So, You’ve Been Tasked With ABM. Now What?

Article at a Glance

What is account-based marketing?

Account-based marketing focuses your sales and marketing efforts on a specific set of high-fit companies instead of casting a wide net and hoping the right ones show up. Rather than marketing to everyone, ABM starts by defining exactly who you want to work with, then builds targeted programs to win those specific accounts.

What are the first ABM steps you should take when starting from scratch?

Start with strategy before anything else. That means getting aligned on goals, building a realistic target account list, and mapping out how accounts move through your program before a single campaign goes live. The teams that skip these ABM steps end up rebuilding everything three months later.

Where do most teams go wrong when launching an ABM strategy?

They jump straight into tactics. A new campaign goes live, a list gets pulled together, and everyone gets busy. Unfortunately, without a shared foundation, the motion falls apart fast. A strong ABM strategy starts with alignment and an account progression model instead.

How do you build a target account list before you have everything figured out?

Start with your CRM. Look at your best current customers, aka the ones that are profitable, stay longest, and are easiest to serve. Then build your target account list around companies that look like them. In B2B marketing, the fastest path to results is targeting accounts that resemble people you've won before.

What does good alignment look like before launching anything?

It means Sales, Marketing, and Leadership agree on three things: which accounts matter right now, what success looks like at the end of the quarter, and what's intentionally out of scope. When those three things are clear, account-based marketing stops being a theoretical question and starts being an executable plan.

How do you prove ABM is working early on?

Start small. Pick one play and run it for 90 days. Closed-lost programs, high-intent website visitors, and stuck pipeline deals are all great places to find early wins without a massive ABM strategy overhaul. Proof comes from doing something focused well rather than doing everything at once.

At some point in a lot of marketing careers, someone walks into a meeting, says "We should be doing ABM," and then looks directly at you.

Maybe it came with a vague directive and short timeline. Or maybe it came with a lot of enthusiasm from leadership and not a lot of detail about what needs to happen next. However it landed, it's yours now, and the clock is ticking.

The instinct in that moment is to start doing things. Pull a list, launch a campaign, get something in front of accounts fast. It feels productive, but it's one of the most reliable ways to end up three months in with a lot of activity and little pipeline to show for it.

The teams that get ABM off the ground spend the first few weeks doing things that don't feel like marketing: getting aligned on goals, building a realistic target account list, and mapping out how accounts should progress before a single dollar is spent on campaigns.

That's what this post covers. The ABM steps worth taking when you're starting from scratch, in the order that makes them stick. Whether you've been handed a blank slate or a half-built program that needs a reset, this is where to start.

Step 1: Start With Strategy

When ABM lands on your plate, the pressure to show progress fast is real. Nothing looks more like progress than launching something, like an email sequence or targeted ad set. The problem is that tactics without strategy are just expensive guesses. That’s why the first step you want to take is to build the foundation that makes campaigns work.

That foundation has three parts:

1. A clear account progression model that maps how accounts move from awareness to opportunity
2. Alignment across sales, marketing, and leadership on who you're targeting and why
3. A shared definition of what success looks like before anything goes live.

Without those three things in place, your ABM strategy is a collection of disconnected motions that nobody can measure or improve.

None of this takes months. A focused strategy session with the right people in the room can cover most of it in a single day (which is exactly what the ABM in a Day workshop is built for!).

Step 2: Get Alignment Before Creating Anything

Alignment is one of those words that gets used a lot in ABM strategy conversations and is defined almost never. What it means in practice: Sales, Marketing, and Leadership are working toward the same goal, using the same definitions, and agreeing on the same target account list before a single campaign goes live.

Three things break alignment most often. The first is language, so teams using the same words to mean completely different things. When Marketing says "lead" and Sales hears "inbound meeting request," no ABM strategy will bridge that gap.

The second is goals. Marketing optimizing for engagement, while Sales is measured on closed revenue, with no shared metric tying the two together.

The third is compensation. If collaborating with Marketing puts a seller's commission at risk in any way, they won't do it, no matter how good the plan sounds in a kickoff meeting.

Getting aligned before you build means agreeing on which accounts matter this quarter, what success looks like when it's over, and what's intentionally out of scope.

Step 3: Build a Realistic Target Account List

Building a target account list is one of the ABM steps that feels straightforward until you're doing it. That's when the fun begins, and by fun, we mean the moment someone suggests adding a few dream logos to the list. Think of the household names that would make leadership light up in a board meeting. It's an exciting conversation, but not always a strategic one.

A target account list full of aspirational targets that don't resemble the companies you serve well is going to make the rest of your ABM strategy harder than it needs to be.

Luckily, building a great list doesn't require starting from scratch. Hop into your CRM to look at your best current customers: the ones that are profitable, stay the longest, and are easy to work with. Those are your ideal customers, and your target account list should be full of companies that look just like them.

Step 4: Start Small to Get Wins Fast

Here's where a lot of teams talk themselves into doing too much too soon. The strategy is built, and suddenly there's enthusiasm and a long list of ABM steps that all seem equally urgent. The natural response is to launch everything at once and show the organization what ABM can do.

Resist that urge.

Starting small is one of the smartest moves you can make early on. A focused pilot with one motivated seller, one well-chosen play, and one clearly defined success metric will teach you more in 90 days than a sprawling program running across five segments simultaneously.

It also gives you something incredibly valuable: proof. Proof is what turns skeptical sales teams and cautious leadership teams into supportive ones.

The best places to find early wins aren't net-new cold accounts either. Closed-lost opportunities, high-intent website visitors, and deals stuck in pipeline are all goldmines for fast results because the groundwork is done. These accounts know who you are, have shown some level of interest, and just need the right nudge at the right time. In B2B marketing, starting where you have signals is almost always faster than starting from zero.

Step 5: Do Your Homework

Starting ABM right now means you don't have to figure it out alone. There's a deep library of resources, program examples, and practical guidance out there, and using it before you start building is one of the most underrated ABM steps in the whole process.

Before diving into execution, spend some time with the existing resources. The Scrappy ABM podcast covers everything from building a target account list to running specific plays at every stage of the funnel.

Our blog goes deep on the 4D framework, account progression model, and ABM strategy fundamentals. Then, if you want to compress months of learning into a single day, the ABM in a Day workshop is built for that, working through your program so you can walk away with a plan you can execute immediately.

Step 6: Build Your Account Progression Model

Once strategy and alignment are in place, it's time to map out how accounts move through your program. This is the account progression model, and it's one of the most useful things you can build before launching any ABM plays.

The model has six stages:

1. Awareness
2. Initial engagement
3. Meaningful engagement
4. Marketing qualified account
5. Opportunity
6. Re-engagement

Each one answers a different question about where an account is in their journey and what they need next. More on that in here.

The most valuable thing the account progression model does is show you where accounts are stuck. Map your current programs to each stage and look for gaps. Once the gaps are visible, the ABM steps to fix them become obvious, and you can prioritize one stage at a time instead of trying to overhaul everything at once.

Step 7: Know What Success Looks Like

"More pipeline" isn’t a goal. Really, it's a direction. In ABM, the difference between a direction and an actual goal is the difference between a program that compounds and one that gets defunded after two quarters. Before anything goes live, get specific about what success looks like.

Is the primary objective net-new logos, accelerating late-stage deals, or expanding within existing accounts? Those are three completely different motions with different ABM steps.

From there, define what a win looks like at 30, 60, and 90 days. Early on, that might not be closed revenue, but meetings booked with target accounts or re-engaged closed-lost opportunities. Setting those markers gives the program room to build momentum without being measured against outcomes it was never designed to hit.

The Foundation Is the Fast Track

Being handed ABM responsibility can feel like a lot. We’ve been there, trust us. There's pressure to prove results and figure out a complex program while everyone is watching. But the teams that create something sustainable are the ones that took the time to get the foundation right first.

Those ABM steps above might not be the most glamorous, but they're what separate an ABM strategy that compounds from one that generates a lot of activity without a lot of answers.

Grab our ABM Program Planning Template to map out your program before your next leadership meeting, so you can walk in with a plan instead of a pitch!