Account-Based Marketing (ABM): What It Is and Why Sales & Marketing Cohesion Is Critical for Success

Today, particularly within the UK’s thriving technology sector, businesses constantly seek more innovative, more efficient ways to win high-value customers. Traditional broad-stroke marketing methods often fall short when targeting enterprise-level decision-makers or highly specialised buyers. Enter Account-Based Marketing (ABM)—a strategic approach transforming how tech companies engage with their most valuable prospects and key accounts.

ABM isn’t just another buzzword. It’s a strategy that flips the traditional marketing funnel, aligning sales and marketing to target high-priority accounts with laser precision. When executed correctly, ABM can significantly shorten sales cycles, increase deal sizes, and improve ROI. However, businesses often overlook ABM’s most crucial element: the synergy between sales and marketing teams.

This blog unpacks ABM, how it works, and why sales and marketing cohesion is beneficial and essential for delivering a successful ABM strategy.

What Is Account-Based Marketing?

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a focused B2B growth strategy in which marketing and sales teams work together to identify high-value accounts within their ideal customer profiles and create personalised buying experiences for each. Unlike traditional marketing efforts and approaches that cast a wide net to generate leads, ABM programs concentrate efforts on a specific set of target accounts, including existing customers, who are pre-qualified as potential high-value customers and key decision makers within that ICP.

Key Characteristics of the ABM Approach:

• Highly targeted: ABM campaigns are built around specific accounts, not broad segments.
• Personalised content and messaging: Each outreach piece and marketing campaign is customised to resonate with the target company’s challenges, needs, and goals.
• Sales and marketing alignment: ABM collaborates closely between departments from strategy to execution.
• Longer sales cycles but higher returns: Because ABM targets high-value opportunities, the payoff, though a longer sales process, is significantly larger.

ABM can be categorised into three tiers:

1. One-to-one (Strategic ABM): Deeply personalised marketing tactics for individual accounts. Ideal for enterprise-level clients.
2. One-to-few (ABM Lite): Tailored campaigns for a small group of similar accounts.
3. One-to-many (Programmatic ABM): Broad campaigns using technology to personalise messaging at scale for a larger set of accounts.

Why ABM Makes Sense for UK Tech Businesses

The UK technology sector is one of Europe’s fastest-growing and most competitive industries. With over 45,000 tech companies operating across the country, differentiation is critical. ABM allows UK tech firms to move away from volume-based lead generation and focus on winning strategic accounts that drive long-term growth.

Common Use Cases for ABM in Tech:

• Enterprise software vendors targeting financial institutions.
• Cybersecurity firms pursuing public sector contracts.
• AI or data analytics platforms break into specific verticals like healthcare or logistics.

A deep understanding of the buyer’s organisation, pain points, and procurement processes is vital in all these scenarios. ABM enables this level of customisation and connection.

How ABM Works: The Process

Identify High-Value Accounts:

Sales and marketing collaborate to define a “high-value” account, taking into account company size, industry, revenue potential, and tech stack compatibility.

Build Account Intelligence:

Marketing teams dig deep into each target account to gather insights—organisational structure, recent business challenges, buying committee members, and market behaviour.

Develop Personalised Campaigns:

Using the intelligence gathered, marketing builds custom campaigns tailored to the account’s specific pain points and objectives. These could include whitepapers, email sequences, LinkedIn ads, or bespoke landing pages.

Engage Across Channels:

ABM campaigns leverage multiple touchpoints—social media, email, direct mail, events, webinars and sales outreach—to engage accounts consistently and coordinately.

Measure and Optimise:

Metrics such as engagement levels, pipeline velocity, deal size, and revenue attribution are used to evaluate success and refine campaigns.

The Real Secret to ABM Success? Sales & Marketing Alignment

The foundation of any successful ABM strategy is a tight collaboration between sales and marketing. Too often, these departments operate in silos—marketing generates leads, then hands them over to sales without much further communication. In an ABM model, that doesn’t work.

ABM requires a shared mindset where both teams are fully invested in the same goals, target audience accounts, and outcomes.

Why This Cohesion Matters:

Shared Understanding of Target Accounts

• Sales and marketing must agree on what constitutes a high-value account. This means aligning on firmographics, technographics, pain points, and buying roles.
• This prevents wasted effort targeting the wrong companies or using misaligned messaging.

Integrated Strategy & Messaging

• With both teams collaborating on content, timing, and tactics, the outreach becomes consistent and persuasive across all touchpoints.
• A misaligned message—say, a whitepaper that promotes cost savings while the sales team pushes innovation—can kill credibility.

Efficient Use of Resources

• ABM is resource-intensive. Coordinated efforts ensure that budgets and time are spent wisely, focusing only on high-potential accounts with genuine traction.

Faster Sales Cycles

• When marketing warms up accounts for the buyer journey with highly relevant content and sales teams continue the conversation seamlessly, deals move through the pipeline more quickly.
• This end-to-end collaboration reduces cold outreach and friction in the buying process, thus improving customer experience.

Improved Attribution & Reporting

• With shared KPIs—like pipeline velocity, revenue per account, and account engagement—both teams are held accountable for outcomes, not just activities.
• This allows leadership to measure ROI and refine tactics more accurately.

Tools That Enable ABM & Alignment

Technology plays a vital role in facilitating ABM strategies and sales-marketing cohesion.

ABM-Enabling Tools:

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics.
• Marketing Automation: Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot.
• ABM Platforms: Demandbase, Terminus, 6sense.
• Sales Enablement: Outreach, Salesloft, LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
• Analytics & Reporting: Tableau, Power BI, Google Analytics, Attribution tools.

These platforms allow teams to identify account intent, personalise content, and track multichannel engagement. Importantly, they create a single source of truth for both sales and marketing teams.

The Benefits of Account-Based Marketing: What You Can Expect

1. Higher ROI

ABM delivers one of the highest returns on investment of any B2B marketing strategy. According to research by ITSMA, 87% of marketers say ABM outperforms other marketing initiatives in terms of conversion rates and ROI.

2. Stronger Customer Relationships

Because ABM involves understanding and addressing specific challenges within each account, customers trust and value the resulting engagements more.

3. Larger Deal Sizes

Account-based marketing strategy targets high-value accounts that typically yield larger contracts. These deals often include upselling or cross-selling opportunities down the line.

4. Better Win Rates

Focused targeting and collaboration increase the chances of winning business from the right accounts, increasing the sales funnel.

5. Scalable Insights

Even when focusing ABM efforts on a small set of accounts, the insights and learnings can be scaled across similar industries or verticals.

Challenges to Be Aware Of:

ABM isn’t without its hurdles. It’s essential to plan for:

• Longer setup times: Gathering insights, account lists, and building personalised campaigns are time-consuming.
• Initial resource strain: Content creation and sales enablement require an upfront investment.
• Cultural change: Sales and marketing may need to undergo a mindset shift to break down silos and work collaboratively with stakeholders.

However, the payoff is worth it for businesses that commit to the strategy.

Final Thoughts: Why Your Tech Business Needs ABM Now

As the UK tech market becomes more saturated and buyers more discerning, generalist marketing won’t cut it. ABM provides a path to cut through the noise and speak directly to the prospects that matter most.

But remember: ABM is not a marketing initiative—it’s a company-wide strategy. The tighter the alignment between salespeople and marketing, the better the results. When these teams share goals, insights, tools, and feedback loops, they become a revenue-growth powerhouse.

So, ABM might be the key if you’re looking to move beyond MQLs and generic campaigns and close more strategic, high-value deals.

Next Steps

If your business is ready to explore ABM, schedule a strategy session between your sales and marketing leadership. Identify 5–10 strategic accounts, build joint personas, and agree on what success looks like.

Need help getting started? Our team specialises in helping UK tech businesses design and execute winning ABM strategies. Get in touch for a free ABM readiness assessment.