Why We Recommend Starting Every ABM Program With This

Article at a Glance

What should you start an ABM program with if resources are limited?

Closed-lost instead of a fully built-out ideal customer profile. These accounts understand your product, have likely seen a demo, and reached a point in the sales cycle before falling out. That makes for a much clearer target account list than creating one from scratch based on assumptions.

Why is closed-lost such a strong starting point compared to creating the full ideal customer profile first?

Because there's no education gap to close. An ideal customer profile built without concrete sales data ends up more idealistic than accurate, aka a list of who you'd like to work with rather than who's reachable. Closed-lost accounts skip that problem since they know who you are.

Do you need a complete ideal customer profile before running any kind of ABM program?

Not necessarily. Teams with limited bandwidth can start with one or two playbooks, like closed-lost or pipeline acceleration, instead of building out a full ABM strategy across one-to-one, one-to-few, and one-to-many all at once. The full ideal customer profile can come later, once there's data to build it on.

How do you know if a target account list can be trusted?

Cross-check it with sales before assuming it's right. A target account list designed purely off internal assumptions about the ideal customer profile can look great on paper and still be full of accounts sales can't reach or doesn't believe in. That defeats the purpose before the ABM program starts.

What's the biggest lesson experienced ABMers wish they'd known sooner?

Simple is better. Overbuilding the ABM strategy, trying to nail buyer intent data, full segmentation, and every account type before launching anything, wastes time that could go toward learning from a smaller program in motion.

Ask ten ABM practitioners where to start, and at least eight will say the same thing: build your ideal customer profile first. Sounds right. It can also be, for a lot of teams, the wrong first move.

Developing a full ideal customer profile takes time: data pulls, sales interviews, signal analysis, alignment meetings. For a team with a dedicated ABM function and the bandwidth to match, that investment pays off. For everyone else, it can turn into weeks of planning before a single account gets contacted.

There's a faster starting point sitting in the CRM: closed-lost. These are accounts that know the product, sat through a demo, and got far enough into a sales process before falling out. No education gap and no guessing about fit. Here's why that's the smarter place to begin.

The Two Paths to Building an ABM Program

How to approach building an ABM program comes down to one honest question: is this your entire job, or one responsibility among many?

If ABM is a dedicated, full-time focus with resourcing behind it, the fully structured path makes sense. That means building a data-backed ideal customer profile in collaboration with sales, layering in signals from sales conversations, and structuring a target account list across one-to-one, one-to-few, and one-to-many motions. It's thorough, and it takes time to do well.

Most teams aren't in that position. ABM gets treated as a tactic layered onto an already full plate, with limited headcount and hours to spend planning before something needs to launch. For that more common scenario, starting with one or two narrow ABM programs, closed-lost being the obvious first choice, beats trying to build the full ABM strategy before ever making contact with an account.

Why Closed-Lost Is the Best First Target Account List

A target account list doesn't need to come from a fresh ideal customer profile to be worth pursuing. Closed-lost accounts already come with something most new lists don't: familiarity.

These are companies that got far enough into a sales conversation to sit through a demo, understand what the product does, and reach a point in the sales cycle before things stalled out. There's no brand awareness to build from zero and no education gap to close first. For companies still doing heavier category-creation work, where a lot of the sales motion is spent explaining what the product is, skipping that step with a warm audience is a big head start.

Starting here also makes for a better first test of the whole motion. Moving an account from "not in a sales call" to "back in a sales call" is a simpler problem to solve than convincing someone who's never heard of the company to take a first meeting. This makes closed-lost a low-risk way to validate the entire ABM program before ever guessing at a broader ideal customer profile.

Don't Trust a List You Haven't Cross-Checked With Sales

A target account list made without any input from sales can look great on a slide and fall apart the moment someone tries to reach these accounts.

This usually comes down to an ideal customer profile made on assumptions instead of data. It's easy to describe the kind of company you'd love to work with without checking whether those companies are the ones buying (we've all done it!). Sales sees something different day-to-day: who ghosts after the first meeting, which accounts seem like a good fit, and which ones marketing keeps pushing even though they never convert.

If you've got the bandwidth, you can go deeper here, digging into sales call data to spot patterns in which accounts make it furthest before closing. But even a quick check-in with sales before finalizing your target account list catches most of the same problems. An ideal customer profile that's never been tested against conversations with buyers is still just a guess, even a well-meaning one.

Layer in Intent Before Scaling Up

Once closed-lost is up and running and delivering results, the natural next move is to expand beyond it. That's where buyer intent data earns its place in the ABM strategy.

A closed-lost list works because it's built on accounts known to be a fit. Scaling beyond that means finding new accounts that share those same traits, without the benefit of a past sales conversation to confirm it. Buyer intent data helps close that gap by surfacing accounts actively showing signs of being in-market right now.

This is also the point where a refined ideal customer profile starts to matter more. With a working program generating data on what's converting and why, that information can shape a sharper profile than any list built purely on assumptions. Intent data plus a results-informed profile is a much stronger foundation for scaling than trying to guess at both from day one.

Keep It Simple Longer Than Feels Comfortable

Teams that have created multiple ABM programs across different companies tend to land on the same regret: wishing they'd started smaller. Planning the perfect strategy before launching anything eats up weeks that could've gone toward running a program and learning from the results. A narrow closed-lost play teaches more in a month than a fully mapped-out strategy sitting in a slide deck ever will.

Staying simple longer than feels comfortable means doing things in the right order. Get one program working first, see what the data tells you, then expand from there, backed by proof instead of a well-organized guess.

Evidence Beats a Well-Organized Guess

Closed-lost is a smart starting point. A sharper ideal customer profile and broader ABM strategy can come later, built on data instead of assumptions made before you contact a single account.

If you want help figuring out the best place to start your ABM program, bring your team to a private ABM in a Day Workshop, and we'll map it out together!