Nobody Buys Because You Turned Up Once

Account-based marketing was named in the early 2000s by ITSMA, a trade body for technology services marketers, which is about as unglamorous an origin as a marketing idea can have. It has been rebranded roughly every 5 years since, usually by a company with a platform to sell. Account-based everything. Account-based experience. ABX, if you have been to a conference recently.

The acronyms keep moving. The practice has barely changed since the first version, and that is worth saying plainly before anyone spends money on the latest label. What got rebranded was the software category. The discipline underneath is the same one it always was.

Stripped of the vendor language, that discipline is a single decision. Rather than marketing to a market and hoping the right organisations happen to be in it, you choose a small number of named organisations and treat each one as a market in its own right.

Written down it sounds obvious. In practice it is wildly unpopular, because it requires you to decide out loud that most of the businesses you could theoretically sell to are not worth your attention this year. Very few people enjoy making that decision and almost nobody enjoys defending it in a meeting.

Large technology companies do it anyway because of the arithmetic. Gartner puts the typical buying group for a complex B2B purchase at 6 to 10 people. Not 6 to 10 job titles, 6 to 10 individuals with different priorities, different anxieties and different reasons to say no. Sell security software and you are dealing with a CISO who is thinking about risk, a technical lead who wants to know whether it will actually work alongside everything else they already run, a procurement lead reading the contract and a finance director who cares about none of it except the number at the bottom. Reaching one of those people, once, with one message, in one channel does close to nothing to a decision the four of them will take together over 18 months.

Which means organising your marketing as a series of single acts was never a resourcing problem. It was the wrong shape from the start.

The thing that surprised me most when I first worked on this properly was not the budget behind it. It was the specificity. I sat in a session where a colleague could tell me, without notes, where a target security director had worked before, which vendor they had chosen in that previous role, what they had said on a panel 4 months earlier and who on their team had recently joined from a competitor.

If I am honest I loved those conversations. The depth in them was extraordinary and most of it came from the sales side of the room, which is not something marketers say often enough. Nobody there was marketing to a persona called Security Decision Maker. They were marketing to a named human being with a documented history of opinions.

In most smaller organisations a persona is a paragraph of demographics and a stock photograph. In an account programme it reads more like a briefing note. That difference is not diligence for its own sake. You simply cannot write something a specific person finds genuinely relevant when your understanding of them stops at their job title.

Before that sounds like a resource you do not have, it is worth holding onto where that knowledge actually came from, because if you are smaller it almost certainly already exists inside your business. It is in the founder's head, or in the notes of whoever takes the sales calls, or in the memory of the one person who has been to every conference for 6 years. It has simply never been written down anywhere the rest of the marketing can reach it. Enterprise teams pay a great deal of money to assemble something you may be able to get by asking your own colleagues better questions.

But the part that took me longest to learn, and the part almost nobody writes about, is sequence.

Most published material on account-based marketing is about targeting and personalisation, and both are thoroughly covered. Very little of it is about the order things happen in, which is the mechanism that makes the whole thing work.

I learned that the wrong way round. Earlier in my career I inherited a programme with a number of activities running in parallel and did what looked like good management. I examined each activity on its own performance, found that the early-stage ones were producing very little in the way of direct, attributable response and cut two of them to fund something further down the funnel that was converting nicely. Sensible, defensible, the sort of decision that gets approving nods in a review.

I should be fair to my past self here, because I was not being reckless. I was being decisive, or at least that is what it felt like at the time, and there is a particular pressure on someone new in a role to be seen making calls rather than leaving things as they found them. Cutting something is visible. Leaving something alone because you do not yet understand why it exists looks like inaction, even when it is the wiser move.

About 6 months later the thing that had been converting nicely stopped converting. It had not got worse. It had simply run out of people who had already encountered us three times before they arrived at it. I had been reading the last touch as the cause when it was only ever the finish line. What I had done was demolish the run-up and then wonder why nobody could clear the bar.

That is the whole argument of this piece and it is why sequence matters more than any individual asset. In a properly built programme the touches are deliberately connected. Something public appears that speaks to a problem the account is known to have. Someone they trust encounters it and mentions it or shares it. A direct approach follows that refers to the first thing rather than starting from nothing. A conversation at an event assumes that earlier context. By the time anyone asks for a meeting, the request is not an interruption, it is the obvious next thing to happen.

None of that is luck. Momentum in B2B is a design decision and it compounds, which also means it can be dismantled by anyone assessing its parts in isolation.

Here is the test that separates a programme from a schedule. If touch 3 could have been sent without touches 1 and 2 having happened, you do not have a sequence. You have a campaign with dates on it.

That test is unforgiving and it is worth running over whatever you are doing at the moment, because most marketing fails it on contact. A newsletter, a LinkedIn post, a cold email and a webinar invitation going to broadly the same list in the same month are not a sequence. They are 4 unrelated interruptions that happen to share a sender. That is what random acts of marketing actually means, and it is what account-based thinking exists to prevent.

Now the honest part, because pretending the enterprise version scales down is where most advice on this falls over. There are few things more irritating than a confident article about a discipline that quietly assumes you have three functions you do not have, so let me be specific about what you will not be copying.

Large account programmes run on machinery a smaller organisation does not have. A team of sales development reps working the accounts by phone. Intent data subscriptions costing tens of thousands a year to flag which companies are already researching the problem. A sales team big enough to coordinate with, and a formal working agreement between sales and marketing, without which the whole thing quietly collapses. Content produced in volume, sometimes bespoke to one account. An 18 month horizon and a board patient enough to fund it.

If you have 20 people and £40,000 a year for marketing you have none of that, and anyone telling you to build a miniature version of it is wasting your time.

It is also worth being straight about who this does not suit. Account-based thinking earns its effort when a single customer is worth a lot and the decision involves several people. If you sell a £40 a month product to sole traders, this is the wrong model and volume marketing is genuinely the right answer for you. Somewhere above roughly £10,000 of annual customer value, with more than 2 people involved in the decision, the maths starts to favour going narrow. Below that it does not, and no amount of discipline will change it.

What does transfer, if you are the right side of that line, is the thinking. The thinking is most of the value.