specialists, legal and compliance teams, and P&L owners, who are often the first point of entry. Internal priorities shift constantly, budgets change, executives come and go, and competing initiatives emerge unexpectedly.
In highly regulated industries, these complexities become even more pronounced.
At the enterprise level, the total addressable market (TAM) is usually well understood. Public information, market intelligence, and years of relationship building already provide a fairly comprehensive picture of the opportunity landscape.
The challenge is not identifying accounts. The challenge is understanding where those companies are in their buying journeys and building the relationships necessary to influence decisions.
No software platform can replace that work.
The mid-market presents an entirely different challenge.
For the purposes of this discussion, I define mid-market accounts less by company size than by the complexity and duration of the buying cycle. In many cases, sales cycles range from several months to roughly a year.
These companies don't justify the cost of fully dedicated account teams, but they are still complex enough to benefit from many of the principles behind ABM.
For startups, the mid-market often plays an especially important role. These clients may not ultimately represent the largest revenue opportunity or the highest-margin business, but they help establish credibility, create reference accounts, build the logo wall, and generate the momentum necessary to move upmarket over time.
I believe the principles behind ABM can be extremely valuable, especially for startups with limited resources. Affinity-based models can reveal clusters of companies that share common characteristics, allowing teams to concentrate their efforts more effectively.
In my experience, these clusters can support top-of-funnel acquisition, pipeline acceleration, and cross-sell and upsell opportunities within existing accounts.
Some of those clusters may be geographic. If a meaningful concentration of prospects exists within a particular market, an executive event might be the most effective strategy. In other cases, targeted thought leadership campaigns in the form of virtual events or white papers can be more effective.
The goal is not merely to identify prospects. The goal is to create circumstances that reveal genuine buying intent and strengthen relationships over time.
Final thoughts
Ultimately, my concern isn't with ABM itself.
My concern is that ABM has become more of a trendy buzzword than a disciplined go-to-market strategy.
After all, demand generation is not the same as lead generation.
In enterprise environments, marketing is often less about generating leads and more about shaping market perception, nurturing relationships, accelerating existing opportunities, and building long-term trust.
These principles have guided me throughout the rest of my career. At Thought Machine, we sold core banking platforms to everyone from tier-one global banks to technology-forward regional banks. Later, at MoneyLion, I worked with both large financial institutions and smaller fintech companies.
Although the industries, products, and clients were very different, the lesson remained the same: not every customer segment deserves the same level of investment, and not every company should approach ABM in the same way.
Marketing isn't sales, but sales and marketing must work closely together to be effective. Technology can strengthen that relationship, but it cannot replace it.
That's what ABM was always intended to accomplish.
Let’s talk.
Whether you're launching a new product, refining your go-to-market strategy, or preparing for your next stage of growth, I’d love to hear about it.