Rethinking ABM 

Welcome to the ABM, REBUILT blog series. Follow along for practical insights on building modern ABM programs that deliver real revenue impact.

For more than a decade, account-based marketing (ABM) has been hyped as one of the most powerful growth levers in B2B. Higher win rates. Better alignment. More predictable pipeline. Deeper engagement across buying groups. On paper, it all sounds airtight.

But the reality looks very different. Even mature ABM programs hit turbulence. Buying groups stall and campaigns fizzle. Stakeholder engagement plateaus, and personalization gets spread too thin.

CMOs can’t clearly articulate why their ABM programs aren’t working. It’s certainly not because marketers don’t understand ABM or teams aren’t committed. It’s because the traditional ABM playbook was built for a different era and no longer matches how enterprise buying actually works.

In other words, ABM hasn’t failed – the model has.

Marketers were taught that successful ABM requires deep personalization, precise targeting, tight sales alignment, orchestrated campaigns, clean data, connected systems, and a robust content engine. All of this is directionally correct but overwhelmingly unrealistic. ABM didn’t become ineffective – it became overengineered.

But if you peel back the layers a bit more, you can see the obstacles to ABM success are consistent and widespread:

Sales and marketing alignment remains shaky. Without shared goals and unified measurement, even brilliant targeting struggles to gain traction.

Account selection has become guesswork. Data says one thing, sales says another, predictive tools offer a third layer, and marketers end up with too many accounts and not enough relevance.

Buying groups keep expanding. A decade ago, teams planned for five or six stakeholders. Today it’s 12–18. Scaling personalization to that many people is a math problem most organizations can’t solve.

Budgets and staffing haven’t kept pace. Pipeline360’s research shows that insufficient budget and internal resource shortages now top the list of ABM barriers – both rising sharply year over year.

Measurement remains murky. Teams can track activity and show influence. But connecting ABM to movement inside the deal cycle? That’s still elusive.

Legacy ABM was designed for when buying was more predictable. But enterprise buying today is nonlinear, political, and committee-driven. The mid-funnel – where skepticism, anxiety, and internal debate live – is too dynamic for static campaigns. No automated workflow can keep up with the reality of modern deal cycles.

Put another way, the gap is widening between how ABM is executed and how buying decisions actually happen. Which leads to the uncomfortable truth: we’ve optimized the ABM machine instead of supporting the moments where decisions get made.

To overcome the growing complexity, marketers have turned to:

These approaches don’t address the actual issue: ABM has become a campaign-first motion when it should be a buyer-first one. Marketers are producing more campaigns, assets, targeting, and orchestration without influencing the most important part of the process – the internal conversations buyers have when deciding whether to move forward.

Enterprise buying cycles are getting longer. Buyer confidence is shrinking. CFO scrutiny is increasing. Information overload is real. Champions are stretched thin and often unsupported.

And yet marketers are perpetuating the issue by adding more campaigns, more tools, and more automation into the mix. In other words, we’re trying to win a modern game with an outdated playbook.

It’s time for a new one. In my next post, I’ll cover why as marketers, we need to stop slogging through ABM on auto-pilot and start playing the game how it’s meant to be played.

Additional Resources

Attend the webinar, The 10 Trends Reshaping B2B Marketing in 2026.

Read the full report, The 2025 State of B2B Pipeline Growth.