Account-Based Marketing Needs a Better Customer Journey

The account-based marketing customer experience is the sequence of touchpoints, decisions, and relationship moments that move a target account from initial awareness through to closed deal and long-term retention. Unlike a broad B2B funnel, ABM compresses that sequence around a defined set of accounts, aligning sales and marketing effort around the specific people, priorities, and timing of each one.

Most ABM programmes get the targeting right and the experience wrong. They identify the right accounts, build the right lists, and then run the same linear funnel they always have, just with better segmentation on top. That is not account-based marketing. That is email marketing with a shorter list.

I have spent a fair amount of time on both sides of this. Running agencies, pitching enterprise clients, managing relationships with procurement teams across multiple years and multiple contracts. The accounts that grew were never the ones we had simply marketed to well. They were the ones where we had mapped out what they actually needed at each stage of the relationship and built our engagement around that. The accounts that churned were usually the ones where we had done a good job of winning the business and a mediocre job of everything that came after.

Why the Standard B2B Funnel Does Not Work for ABM

The traditional B2B funnel was built around volume. Generate enough leads, qualify a percentage, close a smaller percentage, repeat. It is a numbers game that works reasonably well when your target market is broad and your deal sizes are modest. When you are running ABM, both of those conditions change. Your target market is narrow by design, and your deal sizes are large enough that losing one account matters.

The funnel model also assumes a single buyer. In enterprise accounts, you are typically dealing with a buying committee of six to ten people, each with different priorities, different risk tolerances, and different relationships with your brand. The marketing team might be aware of you. The CFO might never have heard of you. The IT security lead might have concerns that have nothing to do with your value proposition. A linear funnel cannot hold that complexity.

Understanding how customer journeys actually work in complex buying environments makes it clear that the path from awareness to purchase is rarely straight, and in enterprise sales, it is rarely short. The ABM customer experience has to account for multiple decision-makers moving at different speeds, with different information needs, across a timeline that can stretch from months to years.

If you are thinking about ABM in the context of broader customer experience strategy, the Customer Experience hub on The Marketing Juice covers the principles that sit underneath a lot of what makes ABM work in practice, particularly around consistency, personalisation, and how organisations measure what actually matters to customers.

What the ABM Customer experience Actually Looks Like

The ABM experience has five distinct phases, and most organisations only pay serious attention to three of them.

1. Account Selection and Intelligence

Before any marketing happens, there is a decision about which accounts to pursue. This is where ABM either gets sharp or gets sloppy. Good account selection is based on fit, timing, and commercial logic. Which accounts have the budget, the need, and the internal conditions to buy? Which ones have buying cycles that align with your capacity to serve them? Which ones, if they became customers, would generate the kind of reference value that opens doors to similar accounts?

The intelligence phase runs in parallel. You are building a picture of the account: who the key stakeholders are, what initiatives are live, what the organisation has said publicly about its priorities, what technology it is already using, where the pain points are likely to sit. This is not stalking. It is the kind of research that any good salesperson would have done before a first meeting, scaled and systematised across your target account list.

2. Awareness and Engagement

This is the phase most ABM content focuses on, and it is where the technology conversation usually starts. Targeted advertising, personalised content, intent data, account-specific landing pages. All of that has its place. But the purpose of this phase is not to generate a lead. It is to establish relevance with the right people inside the account before a sales conversation begins.

The distinction matters. If you are optimising for lead generation in an ABM programme, you will end up with the wrong metric driving your decisions. Someone downloading a whitepaper is not a buying signal. Someone from your target account reading three pieces of your content, attending a webinar, and then having a colleague from a different department engage with a LinkedIn post, that is a pattern worth paying attention to.

Thinking about the omnichannel dimension of the customer experience is relevant here. Enterprise buyers do not engage through a single channel, and the touchpoints that matter are often the ones you cannot directly attribute. The goal is to be present and relevant across the channels where your target accounts are active, not to force them into a channel that suits your tracking setup.

3. Consideration and Evaluation

When an account moves into active evaluation, the nature of the engagement changes. This is where the buying committee becomes visible, where RFPs appear, where procurement gets involved, and where the relationship between marketing and sales either works or does not.

I have seen this phase go wrong in a specific way more times than I can count. Marketing hands over a warm account and steps back. Sales takes it from there. And then the carefully constructed account intelligence, the understanding of stakeholder dynamics, the content that had been building relevance over months, none of it gets used. The sales team starts from scratch with a generic pitch because the handover process did not transfer the context, only the contact.

The ABM experience does not have a handover. Marketing and sales are both active during evaluation. Marketing is producing account-specific content, case studies from relevant industries, tailored responses to the concerns that have surfaced in sales conversations. Sales is feeding intelligence back into the marketing function so the content stays relevant to where the account actually is, not where the funnel says it should be.

There is also a strong case for video at this stage. A personalised video walkthrough of a solution, a short case study in video format from a comparable client, even a recorded message from a senior leader addressing a specific concern, these carry more weight than another PDF. Video used at the right moment in a customer relationship does something that written content cannot: it makes the relationship feel human before the contract is signed.

4. Onboarding and Early Relationship

This is where most ABM programmes quietly fall apart. The account is won. The deal is celebrated. And then the organisation moves its attention to the next target account, leaving the new client to figure out what comes next.

Onboarding in an ABM context is not just a customer success function. It is a continuation of the marketing and sales relationship that won the business. The people who were involved in the sale should be involved in the first ninety days. The promises made during evaluation should be tracked and delivered. The account intelligence built during the pre-sale phase should be handed to the delivery team so they understand what the client actually cares about, not just what the contract says.

When I was running an agency through a period of rapid growth, we made a deliberate decision to keep the account director who had won a piece of business involved for the first six months of delivery. It added cost. It also meant that clients felt a continuity of relationship that most agencies do not offer. Retention was higher. Scope expansion happened earlier. The commercial logic was not complicated.

5. Retention, Expansion, and Advocacy

If you have done the first four phases well, this is where the ABM model pays back its investment. A retained account costs a fraction of a new one to maintain. An expanded account, one that started with a single product or service and has grown into a broader relationship, is one of the best indicators that your ABM programme is working as it should.

Advocacy is the phase that most organisations treat as a bonus rather than a planned outcome. If a senior stakeholder at a target account has had a genuinely good experience, they will talk about it. They will move to other organisations and bring you with them. They will speak at your events, appear in your case studies, and take calls from your prospects. That is not luck. It is the result of an ABM experience that treated the relationship as the asset, not the contract.

The end-to-end view of the customer experience is useful here because it forces you to think about what success looks like beyond the initial sale. In ABM, the sale is not the destination. It is the beginning of the relationship you were trying to build.

Where Personalisation Works and Where It Does Not

Personalisation is the word that comes up in almost every ABM conversation, and it is also the word that covers the widest range of actual practice, from genuinely insightful to mildly embarrassing.

Real personalisation in an ABM context means your content, your outreach, and your conversations reflect actual knowledge of the account. What is the organisation trying to achieve this year? What has changed in their market? What did their last annual report say about strategic priorities? What has the CHRO said publicly about workforce transformation? If you know those things and your engagement reflects them, that is personalisation.

Putting someone’s first name and company logo on a landing page is not personalisation. It is mail merge with a higher production budget.

The technology exists to do this at scale, and the role of AI in improving customer experience is relevant here, particularly in how it can help surface account intelligence, identify engagement patterns, and flag when a target account’s behaviour suggests a shift in buying intent. But the technology is only useful if the underlying account knowledge is real. AI cannot manufacture relevance from a shallow account profile.

I have judged enough marketing awards, including the Effies, to know that the campaigns that win are not the ones with the most sophisticated personalisation technology. They are the ones where the insight about the audience was so precise that the creative work felt inevitable. The same principle applies in ABM. The insight comes first. The personalisation is just the expression of it.

How Sales and Marketing Alignment Actually Works in ABM

Every ABM article mentions sales and marketing alignment. Almost none of them say what it looks like in practice when it is working.

It looks like a shared account plan. Not a CRM record, not a Salesforce opportunity, but an actual document that both teams contribute to and both teams use. It contains the account intelligence, the stakeholder map, the current status of the relationship, the content that has been shared, the conversations that have happened, and the next steps that are agreed. Both teams can see it. Both teams update it. Neither team is surprised by what the other is doing.

It also looks like a shared definition of what a good account looks like at each stage of the experience. What does a target account in the awareness phase look like? What behaviour signals that it has moved into active consideration? What does a healthy onboarding look like at ninety days? When these definitions are agreed in advance, the handover between marketing and sales stops being a handover and starts being a continuous relay.

Forrester has been making the case for this kind of integrated approach for some time. Their work on the intersection of customer experience and account-based marketing points to the same conclusion: the organisations that do ABM well are the ones that have stopped treating it as a marketing programme and started treating it as a business strategy that marketing and sales both own.

The practical implication is that ABM requires a different kind of marketing team. Not necessarily a larger one, but one that is comfortable operating without the volume metrics that most marketing functions use to demonstrate their value. When I grew a team from around twenty people to close to a hundred, the hardest cultural shift was not the process change. It was helping people understand that the measure of their work was commercial outcome, not activity. ABM forces that conversation because the activity metrics are almost meaningless at the account level.

Measuring the ABM experience Without Fooling Yourself

ABM measurement is where a lot of programmes quietly underperform without anyone noticing, because the metrics being tracked are not the ones that reflect what is actually happening.

Lead volume is the wrong metric. If you are running a programme targeting fifty accounts, generating two hundred leads is not a success. Generating meaningful engagement from forty-three of those fifty accounts, across multiple stakeholders, is.

The metrics that matter in ABM are account-level engagement, pipeline quality within target accounts, deal velocity compared to non-ABM accounts, win rates, contract values, and expansion revenue in the twelve months after close. These are harder to report on because they require connecting marketing data to sales data to finance data. Most organisations do not have that connection. Building it is worth the effort.

There is also a timing dimension that gets overlooked. ABM programmes targeting enterprise accounts can have sales cycles of twelve to twenty-four months. If you are evaluating the programme at six months, you are looking at leading indicators, not outcomes. Account engagement, content consumption patterns, stakeholder coverage, these are proxies for progress. They are useful, but they are not the result. Patience and honest approximation matter more than false precision in monthly reporting decks.

Thinking carefully about optimisation across the full customer experience is worth the time, particularly in how you structure your measurement framework to capture what is happening at each phase rather than just at the moments of conversion. In ABM, the moments between conversions are often where the relationship is won or lost.

The Post-Sale experience Is Where ABM Pays Back

I want to return to this because it is the part of the ABM customer experience that receives the least attention and delivers the most commercial value.

If your ABM programme ends at contract signature, you have built an expensive acquisition machine. The economics only work if the accounts you win stay, grow, and refer. That requires a post-sale experience that is as deliberately designed as the pre-sale one.

What does that look like? It means your customer success team has access to the account intelligence built during the sales process. It means the commitments made during evaluation are tracked and fulfilled. It means you have a planned cadence of value delivery moments, not just quarterly business reviews, but moments where the client sees something that reminds them why they chose you. It means your marketing team is producing content that is useful to existing clients, not just to prospects.

There is a version of this that I have always believed in, even when it was commercially inconvenient. If a company genuinely delights its customers at every opportunity, that alone drives growth. Marketing becomes a much smaller problem when your existing clients are growing their spend and generating referrals. ABM is, at its best, a framework for building the kind of client relationships where that happens by design rather than by accident.

The customer experience dimension of this is not separate from the ABM strategy. It is the ABM strategy, applied to the post-sale relationship. If you are interested in how the best organisations approach this, the broader thinking on customer experience strategy at The Marketing Juice covers the principles that apply across both the pre-sale and post-sale phases of the account relationship.

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.

Frequently Asked Questions