The business
value of ABM

In this section: Budgets, types,
top benefits, and ROI

Defining
Account-Based Marketing

[Noun]

Treating individual accounts as markets in their own right

For the purpose of this report, and with the hope of helping marketers rally around a common definition, we agree on the following definition:

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a strategic approach to designing and executing highly-targeted and personalized marketing programs to drive business growth and impact with specific, named accounts.

Core principles for ABM include:

Strategic focus on Reputation, Relationships,
and Revenue (the Three Rs)
Tight partnership and integration with sales
Tailored and personalized programs and campaigns based on deep customer insight

Curious to see how your ABM program stacks up against 300 B2B peers? Click here to learn about our short ABM Benchmark survey and how to take part.

ABM has a
variety of deployment models

Nine in 10 of the organizations we surveyed have an ABM strategy, a five percent increase from our 2023 survey.

As we’ve seen in previous studies, companies continue to invest in a variety of ABM models as they balance breadth and depth of coverage across a larger number of accounts.

One-to-one ABM is the most popular type of ABM program, followed by one-to-few and one-to-many.

According to the respondents, roughly half of their top accounts are included in ABM programs.

90^%

of organizations have adopted ABM

A consistent focus on top accounts drives growth

ABM is paying off: 81% of marketers say ABM delivers a higher return on investment compared to other marketing initiatives – the same result we saw in our 2023 survey.

The top benefits of ABM include growing business with existing accounts (49%), enhancing customer retention and loyalty (44%), and enhancing brand reputation (41%).

That could explain why a quarter of respondents expect an 8% increase in annual revenue from their “most valuable clients” (i.e. top accounts) in FY24 compared to FY23.

49^%

of marketers say “growing business with existing accounts” is a top benefit of ABM

ABM resource
allocation is growing

Given ABM’s outsized ROI compared to other marketing initiatives, it’s no surprise that 87% of marketers expect
their organization’s ABM budget to increase in the next
12 months, with a mean increase of 9%.

Over three-quarters (77%) of marketers intend to increase the number of ABM staff in the next 12 months, also by an average of 9%.

It’s possible that marketers intend to spend their additional ABM budget on headcount: 43% of CMOs agree that not having enough people to cover all key accounts and managing ABM-ers’ are challenges.