ABM Is Not a SaaS Subscription

Every year, B2B leaders pursuing ABM pour millions of dollars into new technology to drive business growth, from intent data platforms to AI-powered sales tools and revenue intelligence software. Then, many of those investments fail. What’s happening?

Culture, culture, culture

I’ve spent years working with organizations navigating ABM transformations, and experience consistently shows that the teams that succeed aren’t the ones with the most sophisticated tech stack, but the ones that take their processes seriously. Moving toward an ABM model will never just be a technology decision. You can’t buy a platform, onboard a team, and expect the “big shift” to happen organically (though many still try).

ABM requires marketing and sales to operate fundamentally differently from other growth models. Instead of marketing running demand gen campaigns and handing off leads to sales, both teams need to be aligned on the account as a unit. To do that, they need to operate on shared language, metrics, and accountability. 

In practice, this means sales reps thinking about the buying committee rather than a single contact. It means marketing building content and campaigns that serve specific personas within specific accounts, not just filling the top of a funnel. It also means teams aligning to a shared target account list, defining clear roles across SDRs, AEs, marketing, and customer teams, and agreeing on how account engagement, progression, and handoff should work. Without that level of process clarity, “doing ABM” often becomes little more than a set of layered-on tactics without a real operating model behind them.

This is a big behavioral realignment, and behavior doesn’t change because you bought new software. It changes because your process, targets, and expectations all change together, communicated from the top.

Measurement first

Measurement is the most common culprit of ABM stalls. An organization will spend months planning its rollout, aligning on strategy, selecting target accounts, and standing up the tech stack. Then the quarter ends, and someone asks: “What did marketing deliver?” 

And the answer they’ll still be looking for is MQLs.

Here’s the thing about MQLs: they’re not useless, but they measure the wrong unit for ABM. When you’re operating in an account-based model, the question is not how many leads were generated. Instead, it’s how many people on the buying committee were engaged? How is this account progressing through the funnel? Are teams multi-threading effectively into the accounts that matter most?

If you don’t change what you measure, you don’t change what people prioritize. Sales will continue to chase meetings booked, and marketing will continue to optimize for lead volume. Your ABM strategy will exist on paper while your team executes demand gen in practice. And the business consequences are real: inflated confidence from legacy KPIs, underutilized technology investments, lower adoption across teams, and a pipeline that appears active but shows no meaningful progress in the accounts that matter.

To fix this, you need to start with honest conversations with leadership and boards about why the metrics need to change. In practice, this often means running both measurement models in parallel for a period, so teams can build confidence in the new indicators while weaning off the old ones (which is inelegant, but alas). Those new indicators might include buying group coverage, target account engagement, account progression, opportunity creation within named accounts, and pipeline movement across priority segments. Those are not just “better ABM metrics”; they are a better reflection of whether the go-to-market model is actually working.

But the transition has to happen. There has to be a point where the new model becomes the standard.

A leap worth taking

The most practical advice I can give is this: draw a line in the sand.

ABM cannot be a soft rollout where some people kind of do it while others sort of try it. For the accounts and teams operating under an ABM model, there needs to be a clear moment where the old way ends and the new way begins. 

What does that look like in practice? A defined set of strategic accounts. A documented process that everyone on the account team follows. Aligned targets that reflect ABM metrics, not legacy demand gen metrics. And the tools, training, and support to actually execute. It may also mean formalizing account tiering, setting expectations for buying group coverage, establishing shared SLAs between sales and marketing, and clarifying ownership from first engagement through opportunity progression.

You don’t have to flip the entire organization overnight. Some companies start with a strategic accounts team, keeping the rest of the business on a traditional model while they build out the ABM playbook. That works. What doesn’t work is letting individuals straddle both worlds indefinitely. Asking someone to run a demand gen process and an ABM process simultaneously is asking them to do two different jobs.

Still not sure where to start? Find a mediator. When two teams, like sales and marketing, have separate KPIs, histories, and often deeply ingrained habits around how they work, getting total buy-in for process change is a tall order. A third party who has guided these transitions before (like, say, The Imaginarium) can hold the middle ground, facilitate uncomfortable conversations, and help both teams see around the corners that might otherwise hold them back.

Process design is not glamorous work, and it certainly doesn’t make for exciting conference keynotes. But it is the difference between an ABM investment that compounds over time and one that is dead in the water from the get-go. The reality is that, done poorly, ABM can leave organizations with higher technology costs, confused teams, misaligned incentives, and no clear story for leadership on what is actually driving growth. Done well, it creates the conditions for more coordinated execution, better visibility into account progression, and stronger long-term revenue impact.

ABM is not a SaaS subscription. It’s a process, it’s a culture, and it’s incredibly powerful when you get both of those right. You’ll see.