The 2025 guide to ABM: Part 1

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Welcome back, and happy 2025, everyone!

Coming into this year it seems like everyone is talking about Account Based Marketing (ABM). And for good reasons. The B2B landscape has changed. ABM has evolved to keep up, making it simpler (and cheaper) to employ.

But what no one is talking about is HOW TO actually do it and do it well.

I’m kicking things off with a two-part series, your ultimate guide to modern ABM: what it is, why it’s better than ever, and exactly how to launch a program that works in 2025.

In the first installment, we’ll lay the foundation by covering the essentials. You will learn:

1. What ABM is what it takes to be effective

2. Why it’s a critical strategy in 2025

3. How it has evolved into Account-Based Experiences (ABX) and why you no longer need an overpriced ABM tool to make it work

In the second, I’ll show you exactly how to influence $1M ARR in 90 days—step by step.

And let me be clear: I’m not a vendor or someone trying to sell you an ABM tool. I’m an operator, a builder, and a boots on the ground player in the paid, demand-gen and growth marketing space. This guide goes into theory but my perspective isn’t theoretical. It’s rooted in practical execution, and this series is about giving you exactly what you need to drive real revenue this year.

Estimated time: 10 minutes

But first, have you heard of today’s sponsor Inflection.io? I am a big fan of their PLG GTM summit!

Inflection.io is a modern B2B marketing automation tool used by leading PLG & DevTool companies.

✅ Used by Mural, Vercel, Clay, and Bill.com, and more

✅ Product onboarding, free-to-paid, & customer expansion are common use cases

✅ CDP & warehouse-native marketing automation

✅ Hosts of the famous PLGTM.com Summit happening in SF in May

Why ABM Matters in 2025

The B2B world has never been more competitive. Your target audience is bombarded with messaging, content, and solutions left and right. They (we) have dwindling attention spans. To stand out, you either need to outspend the competition or put your focus where it matters most.

ABM is more than an outbound growth strategy. It’s a way to tackle some of the biggest challenges we’re facing in marketing today:

• Market saturation: Your competitors aren’t the only ones targeting your same pool of leads. ABM helps you zero in and provide personalized and better experiences to differentiate.

• Super sophisticated buyers: They’re more informed and selective, with easy access to reviews, competitors, and alternative solutions. They expect value-driven interactions that meet them where they’re at in the buying journey and solve their specific problems.

• Complex buying committees: Tailored messaging and outreach can speak directly to the needs and concerns of each stakeholder.

• Budget constraints: Marketing is expected to do more with less. Precision and efficiency are critical.

• Longer buyer journeys: In a product-led model, rev potential often lies in nurturing usage and engagement within existing accounts to drive upsell. Not everyone who signs up for your product is a perfect fit. You need to be able to narrow in on those who are. Longer rev plays rely on seamless experiences across even more touchpoints, making GTM alignment non-negotiable.

By honing in on high-value accounts and aligning your GTM teams, ABM provides the precision and efficiency you need to compete.

What is ABM?

At its core, ABM is all about GTM teams aligning and working to deliver a seamless, personalized experience focused on converting the best accounts. Rather than drowning in a broad lead pool, you’re outbounding a precise list of individuals.

It revolves around 3 key stages:

1. Account selection: Identifying the companies and individuals at those companies that are most likely to benefit from your product and in turn convert and building your target list.

2. Account engagement: Engaging your target list with personalized messaging, plays, and efforts to win them over.

3. Account measurement: Tracking and analyzing the performance of your efforts. Ultimately, this comes down to the progress of these key accounts in your actual pipeline.

Account Selection

ABM helps you reach the right people. Your dream customers, the people your product actually serves best.

You might have a rough idea of who these folks are, but in 2025 this requires a precise definition of your Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP) - the blueprint makeup of those best-fit individuals.

Adam Schoenfeld of Keyplay (an ABM account selection tooll) has a great framework to help you define this. 

Account Engagement

Your targeted list is then segmented for specific plays with personalized and relevant messaging and experiences.

Different plays use different levels of precision and allow to allocate resources efficiently based on account value and potential ROI.

ABM Frameworks

To understand what it takes to be effective at ABM, you really need to go back to first principles. By learning these, you won’t be intimidated or need to hire someone who runs some black box software tool to see no results.

Account Selection → Engagement → Measurement

The first should look familiar. It goes back to the stages of ABM we’ve already talked about:

• Account selection: Identifying those companies and individuals at those companies that match your ICP and building your target list.

• Account engagement: Engaging your target list with personalized plays.

• Account measurement: Tracking and analyzing how well your efforts influence your pipeline and revenue.

This lets you create a funnel of sorts.

Fuel vs Engine

This second framework comes from an ideology worth talking about for anyone who is marketing. To build a successful you need two essential components: great fuel and a finely tuned engine.

Engine: Something that does “work.” It moves something from point A to point B. Whether that is an ad platform that puts content out an email that is sent or a website that moves content as someone navigates.

Fuel: The elements or pieces that go into the engine that moves. This is messaging, website copy, ad copy, creative images, etc. All the fuel gets wrapped and distributed in an engine.

(I LOVE using fuel and engine talk to communicate with stakeholders. Thanks to MKT1 for the OG creation of this paradigm. They deserve so much credit for influencing the current marketing landscape to us practitioners.)

However, this Fuel vs Engine paradigm is not enough first principles for me, so I’ve taken it a step further.

The First Principles Prism of ABM

When I talk to other practitioners, what resonates more is:

1. Distribution (Engine): The systems or channels that get your message in front of the right people.

2. Building (Fuel): All the creative work/assets that fuel your campaigns.

3. Operations (Engine Wiring): Workflows and processes that tie it all together and make it work.

1️⃣ Distribution is about spreading information.

If you’re a nerd like me, you can think of distribution like entropy. The constant flow of disorder and chaos. Distribution is the cornerstone of all marketing. Different marketing strategies or approaches are set apart by how and what you use to distribute. Each channel you use has its own distribution laws (think LinkedIn vs Direct Mail).

Distribution is the engine of ABM. if your messaging doesn’t reach the right people in the right way, nothing else works.

Distribution tools are your platforms: LinkedIn, Google, 6sense, DemandBase, Rollworks, Influ2, and email marketing.

2️⃣ Building is all about the groundwork of creation so that distribution does not burn out.

Building tactics in ABM are all the support functions and tools that fuel distribution. That is landing pages, website messaging, ad creatives, email copy, etc. The creative fuel for your engine.

If your fuel isn’t great, your distribution engine isn’t going anywhere.

Most companies do not spend time in the building phase. They overweight Distribution and Operations. This is because the resources to make building high-performing tend to be functions of the company biased for under-resourcing.

Are you going to spend an extra 5 days building customized landing pages for each ICP or be pressured to launch the campaign because we gotta get moving and show progress?

Guess what? 8 out of 10 times, a company will not circle back as a fast follow to improve even though they said they would. Then they are locked into OK creative and an OK channel-market fit, which impacts diminishing returns every time you keep spending money…all due to an anchor bias that shipping fast is better than critically thinking about quality.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this.

3️⃣ Operations are all about process workflows that communicate cross-functionally to different teams in order to close the feedback loop of ABM.

Just like wiring ensures the engine’s fuel, spark, and mechanics work harmoniously, operations link your distribution and building efforts, aligning marketing, sales, and the rest of your GTM team to execute and refine.

Operations consist of marketing ops to connect marketing API data with CRM so sales team can utilize distribution signals. It consists of sales ops ensuring the CRM fields are actionable and frictionless so that sales team can utilize for outbound. Operations extend to revenue ops and data ops to ensure ABM reporting is separate from standard GTM reporting - giving it the ownership and focus it deserves.

Altogether, these 3 principles work to create a balanced and scalable ABM function:

1. Distribution ensures your messaging reaches your ICP where they are.

2. Building provides fuel. Your high-quality creative and assets that make your messaging effective.

3. Operations ensure alignment, data flow, and actionable insights across teams, closing the loop for continuous improvement.

💡As a founder, you want to think about ABX from these 3 pillars—distribution, building, operations.

The need to modernize ABM

Distribution, building, and operations are the backbone of ABM. But llegacy tools and approaches have often struggled to execute them effectively.

Take, for example, the landscape 5-7 years ago:

Sales teams would lean heavily on demand gen inbound performance marketing campaigns that would generate tons of good leads that sometimes were able to target a top 20 key account.

What does this tell us? ABM fails when there’s a misalignment between strategy and execution.

Until recently, executing ABM meant relying on “bundled” all-in-one platforms like RollWorks, Demandbase, and 6sense. These platforms, often referred to as black boxes, used proprietary algorithms to identify key accounts for targeting. Your strategy is limited to the abilities of the platform.

These rigid, expensive, and overly complex tools make the ROI hard to see. Not to mention, they box out early-stage start-ups strapped for cash.

The problem with old-school ABM:

• Legacy ABM tools require a lot of resources: Time and money. These tools demand a LOT of upfront training, sales involvement to learn a new tool, and high signing costs.

• Sales never really fully lean into ABM tools: They see them as an intent score or prioritized list of accounts that fit the ICP in CRM, but it’s not accurate or sticky enough, so they revert to traditional outbound and inbound.

• Ad options from ABM tools are dinosauric: Sorry but display ads are a thing of the past. No “target account” is being influenced because they saw your banner ad on a website.

• You’ve got no flexibility: By too much bundling of ABM tooling, you don’t get the arbitrage ability to optimize something the tool owns for yourself - like different ad platforms or operations.

• Intent signals are everywhere: The main value prop of ABM back in the day was proprietary “intent” signals that they could measure and feed you. But the democratization of these signals is getting easier to acquire in other ways (I'll provide solutions).

• No ability to scale: Legacy platforms are almost always owned by marketing, which puts too much pressure or bottleneck on Marketing (especially when product-led) when engagement is a GTM problem to solve.

• Measuring impact is hard: This has always been a slippery slope. It depends on what kind of CMO you have. However, because ABM is more outbound than inbound, current approaches lean in to fit an inbound methodology on an outbound one. This is changing as we speak.

Old school ABM tools black box the first principles so you can’t control them separately. They control the distribution, the integration with your GTM team, AND your sales team needs to learn a whole new tool outside of their existing workflows.

They take a tech-first approach to strategy, making it impossible to adapt to the complexity of modern B2B.

Modern challenges require modern solutions.

The Rise of ABX

In the last year, the industry has been moving towards “unbundling” ABM tooling to meet shifts in buyer behavior and demands of PLG.

This is cheaper, more agile, scalable, and precise. It also makes leveraging account-based tactics simpler and more accessible to anyone who doesn’t have $100K+ to drop on a piece of software.

Unbundling lets you return to these first principles to take a strategy-first approach. You pick the right tools and are more in control of distribution, building, and operations, selecting your custom tech stack based on your goals and workflows across the entire buyer lifecycle.

This means you can deliver value-driven experiences at every stage of the customer journey. Not just for acquisition, but activation, retention, expansion, etc.

Unbundled tools empower each team to contribute to the buyer’s journey and disperse ownership across your entire GTM function.

This transforms ABM into ABX. It’s a holistic GTM strategy, not just a marketing effort.

Unbundling ABX tools

My two favorite ABX resources right now show what this can look like.

1️⃣ Unbundling Market Map

Adam at Keyplay put this graphic together to separate tools into account selection and account engagement. He’s also created an entire spreadsheet laying out options for unbundling tools.

Kudos to Adam and his ability to leverage community and thought leadership as his main source of Acquisition for Keyplay. His contribution to the space is helpful!

2️⃣ ABX tools for engagement precision

Another is Kyle Poyer’s framework from the work he did with Mutiny (a vendor).

Different tools distribute with more precision or broadbrush for 1:1, 1:few, and 1:many plays.

Putting it all together

The shift from ABM to ABX orchestration reshapes how you should be approaching growth, rallying your entire GTM function to make every interaction count.

This modern approach with unbundled tools makes what was once reserved for enterprise giants now accessible to even early-stage startups. Instead, ABX empowers you to build a tailored tech stack, focusing on what works for your business and your customers

And the best part? It’s not hard to get started, and it doesn’t take long to see serious results.

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Thanks for reading!

See you next week for part 2 👋 

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