Somewhere right now, an ABM marketer is…
- second-guessing which accounts belong on the list
- spending ad budget and hoping it reaches the right person
- Trying to figure out why an account suddenly hit the decision stage
- watching a signal go cold before anyone acts on it
- getting grilled about a campaign’s impact on pipeline
Woof. If that’s you, you’re not alone.
We surveyed 239 ABM marketers about the gaps between what they were sold they could do with ABM and what they can actually do. In our latest webinar, Jess and Josh walked through the most interesting findings. Consider it an on-demand therapy session — a room full of marketers discussing why ABM is still so dang hard to get right.
Here’s what they covered.
The promise vs. the reality
ABM sounds simple. Find the right accounts and everything else falls in line. You can reach the right people, act at the right time, and prove it worked.
In practice, every one of those steps is breaking down. And if your CEO is blaming the marketers, the data points somewhere else: tooling built for a different era, and processes that leave marketers without answers.
Picking the target accounts
Everything in ABM starts with the account list, and our findings show that’s where the trouble starts. One in six marketers said knowing which accounts to prioritize is their biggest ABM bottleneck. “Checks notes… that’s the first step,” as Jess put it. Cool cool cool.
If nobody can agree on which accounts you’re running ABM for, it’s no surprise the rest of the motion turns into what Josh called “an absolute dumpster fire.”
Reaching the right people
Once you know which accounts to go after, the next step is getting in front of the people inside them who will make the decision. For most teams, ads help them accomplish this, but very few marketers trust that their ads are landing with actual buyers.
The numbers back that up. Over 91% of the marketers we surveyed aren’t very confident their ads reach the right people inside an account. That’s a lot of budget potentially being wasted on people who have no skin in the game.
As one marketer put it: “We have no idea who inside that account is actually seeing your ads. You’re just hoping the right person is in the audience.”
Part of the problem is a technical limitation that still exists in a lot of ABM tools. Legacy ABM tools matched IP addresses to companies, which worked well enough when everyone sat in an office. Now plenty of buyers work from home, often on a network they share with someone working for a completely different company, so an IP lookup can credit their site visit to the wrong employer.
Newer identifiers solve this. Personal emails, mobile ad IDs, and hashed emails let you put an ad in front of a specific person instead of just anyone at the company.
The capability that nearly doubled confidence
The data pointed to one fix in particular. When teams could see who was visiting their site, confidence that their ads were reaching the right people nearly doubled. Almost 90% of marketers who treated website de-anonymization as central to their scoring were somewhat or very confident their ads were reaching the right person.
Josh had a hot take here. Most people think about site visitor data as a signal to pass over to their SDR or BDR team. That’s a really good use case, but there are other use cases marketers should be tapping into, like using it to:
- Prove your ads are driving the right people to the website. Someone clicked an ad, came to your site, and they’re the ICP you meant to target.
- Know who’s engaging with your top-of-funnel content but not converting. These are the people reading your content who haven’t raised a hand yet.
Knowing why an account moved
As accounts start engaging, most ABM platforms assign them a score or a buying stage. That’s supposed to tell you which accounts are moving and when to bring in sales. But in a lot of legacy platforms, the logic behind those scores is a black box.
Our findings show how widespread that problem is. Of the marketers we surveyed, 81.6% can’t consistently explain why an account’s stage or score changed.
This is where trust with sales breaks down. Without the why, it’s like getting your answers from a Magic 8 Ball, and then handing that to sales to act on. It’s no wonder they ignore it.
One survey respondent had this to say: “The product itself is unexplainable when it comes to scoring. A black box.”
What works is bringing in the next layer of context: who’s moving, the signal that showed it, and the message that fits. Across his time at Drift and now building Vector, Josh has seen sellers become far more successful working ABM when marketing hands them all three.
More signals, more trust
That kind of context is only as good as the signals behind it. The more of them you can see, the easier it gets to explain why an account moved, and to get sales to believe it. Our survey findings support that: 60% of teams tracking 10 or more buyer signals trusted their scoring enough to act on it. For teams tracking one to three signals, that number was 17.5%.
Some of the gap comes from teams relying on the same small set of signals that legacy ABM platforms have offered for years. Jess argued that better signals are specific to what you sell. If you sell security software, a prospect publishing a SOC 2 page might tell you more than someone reading a Forbes article that may or may not be about what you do.
Moving while the signal is hot
Even with the right people and the right context, a signal only matters if you act on it while it’s fresh. Our findings suggest most teams aren’t set up for that. 92.5% of respondents said they don’t get a real-time or automatic response to buyer activity. By the time they’re ready to act, it’s too late.
One marketer wrote in our survey: “Data fragmentation across tools means we can’t get a single real-time view of account engagement. By the time signals are compiled and actioned, the buying moment has often passed.”
That’s why Josh thinks ABM needs its own version of speed to lead. Some companies set an SLA to call back form fills within minutes, and the same urgency should apply to the rest of your signals. Sales still tends to wait for the ultimate signal, the form fill, when a site visit or a social engagement is a real signal too.
Respondents also pointed to misalignment between sales and marketing, which causes signals to go unnoticed or never get followed up on. This is where Josh said “marketing should start yelling back a little bit.” Sales is usually the one saying marketing isn’t generating enough pipeline. But when customers turn on signals in Vector, they often see marketing engaging accounts that are well along in their buying journey across organic, paid, and social. They may not be perfect form fills, but they’re in market and worth a look.
Proving it worked
The last step is proving any of it worked, and the survey confirmed just how hard that is. 84% of marketers can’t immediately show evidence of marketing’s pipeline contributions.
Most marketers have been asked some version of “where’s the pipeline from this?” And there’s usually a sales version of the answer, a marketing version, and finance’s version.
When asked what frustrated them most about their ABM program, one respondent said: “Lack of knowing definitively if marketing is moving the needle toward deal stage progression or if we are just spinning our wheels.”
Josh’s take: most CEOs don’t understand the value of top of funnel. They look only at the last touch, see a form fill, and decide that none of the touches that came before it mattered.
The fix builds on everything above. With contact-level signals and sales aligned on following them up, you can reverse engineer those signals into proof. When an opportunity is created, look back at every site visit, piece of content, and paid impression that led there. Over time, a pattern emerges that Jess calls the golden path. It’s the content, campaigns, job titles, and company traits that show up most often before someone buys, and it shows how you won as a team.
Get the full report
This webinar only scratched the surface of what we learned about the wide rift between the promise of ABM and the reality of marketers’ day-to-day experiences running it.
The full report has the rest of our findings, more of what marketers told us in their own words, and some answers that might help you make a few fixes.
Read the whole thing here, and watch the webinar recording on demand below:
