8 steps to build your account-based marketing strategy + recommended tools

In this guide, you’ll learn how to build an effective ABM strategy in 2026, including the essential steps, best practices, and tools needed to engage decision-makers and drive measurable business growth. Wingrove told me his team focuses on the whole funnel, but especially the top, as it helps keep their company at the top of mind when target accounts begin looking for solutions. With this strategy, you can understand how things perform and then check them bi-weekly to optimize and slowly add in more channels as you build things out. Many of us don't have an entire ABM team, so having the resources to refresh your channels constantly is super helpful so that things don't go stale to your target accounts. It's a joint project between sales and marketing, so it's about personalization to get to those key stakeholders at the end of the day. By the end of this guide, you’ll have everything you need to start targeting (and closing!) your high-value prospects through ABM — and dramatically increase your conversions and revenue in the process.

The key to success is alignment—ensure these channels are part of your broader ABM orchestration, reinforcing messaging and engagement rather than operating in silos. To stay ahead of the competition and achieve more with ABM, you must explore and incorporate these emerging channels into their plans. While these channels remain effective, new channels are rapidly emerging due to shifting trends and external factors. Your sales teams can proactively offer premium add-ons, while you highlight relevant success stories or ROI calculators to reinforce the value of an upgrade with inbound marketing. Shared dashboards encourage transparency, aligning marketing and sales on goals, ABM KPIs, tracking progress, and refining strategies together.

Successful ABM requires a close collaboration between marketing teams and sales teams. A successful account-based marketing (ABM) campaign is built on a few key components that work together to create a seamless, personalized experience for your target accounts. To identify and target accounts for ABM, focus on high-value target accounts that align with your business strategies.

This involves analyzing how stakeholders interact with your content across social media, newsletters, webinar and other channels — and using these insights to refine strategies in real time. DB Nuggets → Use dynamic content tools to automate personalization at scale. For example, if targeting a healthcare organization, highlight how your solution addresses regulatory compliance and improves patient outcomes. To do this, start by leveraging account-specific data, such as industry trends, organizational pain points, and individual preferences, to inform your messaging. In this case, multinational conglomerates might prioritize solutions that ensure global compliance, while regional enterprises may focus on scalability within their specific markets.

Explore and Incorporate Emerging Marketing Channels

But you’ll get the best results through the most relevant channels to your target accounts and contacts. Besides marketing and sales, don’t forget to choose other internal key players — such as customer success reps — who should be aware of and aligned with your ABM strategy. I think it’s important to mention that you don’t need to go full force with your ABM strategy from the start. 🧡 The easiest way to support internal account-based marketing alignment is with the help of software, like HubSpot, which makes connecting your marketing and sales teams exceptionally easy. As you check in on it regularly, you'll start to identify trends and see what's working and what's not.

• You can move straight into the phases of engaging and delighting your target accounts.
• For example, if your company provides B2B marketing data solutions, your ICP might include enterprise SaaS companies, technology providers, healthcare organizations, and financial services firms with dedicated sales and marketing teams.
• For example, if JP Morgan shows interest in your solution, how do you know/identify if you’re seeing genuine demand from a key business unit, or just routine research from a non-influential team?

Choose meaningful metrics to track and measure

ABM requires account-level metrics tied to progression stages. After switching to Prospeo, bounces dropped under 5%, AE-sourced pipeline jumped 180%, and they now generate 200+ new opportunities per month. 40% of businesses report struggling to gather the account and contact data they need for ABM. The average B2B buying committee includes roughly 7 decision-makers. Don't blast all channels simultaneously. The effort scales down by tier – tier-1 gets bespoke content, tier-3 gets segment-level personalization – but the principle holds everywhere.

71.2% of organizations now run some form of ABM, and 49.7% plan to increase their ABM budgets this year. See which models fit digital marketing goals, customer journey stages, and market penetration plans so framework choices stop feeling interchangeable. By understanding and addressing these challenges, you can create a more effective and sustainable ABM strategy. Personalizing marketing messages requires having the right data, but many businesses struggle to gather enough relevant information to tailor content effectively. If the target accounts aren't selected properly, your efforts may not lead abm best practices to the desired results. Implementing Account-Based Marketing (ABM) can be highly rewarding, but there are common challenges that many businesses face.

Review your landing pages

The expectation for personalized experiences has only intensified, though the methods for delivering personalization have become more sophisticated. Perhaps more important than ever, alignment now includes shared dashboards, service level agreements (SLAs), and coordinated technology stacks that enable real-time collaboration. This full-funnel approach recognizes that existing customers often represent the highest-value opportunities for growth.

Best Practice: Implement Deep Personalization Across All Touchpoints

As mentioned above, many companies are forming "revenue teams" that are a combination of sales and marketing professionals. Before investing in expensive technology, consider the easiest way of reaching a small cohort of ideal target accounts. Therefore, the biggest advice for new account-based marketing programs is to start small and think scrappy.

If you’re just starting with ABM, Wingrove and Davidson both told me the best way to do it is to create a small task force with one marketer and one salesperson. Both teams must commit to clear communication and find a middle ground. If you don‘t have those conversations with your executive team, your numbers will look bad to start. Consider following these steps to create an effective account-based marketing strategy.