Account-based marketing (ABM) focuses marketing resources on specific, targeted accounts rather than casting a wide net. This strategic approach treats each prospect as a distinct market, allowing businesses to personalize their efforts and deliver more relevant experiences to decision-makers. Companies can enhance their results by combining ABM with inbound strategies for maximum engagement.
ABM drives better ROI, increases deal sizes, and shortens sales cycles by aligning sales and marketing efforts around high-potential accounts. This targeted approach is necessary considering that over 80% of B2B buyers involve 4 or more stakeholders in technology purchasing decisions, making broad marketing approaches less effective. However, implementing successful ABM comes with several challenges that need strategic solutions.
Major ABM problems and their solutions in 2025
- The challenge of building accurate account lists
- Struggles with prioritizing high-value accounts
- Difficulties in allocating ABM resources effectively
- Misalignment between sales and marketing teams
- Barriers to reaching key decision-makers
- Data management issues that undermine ABM
- Technology integration challenges holding you back
- Overcomplicated ABM tech stacks
- Skills gaps and limited internal resources
- The complexity of measuring ABM performance
1. Building effective account lists
Creating a strong account list requires accurate data collection and identification of key decision-makers. Understanding each prospect’s unique attributes and pain points is essential for the personalization that ABM demands. The process also requires balancing potential value against your capacity to engage effectively.
Solution: Refine your account selection process by using reliable data sources, analysis tools, and thorough research to verify information. Establish clear selection criteria and invest in account intelligence platforms to identify decision-makers. Make prioritization systematic, based on data-driven insights aligned with company capabilities.
Unsure how to pick target accounts for ABM? Partner with Inbox Insight that can use expert insights and data to craft your list. Create an ICP based on your most successful customers by revenue, profit, win rate, or retention. Identify similar companies using intent data tools, pinpointing those actively seeking your services.
2. Prioritizing high-value accounts
Effective account selection should focus on businesses that align with your goals and offer high revenue potential. Segmenting target accounts by industry, size, and revenue enhances your ability to customize outreach to specific needs.
Intent data and behavioral insights can identify accounts actively seeking similar solutions, allowing you to prioritize those further along in the buying process. When evaluating strategic value, consider long-term growth potential and cross-selling opportunities.
As Ross Howard, former Director of Insights and Intelligence at Inbox Insight, noted during our webinar with Bombora, “Actioning Intent Data: Step-by-Step Strategies for Lead Generation Success”, “The best customers are not just those who buy from us today; it’s those who should buy from us tomorrow.“ This forward-thinking approach ensures you consider future potential, not just current status.
Solution: Improve targeting accuracy by integrating comprehensive data analyses and using advanced analytics to profile and predict high-value accounts with greater precision. Apply predictive analytics and machine learning to refine these efforts, focusing on the most promising prospects.
3. Allocating resources effectively
ABM success depends on appropriate resource allocation—budget, personnel, and technology. Finding balance between investing in expensive high-value account campaigns and general marketing activities is critical. Creating a dedicated team and acquiring the right ABM tools requires strategic budgeting and careful recruitment.
Technology investments should focus on tools that facilitate effective account selection and campaign management, though integrating these with existing systems presents challenges.
Solution: Engage in thorough planning and take a strategic approach to resource allocation. Define clear roles within the ABM team, tie expenditures to predicted ROI, and adopt scalable technologies. Ongoing training and skill development for ABM teams can maximize efficiency and impact.
4. Aligning sales and marketing teams
According to our ABM infographic, the lack of alignment between sales and marketing teams ranks as one of the top three challenges facing companies. ABM requires tight collaboration between these functions as they work toward the common goal of converting high-value accounts.
When these departments operate separately, it creates disconnects in messaging, targeting, and strategy. Marketing may pursue accounts that sales doesn’t prioritize, or sales may be unaware of marketing efforts aimed at their key accounts, resulting in wasted resources and a disjointed buyer experience.
Solution: To improve sales and marketing alignment:
- Establish shared goals through consistent communication
- Align metrics by integrating technology platforms for a unified view
- Hold regular strategy meetings and joint training to improve cooperation
- Implement a shared platform for real-time updates on account information
As Pam Didner, author and fractional CMO, emphasized on episode 4 of the Demand Bites podcast, “Talk to each other… Salespeople… let them know what you are looking for… Marketing… you cannot create content and throw it to the other side of the wall and then expect salespeople to use it… try to understand each other’s perspective…“
Interestingly, as companies advance in ABM maturity, meeting frequency declines. The majority (41%) of fully synchronized ABM programs only meet quarterly, suggesting that mature programs establish more efficient processes requiring less frequent coordination.
5. Reaching decision-makers
Connecting with the right decision-makers is a common obstacle in B2B. Even with a well-crafted ICP and account list, reaching those with purchasing authority remains challenging. Decision-makers can be scattered throughout different levels and departments, obscuring where the real influence resides.
High-level executives are particularly difficult to reach, often protected by layers of gatekeeping.
Solution: Develop messages that directly address the specific concerns, goals, and needs of each decision-maker. An effective approach captures attention, demonstrates your industry expertise, and distinguishes you from competitors.
For greater impact, apply your knowledge of industry challenges, use shared connections, and incorporate insights that resonate with those in authority positions. This approach not only gets you noticed but also builds trust and lays groundwork for ongoing relationships.
As Samantha Ranieri highlighted on episode 2 of Demand Bites, “The moment that you lose out on personalization in this saturated market, you’re doing yourself a disservice.” This aligns with buyer expectations, as our research shows more than half (51%) of decision-makers want a high or very high level of personalization when evaluating B2B purchases.
After crafting audience-focused messages, deploy targeted demand generation tactics to reach accounts on your list with your content and engage key decision-makers. Combining content syndication, paid media, and SDR outreach with customized content increases account penetration and brand awareness faster than disconnected channels working independently.
6. Managing data effectively
In ABM, the challenge isn’t just handling data volume but distinguishing valuable insights from “vanity data.” Metrics like website visitors or social media followers may appear impressive but lack direct impact on business outcomes, potentially distracting from more meaningful analytics.
Successful ABM strategies focus on metrics directly correlated with revenue generation and account engagement.
Solution: Filter through data noise by prioritizing information aligned with specific business objectives and target account characteristics. Use tools and analytical models that emphasize relevant data to avoid overload. This focused approach ensures marketing efforts are guided by actionable insights, improving engagement and driving profitability.
7. Overcoming technology integration challenges
Technology is central to ABM, but integrating various tools—CRM, marketing automation, data enrichment services, and content management systems—presents significant challenges. Integration often involves complex and costly processes, particularly with legacy systems or isolated datasets.
Problems like lack of standardization between different technologies lead to inconsistent data, duplications, and efficiency barriers that weaken ABM campaigns. This affects internal operations and customer perception—slightly over half (51%) of B2B buyers cited poor integration with their existing tech stack as a reason to consider new vendors. Additionally, constant technological evolution requires frequent updates, causing potential disruptions and demanding resources for implementation and training.
Solution: Conduct audits to identify integration weaknesses and overlaps. Invest in technologies with strong integration capabilities and adaptable architectures. Encourage cooperation among marketing, sales, and IT departments to unify integration efforts, ensuring technology effectively supports ABM strategies.
8. Simplifying technology stacks
Accumulating specialized tools often complicates the ABM tech stack, causing inefficiencies, data fragmentation, and disjointed ABM execution. Too many tools can obscure unified account views, undermine consistent engagement tracking, and drain resources through extensive management, training, and maintenance requirements.
Solution: Periodically audit your tech suite to identify consolidation opportunities. Prioritize integrated platforms capable of supporting multiple functions to promote efficiency and data cohesion. Foster alignment between marketing and sales, and establish structured guidelines for technology use and coordination. This optimized approach significantly strengthens ABM initiatives.
Sometimes onboarding new tech isn’t the solution when there’s insufficient staff to use it consistently.
9. Addressing skills gaps and resource constraints
Businesses often struggle with ABM implementation due to internal expertise and resource limitations. According to our ABM research report, the most significant challenge for UK-based marketers in planning and executing an ABM strategy was the internal skills gap and resource constraints at 34%.
Uncover the key regional differences in the current state of ABM across the US and UK here.
ABM requires specialized skills that may be absent in existing teams, along with dedicated personnel and budget.
Critical ABM skills include:
- Data analysis and management for identifying accounts, personalizing messages, and measuring performance
- Content creation and personalization based on target needs and decision-making processes
- Campaign orchestration across multiple channels to ensure cohesive account experiences
- Measurement and analytics to track ROI and effectiveness despite complexity
Solution: To overcome these gaps, organizations should:
- Provide training and development for current employees
- Hire specialists or contract with external consultants or ABM agencies
- Allocate targeted budgets and resources to support ABM efforts
Addressing these elements helps businesses prepare for ABM complexity and set up successful targeted marketing initiatives.
10. Measuring ABM performance
Measuring ABM success is essential but complex due to multiple touchpoints and varied channels, complicating revenue attribution. Establishing relevant metrics tailored to business goals is crucial to understand ABM’s impact.
Instead of traditional lead-centric metrics, ABM focuses on account-level engagement, including engagement scores, sales pipeline velocity, and revenue per account. These provide a more complete view of effectiveness.
Consistent, integrated data from marketing automation, CRM, and web analytics platforms is vital yet challenging to achieve, affecting analysis reliability. ABM’s longer sales cycles further complicate attributing marketing efforts to revenue. Multi-touch attribution models can offer deeper insights into how interactions influence the buyer’s journey.
Solution: Develop a reporting framework examining account engagement in terms of penetration and intent. This should highlight accounts engaging with content and generating multiple recent leads. Prioritize these accounts for sales engagement and flag low activity that might damage conversion opportunities.
For optimal ABM performance, adopt a measurement approach that encompasses the entire customer lifecycle, from initial awareness through deal closure and post-sale activities. Aligning metrics with broad business objectives enables extraction of actionable insights, facilitating informed decisions and continuous ABM improvement.
Struggling with these ABM challenges? See how Inbox Insight’s expert services provide the strategic solutions you need. Explore our ABM Services.
