Account-Based Marketing Has Grown Up. Has Your Product Team?

Account-based marketing has moved well beyond its origins as a sales alignment tactic. In 2025, it sits at the centre of how serious B2B product marketing teams build pipeline, defend positioning, and create revenue that actually sticks. The shift is structural: product marketers are no longer just supporting ABM campaigns, they are architecting them.

The growth in ABM adoption across product marketing reflects a broader maturation. Teams that once scattered messaging across broad audiences are now building tightly scoped programmes around named accounts, with product-level narratives tailored to specific buying groups. The results are more predictable, and the accountability is harder to hide from.

If you are building out your product marketing capability and want to understand how ABM fits into the broader discipline, the Product Marketing hub at The Marketing Juice covers the full landscape, from positioning and messaging to launch strategy and competitive intelligence.

Why ABM Has Become a Product Marketing Problem

For most of the last decade, ABM lived in the sales and demand generation world. Marketing operations built the lists. Sales development reps worked the outreach. Product marketers contributed a few one-pagers and called it done. That model worked well enough when buying committees were smaller and products were less complex.

Neither of those conditions holds today. Enterprise buying groups have expanded considerably, and the products being sold, particularly in SaaS and technology, require genuine explanation. A prospect at a financial services firm evaluating a data platform is not reading a generic brochure. They want to understand how the product solves their specific compliance constraints, integrates with their existing stack, and reduces risk for their team. That level of specificity is product marketing work, not campaign management.

I spent years watching agencies run ABM programmes that were, in practice, just retargeting with a spreadsheet attached. Named accounts got the same creative as everyone else, just with a slightly more personalised subject line. The conversion numbers looked fine because we were fishing in warm water, reaching people who already had some intent. But we were not creating anything new. We were harvesting what was already there.

That is a version of a pattern I have seen throughout my career. Early on, I overvalued lower-funnel performance. I thought we were driving growth because the numbers moved when we spent. It took a few years of managing P&Ls properly to understand that much of what performance gets credited for was going to happen anyway. Real growth means reaching accounts that were not already on their way to you. ABM, done properly, is one of the few B2B mechanisms that can actually do that.

Forrester has written about the evolving relationship between product marketing and sales alignment, and the direction of travel is clear: product marketers are being asked to own more of the commercial narrative, not less. ABM is where that ownership becomes most visible.

What Good ABM Architecture Looks Like in 2025

There is a version of ABM that is essentially a CRM exercise with better branding, and there is a version that genuinely changes how accounts think about your product. The difference is almost entirely in the quality of the underlying intelligence and the rigour of the messaging work.

The starting point is account selection. Not all accounts are equal, and not all accounts are winnable. The best ABM programmes I have seen begin with a clear-eyed view of which accounts have the right profile, the right timing, and the right internal conditions for a purchase decision. That requires combining firmographic data with signal data, things like hiring patterns, technology adoption, and competitive displacement signals, to build a picture of where genuine opportunity exists.

Once accounts are selected, the messaging work begins. This is where product marketers earn their place in the programme. Understanding buyer personas is a starting point, but ABM demands something more granular: account-level insight into the specific pressures, priorities, and objections that are live inside a named organisation. That requires talking to people, reading earnings calls, following the trade press your prospects read, and building a genuine point of view on what matters to them right now.

The messaging architecture that comes out of that work should not be a set of generic value propositions dressed up with a logo. It should reflect a specific understanding of what this account is trying to achieve, what is standing in their way, and how your product addresses that specific gap. Creating preference rather than parity is the standard, and it is harder than most teams admit.

When I was running agency teams, we built a discipline around what I called “the brief behind the brief.” The client brief told you what they wanted. The brief behind the brief told you what they actually needed, which was often different. ABM messaging requires exactly that kind of second-order thinking. The account tells you they want to reduce costs. What they actually need is a way to justify a platform switch to a CFO who approved the existing vendor three years ago. Those are different problems, and they require different messages.

The Three Tiers of ABM and Where Product Marketing Fits in Each

ABM programmes typically operate across three tiers, and product marketing’s role shifts meaningfully across them.

One-to-one ABM targets a small number of strategic accounts, often single digits, with fully bespoke programmes. Product marketing here means building account-specific content, briefing sales on the precise narrative for each account, and often supporting executive-level conversations with tailored materials. The investment is high. The expected return is proportionally high. This tier makes sense for accounts where a single closed deal would be significant for the business.

One-to-few ABM clusters accounts by industry, use case, or buying stage and applies a shared but tailored programme across each cluster. This is where most product marketing effort should live. The messaging is specific enough to resonate but scalable enough to run across dozens of accounts. Industry-specific landing pages, vertical case studies, and segment-level competitive positioning all belong here.

One-to-many ABM is closer to traditional demand generation with better segmentation. It is the least resource-intensive tier and the one where the line between ABM and standard campaign work gets blurry. Product marketers should be honest with themselves about whether this tier is genuinely account-based or just segmented advertising with an ABM label attached.

The tier structure matters because it forces resource allocation decisions. I have seen teams burn out trying to run one-to-one programmes across 200 accounts simultaneously. The economics do not work, and the quality collapses. Choosing the right tier for the right accounts is a strategic decision, not an operational one, and product marketers should be part of making it.

Competitive Intelligence as an ABM Input

One of the most underused inputs in ABM is competitive intelligence gathered at the account level. Most product marketers build competitive positioning at the market level: here is how we compare to the main alternatives, here is our differentiation narrative. That is necessary work, but it is not sufficient for ABM.

At the account level, you need to know which competitor is incumbent, how deeply embedded they are, what the switching costs look like, and what dissatisfaction signals exist. Building a rigorous competitive intelligence process gives you the raw material to have that conversation, but the synthesis work, turning data into account-specific insight, is product marketing’s job.

When I was managing a portfolio of agency clients across financial services and retail, competitive displacement was a recurring challenge. The clients who won those battles consistently were the ones who understood the incumbent’s weaknesses from the customer’s perspective, not from a feature comparison chart. They knew which limitations were causing friction inside the account, and they built their pitch around relieving that specific friction. That is the same logic applied to ABM.

Sales Enablement Inside ABM Programmes

ABM without strong sales enablement is marketing theatre. The account intelligence gets built, the messaging gets developed, the content gets produced, and then it sits in a folder that sales never opens. I have watched this happen more times than I care to count.

The problem is usually not that sales does not want the material. It is that the material is not delivered in a way that maps to how they actually work. A 40-page competitive battlecard is not useful in a 20-minute discovery call. A two-paragraph account brief with the three things to say and the two objections to expect is.

Forrester’s work on sales enablement has consistently pointed to the gap between what marketing produces and what sales actually uses. In ABM, that gap is especially costly because the whole premise of the programme is account-specific relevance. If the sales team is not delivering that relevance in their conversations, the upstream investment is wasted.

Product marketers who are serious about ABM spend time with sales teams before they build the enablement materials, not after. They sit in on discovery calls. They listen to the objections that actually come up. They understand the vocabulary the prospect uses, which is rarely the same vocabulary that appears in the positioning document. That field intelligence shapes everything downstream.

Measurement in ABM: What to Track and What to Ignore

ABM measurement is a genuine challenge, and teams that try to apply standard demand generation metrics to it will consistently draw the wrong conclusions. Click-through rates and cost-per-lead are not the right lenses for a programme built around account engagement over extended sales cycles.

The metrics that matter in ABM are account-level: account engagement score, pipeline coverage within target accounts, deal velocity in ABM-touched accounts versus the control group, and win rate against named competitors within the programme. These take longer to accumulate and are harder to present in a weekly dashboard, but they are the numbers that actually tell you whether the programme is working.

There is also a measurement problem that goes deeper than metric selection. ABM often influences deals that get attributed elsewhere. A series of targeted content touchpoints might move an account from passive awareness to active evaluation, but if the final conversion happens through a direct sales conversation, the ABM programme gets no credit in the attribution model. I spent years arguing about attribution with clients and colleagues, and my honest view is that most attribution models in B2B are fiction. They tell a coherent story, but they do not accurately represent how buying decisions actually form.

The more useful question is not “what did ABM cause?” but “are our target accounts progressing through the pipeline faster and at higher win rates than they were before?” If the answer is yes, the programme is working, even if the attribution model cannot prove it cleanly.

The Product Launch Dimension

One area where ABM and product marketing intersect in ways that are still underexplored is product launches. Most launch strategies are broadcast by nature: get the message out to as many relevant people as possible as quickly as possible. ABM offers a different model, one built around activating specific high-value accounts before and during a launch.

The mechanics of a product launch have been well documented, but the ABM-native version of a launch looks different. It involves pre-briefing target accounts before general availability, giving them early access or preview content, and building a conversation that positions the launch as directly relevant to their specific situation. Done well, it means your most important prospects hear about the launch in a personalised context rather than in a press release.

Shopify’s approach to product marketing has often emphasised the importance of understanding the customer’s world before building the message, which is exactly the mindset that makes ABM-native launches work. The message is not “here is what our product does.” It is “here is why this matters specifically to you, right now.”

I ran a launch programme for a B2B software client a few years back where we identified twelve strategic accounts and built a pre-launch engagement track for each one. By the time the product went live, those twelve accounts had already had three or four meaningful conversations with our team, had seen early demo material, and had been involved in shaping some of the positioning language. The pipeline from those twelve accounts in the first quarter post-launch was disproportionate to the investment. Not because the product was better marketed to them, but because they felt genuinely involved in it.

Where Most ABM Programmes Go Wrong

The most common failure mode I see in ABM programmes is the same one I see across most marketing initiatives: the tactic gets adopted before the strategy is clear. Teams buy an ABM platform, build a list of target accounts, and start running campaigns. The messaging is generic. The account selection is based on firmographic data alone. The sales team is not briefed. And when the results are underwhelming, the conclusion is that ABM does not work for their business.

ABM is not a channel. It is a framework for how you think about your market and your most important customers. The technology is a tool inside that framework. The list is an output of a strategic decision. The content is the expression of genuine account intelligence. None of that works if the foundational thinking has not been done.

The second failure mode is treating ABM as purely a new business tool. Some of the most valuable ABM programmes I have encountered are focused on existing customers: identifying expansion opportunities within large accounts, building relationships with new buying centres, and ensuring that the customer’s experience of the product is matched by a coherent and relevant communication programme. Product marketing’s role in customer retention and expansion is underappreciated, and ABM is one of the most practical mechanisms for delivering it.

There is a version of marketing that exists to compensate for product or service failures, to paper over a customer experience that is not quite good enough. I have seen that version up close, and it is exhausting work with diminishing returns. ABM applied to customer accounts works best when the product is genuinely delivering value and the marketing is amplifying that value, not manufacturing it.

More thinking on how product marketing connects to commercial outcomes, including where ABM fits in the broader discipline, is available across the Product Marketing section of The Marketing Juice.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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