ABM Table Stakes: You Have To Know Their Language

ABM has been celebrated for years as a golden bridge between marketing and sales. But if you strip away the acronyms, tech stacks, and dashboards, ABM really comes down to something deceptively simple: speaking your customer’s language. Not your version of it. Theirs.

While this may sound obvious, in practice it’s one of the hardest (and maybe most overlooked) disciplines in B2B marketing — possibly because teams don’t take it literally enough.

Take financial services. Here, “interconnectivity” is the hot buzzword to know, while in healthcare, the same concept is called “interoperability.” Same idea, different language. What about acronyms? For example, if you don’t know that “CMO” stands for Chief Medical Officer (can you even believe that an “M” could stand for something besides “marketing”?), you’re already dead in the water. And in pharma, “NDA” doesn’t mean a confidentiality agreement; it means New Drug Application. I found that out when a customer spoke of a 100,000-page NDA. One wrong assumption like that and your message goes from insightful to embarrassing in a single slide.

This is where ABM earns its keep. Done right, it forces marketing and sales to align not just on accounts, but on vocabulary. A common persona matrix becomes your cheat sheet: who are the real decision-makers, what do they care about, and, critically, how do they describe their world? Because CIOs, developers, and clinical informaticists don’t just want different solutions—they want those solutions explained in their own dialect.

That’s not a marketing flourish, but how you get taken seriously. If you’re talking about “efficiency” when the client says “time to outcome,” you sound like an outsider. If you’re touting “data integration” when they keep calling it “system connectivity,” you’re broadcasting that you haven’t done your homework.

In a committee-driven buying process, that’s fatal. We know that decisions aren’t made by one lone executive; they’re made by concentric circles of stakeholders. Each of them is listening for something different. Technical leads want the specs. Line of business owners want ROI yesterday. Security officers want reassurance that they won’t be blamed when things go wrong. If you aren’t tailoring your messaging across that ecosystem, someone will veto you.

It takes work, and there are no shortcuts, at least not today. Mind you, AI certainly can help surface terminology, buying signals, and even cultural cues from LinkedIn. But there’s no “translate to industry-speak” button that just fixes your campaigns across all of your channels, products, and market segments. Even if there was, the reality is that, also within an industry, no two companies are alike. Cultures, processes, and priorities vary. That’s why ABM is worth its weight in gold, because it makes your deliverables deeply personal to the account.

My advice: listen, research, test, and refine. Go to events. Read how stakeholders describe themselves. Mirror their words, not your own. As marketers, we always need to follow how they see the world, versus how we want to.

This is also why alignment with sales is so crucial. Sales hears in real-time which titles respond, which keywords resonate, and which ones fall flat. If that feedback doesn’t loop back to marketing, you’re just broadcasting more white noise.

At its best, ABM isn’t a campaign. It’s fluency. It’s learning that in one industry, a VP isn’t really a VP, and in another, every VP has a completely different mandate. It’s sending the right message to the right person, in words they would use themselves.

So if you’re wondering where to start with ABM, forget the tech stack for a second. Forget the dashboards. Start with language. Know theirs. Use theirs. Because if you can’t talk like them, you’ll never sell to them.