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<\/a><\/div>\nIn a recent interview, Jeff Bezos, founder and long-time CEO of Amazon, made a point that has stayed with me.<\/span><\/p>\n Everyone, he said, asks, \u201cWhat is changing in my industry?\u201d But the far more interesting and useful question is, \u201cWhat will stay the same?\u201d You can build a business around the answer to that.<\/span><\/p>\n Two things, in my experience, will never change. The first is that With that framing in mind, consider Account-Based Marketing. ABM has Whatever you call it, ABM is here to stay. The newest chapter in this Next week I’ll be attending a workshop with Demandbase built around The \u2014 Teresa That is the right mental model. The judgement about which accounts This is not a new interest of mine. About two years ago, content A year later, in August 2025, I As with everything AI touches, ABM is moving fast. Rather like the Red I fear I’m getting too technical, so let me set the acronyms aside and When I joined Visual IQ, in Boston, Massachusetts, in 2013, we had a crack team. On the sales side, I learned an enormous amount about ABM from these people. Many times a The physical promotion is worth dwelling on, because it captures the Visual IQ also taught me the power of owning a category conversation. We I’ve since replicated that playbook more None of this was happening in a vacuum. The reason those spears landed The Forrester Wave\u2122: Cross-Channel What made the Visual IQ machine work was that ABM ran on two engines at Marketing and sales weren’t two departments lobbing work over a Zscaler taught me the same lesson from a different angle. Our whole As at VisualIQ, I worked with some of the best salespeople in the business – typically from companies like Cisco, Paolo Alto, and Fortinet. Our ‘sales bible’ was ‘The Challenger Sale<\/span><\/a>‘ – based on thousands of sales data points across hundreds of companies. A Data-driven approach to enterprise sales success.<\/span><\/p>\n We drew up a list of 50 companies we wanted to penetrate That offer is expensive to fulfil (Up to $5000 per Company). You cannot make it to 5,000 companies; We had to be genuinely confident that the accounts we approached were Here too, analyst standing did heavy lifting. When you walk into a global Gartner Magic Quadrant, Secure Web The through-line from Visual IQ to Zscaler is simple: in enterprise I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention my time as Demand Generation Manager at Hansen Technologies. We provided CPQ solutions for the Telco and Media sectors. Our entire universe of accounts was under 1000, and our average deal size was $1million. It was a pure ABM play business. I still remember our star Sales engineer closing the Australian telco company, Telstra for $5 million ARR, where they would also be paying a $250,000 switching cost. That sales engineer, Pedro Jose<\/span><\/a>, is now the CTO at Snowflake.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I don’t want to leave the impression that ABM is a solved problem, or What struck me most from this session was how early<\/i> most At Visual IQ and Zscaler we built our target lists from a blend of John Blackmore, who leads demand generation Marketing & Sales then inserts itself only into The most quotable insight of the day was also the most important, and it ABM \u2014 John To extend the analagy – in ABM, you want to skate to where the puck will be, not where it is, to paraphrase Wayne Gretzky’s (Star Ice Hockey player) famous quote.<\/span><\/p>\n I’ve also lived the counter-example. At Tricentis, the team had the full This, for me, is the deepest point, and it’s the one my Visual IQ He put This reminds me of Jim Collins, of \u2018Good to Great\u2019 fame, who made a similar John Blackmore\u2019s point also matches my lived ABM experience exactly. I’ve Damien shared the campaign I still think is the gold standard of The result was an 80% response rate across more than 100 There is far more in the full write-up \u2014 including a candid debate on Put the field experience and the roundtable side by side and the pattern
\ncompanies will always want to reach larger, often enterprise accounts for
\nbig-ticket purchases. The second is that success in that pursuit will always depend on finding
\ncurious people: the ones forever exploring new ways of doing things, adopting
\nnew technology, and adapting to a business world that refuses to sit still.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nexisted, in substance, since B2B selling began. But it has been through many
\npermutations \u2014 and several name changes: from \u201cMajor Account Selling\u201d in
\nthe 1950s, to \u201cTarget Account Marketing\u201d (TAM) in the early 1990s, to
\nthe \u201cStrategic Marketing to Named Accounts\u201d that I was practising at
\nVisual IQ and Zscaler through the 2010s. The label \u201cAccount-Based Marketing\u201d
\nonly took hold around 2015, pioneered by Jon Miller, founder of Marketo and
\nlater Demandbase.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nlong-running need \u2014 to penetrate enterprise businesses at many levels and
\nacross many parts of an organisation in order to secure large recurring deals \u2014
\nis the application of AI.<\/span><\/p>\nThe AI inflection point<\/span><\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n
\nexactly this question: how do we turbo-charge and extend an already strong
\nunderstanding of ABM using AI? In my experience, AI can 10x \u2014 or more \u2014
\nwhat you’re already achieving in this realm. But the point is not that machines
\nreplace the craft; it’s that they amplify it.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nAI revolution is about leveraging and accelerating the best of what humans can
\ndo \u2014 by teaching machines how to perform tasks, and then using AI as an \u201cIron
\nMan\u201d suit to accomplish our goals, together as one unit.<\/span><\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nBarreira, CMO at Publicis Sapient (and a fellow Northeastern University MBA
\nalumna)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\nmatter, why they matter, and how to reach the humans inside them remains
\nstubbornly human work. AI simply lets you do far more of it, far faster, and
\nwith far better signal.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nstrategist Damien Seaman and I convened a virtual roundtable with leaders
\nacross B2B SaaS \u2014 CMOs, heads of demand generation, and others \u2014 to examine how
\nthis account-based approach was proliferating.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
\nworked alongside AI go-to-market experts like Jasper Ruijs (the organizer), including senior leaders from Adobe
\nand Semrush, together with Clay and ABM specialists, to understand how AI was reshaping the way large B2B deals get done<\/span>:<\/a> \u201cfishing with spears\u201d<\/i> \u2014
\nprecise, one-to-one marketing \u2014 as opposed to the \u201cfishing with nets\u201d<\/i>
\ntypical of smaller, more transactional B2B.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nQueen in Through the Looking-Glass<\/i>, you have to keep running simply to
\nstay in the same place. Getting ahead of the curve takes even more talent,
\nopen-minded thinking, momentum, organisational backing, and investment.<\/span><\/p>\n
\ntell some stories instead \u2014 because the principles are best seen in practice.<\/span><\/p>\nVisual IQ: 50 accounts, a pair of
\nbinoculars, and a category-defining survey<\/span><\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n
\nmost had been poached from Adobe by our Chief Revenue Officer, formerly head of
\nsales at Omniture (which Adobe acquired). These were people with realms of
\nexperience closing multi-million-dollar-a-year accounts for digital marketing
\nattribution with global names like TK Maxx, Walmart, Johnson & Johnson,
\nMastercard and P&G \u2014 where, incidentally, many of my fellow marketing MBAs
\nhad done their internships.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nweek I’d sit down with a regional VP of marketing in the US, along with the VPs
\nfor Europe and APAC. We would draw up a list of the top 50 accounts they wanted
\nto penetrate and debate the best way in: outbound calling? A physical
\npromotion? An email campaign? LinkedIn InMail or sponsored content? Once the
\nstrategy was agreed, the hard, patient work of spear-fishing began.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nessence of ABM better than any framework. Because we sold attribution<\/i> \u2014
\nhelping marketers see clearly \u2014 we had branded binoculars made, embossed with
\nthe Visual IQ logo, and sent them to the heads of marketing and digital at our
\n50 target accounts. In the US it did exceptionally well. The head of marketing
\nat ESPN loved it, and it helped open the door to a roughly $1m deal. That is
\nspear-fishing: a memorable, relevant, one-to-one gesture aimed at a named
\nindividual inside a named account.<\/span><\/p>\n
\npublished an annual State of Marketing Attribution<\/i> survey report, built
\non the views of 500 CMOs. It generated a huge amount of SEO and some of the
\nstrongest leads we produced \u2014 because it made us the reference point for a
\nquestion the whole market was asking.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
\nthan once, most memorably at a video-game advertising company where a segmented
\nState of Video Game Advertising<\/i> survey drew around 300 responses in what
\nwas essentially virgin territory, with tailored question sets for game
\ncompanies, advertisers and agencies. The segmentation itself became a form of
\npersonalization, and the response was excellent.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nwas that the market already regarded Visual IQ as a leader. Forrester placed us
\nin the Leaders quadrant of its Cross-Channel Attribution<\/i> Wave \u2014 the
\nanalyst validation that made a cold outreach warm before a single word was
\nexchanged.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nAttribution Vendors, Q2 2012 \u2014 Visual IQ positioned in the Leaders segment
\n(Source: Forrester Research, Inc.).<\/span><\/i><\/span><\/p>\n
\nonce. The outbound engine penetrated named strategic accounts in defined
\nregions; the inbound engine qualified the demand our category leadership and
\ncontent were creating \u2014 web downloads, CMO reports, Forrester Wave enquiries,
\nnewsletter opens, referrals \u2014 and handed genuinely qualified opportunities to
\nfield sales.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
\nwall; they were one motion. I still have the pipeline reviews from that period,
\nand the discipline is striking: strategic accounts analysed for why prior
\nefforts had won or lost, contact reach expanded through ZoomInfo (a tool that I pioneered using at VisualIQ), Salesforce
\nand LinkedIn, and bespoke material built for specific verticals and named
\ntargets \u2014 never generic blasts.<\/span><\/p>\nZscaler: the free security audit, and the
\nconfidence to be expensive<\/span><\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n
\nproposition was cyber security delivered from the cloud \u2014 breaking companies
\nfree from the tangle of on-premise security appliances. Once again, we started
\nwith the biggest game. I worked at the Demand Generation HQ in Austen, Texas, before I moved over to the UK, in 2015.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nand offered each of them something substantial: a free consulting engagement in
\nwhich we would go in, examine their security posture, find the weaknesses, and
\nhand back a report.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nyou can barely make it to 50. Which is precisely why account selection mattered
\nso much.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
\nstrong potential customers before we committed real consulting hours to them.
\nGet the targeting wrong and you don’t just waste money \u2014 you burn your best
\nasset, your experts’ time, on accounts that were never going to buy.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nenterprise’s CISO office offering to audit their defences, the first unspoken
\nquestion is \u201cwhy should we let you?\u201d<\/i> Being named a Leader by both
\nGartner and Forrester answered it before we did. Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for
\nSecure Web Gateways placed Zscaler firmly in the Leaders quadrant, alongside a
\nvery short list of credible names \u2014 and well ahead of the challengers and niche
\nplayers.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nGateways, May 2015 \u2014 Zscaler positioned in the Leaders quadrant (Source:
\nGartner).<\/span><\/i><\/span><\/p>\n
\nABM, credibility is the spearhead.<\/b> The binoculars, the free audit, the
\nsurvey report \u2014 these are the conduit. But analyst recognition, category
\nleadership and social proof are what let the spear actually penetrate. Both
\ncompanies went on to strong exits \u2014 Zscaler to a landmark IPO, Visual IQ to
\nacquisition by Nielsen \u2014 and in both cases the account-based motion was central
\nto how the enterprise pipeline was built.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nthat my own experience is the last word. It isn’t. The roundtable Damien Seaman
\nand I hosted brought together eight senior B2B marketers \u2014 from a
\ncyber-security demand-gen lead to a portfolio CMO to a private-equity Chief
\nDevelopment Officer.<\/span><\/p>\n
\norganisations still are on this journey, and how mixed the results have been
\neven for experienced hands. A few themes emerged that map almost exactly onto
\nwhat I learned in the field a decade earlier.<\/span><\/p>\nIntent is the modern equivalent of my
\ntop-50 list<\/span><\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n
\nengagement data and, crucially, sales-team feedback, confirming that accounts
\nwhich looked<\/i> engaged were also accounts sales agreed were worth an
\nopportunity. I’ve always liked the Bezos line that when the stories and the
\ndata disagree, trust the stories.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
\nat a cyber-security firm, described the modern,
\ninstrumented version of the same instinct: rather than cold-calling phone
\nbooks, his team listens for intent signals; Someone researching endpoint
\ndetection, or evaluating a competitor.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nconversations that are already live. In his words, intent now accounts directly
\nfor around a quarter of his pipeline and lifts the efficiency of his other
\ntactics by 10\u201315%. This is the same philosophy as my top-50 list, but with far more advanced technology and sensors.<\/span><\/p>\nThe tool is the assist, not the goal-scorer<\/span><\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n
\nvalidated something I’d seen go wrong more than once. John \u2014 a Canadian, so the Ice Hockey metaphor is fitting \u2014 argued that ABM platforms like 6sense and Demandbase are
\nnot the killer app but the assist:<\/span><\/p>\n
\nis the assist. It’s not necessarily the goal-scorer, but it sets up all your
\ngoal-scorers in a great way to put the puck in the net. It can improve the
\nefficiency of every tactic by 10 to 20%. It’s worth its weight in gold, even if
\nit never delivers one sale for you.<\/span><\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nBlackmore, Global Director of Demand Generation<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\nDemandbase package, but left it on the shelf. Rocio Sasson, VP of Demand
\nGeneration at Checkmarx, described the same trap from her seven years using
\nboth 6sense and Demandbase: the platform is only as good as the cross-team
\neffort behind it, and personalization \u201ctakes a long time and still doesn’t
\nguarantee success.\u201d A tool bought and un-used is worse than no tool at all,
\nbecause it tells the organisation that ABM doesn’t work when in fact ABM was
\nnever really tried.<\/span><\/p>\nABM is really a sales-and-marketing
\nalignment strategy in disguise<\/span><\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n
\npipeline reviews prove out in retrospect. Every roundtable participant with
\nreal success traced it back to alignment. Blackmore holds two standing weekly
\nmeetings with two different sales teams purely to interrogate lead quality \u2014
\nare these good, do you like them, who do you actually want to talk to?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
\nit memorably: you’re not buying 6sense; you’re buying collegial alignment, and
\nthe tool is simply the expression of it. Rocio was blunt about the failure
\nmode: however beautiful the asset, if sales won’t work the leads, the whole
\neffort collapses.<\/span><\/p>\n
\npoint about using technology. Jim said that in his analysis of top performing
\ncompanies, technology was not even in the top ten of most important factors
\ndriving their success. It was the utilisation of technology to enable other
\nhigh performing functions (So just like Teresa Barreira, CMO of Publicis
\nSapient, points out in her \u2018AI as Iron Man suit\u2019 analogy). <\/span><\/p>\n
\nproduced thousands of leads that fell to the floor because sales wouldn’t pick
\nthem up. The reverse \u2014 the two-engine Visual IQ motion where marketing
\nqualified and sales closed as a single unit \u2014 is what actually produced
\nmillion-dollar accounts. ABM, done properly, forces that alignment because the
\nmodel simply cannot function without it.<\/span><\/p>\nPersonalise the message, not just the list<\/span><\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n
\nspear-fishing: a Canon campaign targeting C-suite executives at listed
\ncompanies across six European countries. The team printed each target’s annual
\nreport, found the passages where the company itself flagged document-management
\npain, and hand-wrote tailored messages on Post-it notes placed at exactly those
\npages \u2014 each package arriving under a cover letter from Canon’s country head,
\npeer to peer.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
\naccounts. The lesson isn’t the Post-it notes; it’s that the value
\nproposition to different personas for the same product is genuinely different<\/b>,
\nand the personalisation has to reach the message, not just the mailing list.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nwhether LinkedIn produces real pipeline or only brand awareness (referencing the notoriously long linkedin lead sales cycle), the mechanics
\nof preferential paid-search bidding on target-account segments, and geo-fencing
\nas an alternative to trade-show spend. I’d encourage anyone serious about ABM
\nto read it in full:\u00a0B2B SaaS Leaders ABM Roundtable<\/span><\/a><\/b><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\nis hard to miss. The fundamentals of ABM have not changed in decades; Pick
\nthe right named accounts, reach the right humans inside them with a message
\nthat speaks to their specific pain, and make marketing and sales a single
\nmotion rather than two teams.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n