Account-based marketing makes sense:
Find your target company and talk to decision makers!
If only it were that easy, say Dmitri Lisitski and Doug Madey from Influ2.
Discover what it really takes for a successful ABM strategy in this clip from their keynote presentation at B2B Forum 2025
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[ Doug]
Does this stat resonate with anybody?
58% report “moderate” [ability to drive engagement with key accounts]…or worse.
That’s like, when you were there, “how was it?”
“It’s moderate.”
Or, “it’s worse.”
But you don’t want to be there…
And I think what we all forget sometimes, I do, is that accounts don’t buy your product or your services or whatever it is you’re selling.
People do.
We’re in B2B, but a company didn’t buy it. Someone at that company bought from you. It sounds silly to say it, but it’s true, right?
People buy. Accounts don’t.
So digging into some of this research—and I won’t read through the stats, this is like photo stuff, you guys can take photos and we can share it later—but we polled marketers like yourselves, like myself, Dmitri, everybody here…
And we said, “What are some of the core challenges that you’re having with your ABM program?”
The biggest one is just identifying the right buyers.
42% of people, the same amount, said they’re wrestling to engage with the right buyers. And if you can do that, they don’t have the technology to target them.
So you need to have the data. You need to have the insights on the individual, the person that’s going to be doing this buying in this group that is 13 people [involved in the buying decision]. I think it’s even more now.
And you need the systems that are going to allow you to engage with those individual buyers.
Important to note, we’re all marketers, but the impact is felt beyond just the marketing organization.
It’s the entire revenue work.
40% anticipate stunted pipeline growth.
The question we asked was, “What would you expect the outcome to be if you couldn’t target individuals?”
Stunted pipeline growth!
I don’t want to be in that Monday morning leadership meeting, Dmitri, and you’re like, “How’s pipeline?”
And I go, “Stunted.”
But that’s what people are saying, right?
So it’s not just a marketing issue.
And about the same amount also projected lost revenue and expected low sales conversions.
I once worked with a CRO—great CRO, don’t work with them anymore—but they always had this one-liner that we probably have all seen at revenue kickoffs:
“Raise your hand if you’re in sales.”
Half the room raises their hand.
And he goes, “I’m going to ask that again. Raise your hand if you’re in sales.”
We’re all in sales!
Has anyone heard this? Yeah, cool. He’s not that original, but it worked. And I believe it, right?
Because the number one refrain you’re going to see from your sales team is that marketing is prioritizing an account…
But your salespeople don’t know who to call, who to get in touch with.
So when we’re talking about the contact level ABM approach, the strategy here, it’s really about aligning with your sales team.
Who are they going after?
Because those are the people we’re going to go after. Those are the people we’re going to target. Those are the people we’re going to measure the engagement with.
So I think we all agree ABM is a no-brainer. This is a strategy that we’re all we’re doing, we’re implementing, we’re having success with it. But as I just said…
It doesn’t mean that there’s no room for improvement.
So Dmitri, I think I want to pass it over to you now and I want to talk through some of the challenges that we think contact level ABM can help address.
[Dmitri]
Well, I will start with a little bit of personal story.
You can see it’s me, 10 years ago. Little younger.
And basically I’m at Demandbase conference at AT&T Park in San Francisco.
And the reason I was there, I was looking for a solution…
We built a quite meaningful big company, Global Logic. Turned out to be 30,000 people kind of service business.
But what kept me unsettled was the fact that frankly, our marketing didn’t work.
It was all about sales and referrals and it took time to build it.
But in all honesty, it felt like our marketing contributed almost nothing to success with that company.
And I was looking for an answer, like, “what could work for super heavy enterprise deals? How can we assist our sales team to be successful?”
And frankly, that’s where I found this answer. I think Account-Based Marketing was, like, a clear, obvious, great idea.
If salespeople are going after, say, Microsoft, marketing needs to target the same company to influence a decision to buy.
It’s kind of a no-brainer.
I really loved that idea, but that was an inception point for Influ2.
And we started this company because there was one problem that I felt was still not working for me.
And the problem was that if you think of account-based marketing and you target Microsoft, as an example, it is 150,000 people. It’s a big town, right? And you don’t engage everyone, right?
So there’s some people who will pay attention to your marketing effort…
And what are the chances that you will actually be able to hit the right people?
While, as Doug mentioned, we only talk about 13 people you care about. So your buying group is 13 people that live in a small town. And you just put a billboard in this town hoping this 13 people will actually see that, right?
What are the chances you’ll be able to hit the right people?
That’s very low.
So our idea was, “okay, ABM is a strategy is amazing because that’s kind of how you can really drive your enterprise sales success with marketing effort.”
But the question was, “how can you execute it in the way it actually works and you’re able to influence contexts that really make decisions?”
And there are multiple problems in this.
One is obviously intent. I think knowing that some account has high intent, this is amazing, right? It’s kind of, “okay, sales team please pay attention! We have this great account, it’s a high-intent account based on our data…”
But then what happens next?
Who should you call and who you should contact and what should going to happen next?
So the problem was, intent as a concept is amazing as long as you know who is engaging, who has intent and where it happened and when.
One of the things you want to solve with contact level ABM is you need to know who is engaging being at search, like who is searching for your product right now or your competitors or your category, or who is reading articles and third party content websites?
You need to know the names of these people when it happens.
Not sometime later.
It should be real time.
Same for social.
You need to know what’s going on and especially you need to be able to execute on the contact level.
Published April 7, 2026
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