Account-based marketing (ABM) is a way of selling in which a company picks a short list of target companies, and aims all its marketing and sales effort at those companies only. It is also called account-based selling. An ABM platform is the software that runs this. It holds the list, scores each account, shows ads to people at those accounts and measures the results.
Ordinary B2B marketing tries to attract as many leads as possible, from anywhere, and then sorts them. ABM works the other way round. It starts from the few hundred accounts that would be most valuable to win. Then it tries to reach every person who takes part in the decision at each one. In a large company, several people usually decide together: the head of finance, the IT head and the purchase team may all have a say. So ABM tries to reach all of them at the same time.
The platform does four things. First, it helps choose the accounts. It ranks companies by how closely they match the company's best existing customers, and by intent data that shows which of them are researching the product now. Second, it shows ads to people at those accounts. It does this through a demand-side platform (DSP), software that buys online ads automatically, one ad view at a time, through real-time bidding. The DSP bids only when the person viewing the page works at a target account. Third, it coordinates the emails and calls of marketing and sales, through B2B marketing automation and the CRM. Fourth, it measures. For each account, it shows how many people engaged, and which campaigns came before a meeting or a deal. Working out which effort led to a sale is called attribution.
Imagine a Delhi company that sells treasury software, which large companies use to manage their cash across many bank accounts. Its ABM list has 250 Indian companies with yearly revenue above ₹5,000 crore. For one month, the platform shows its ads only to finance and IT staff at those 250 companies. Marketing invites their finance heads to a closed-door breakfast in Mumbai about managing cash across many banks. By the end of the month, the dashboard shows that people at 64 of the 250 accounts clicked an ad, came to the breakfast or visited the website. Eleven of those 64 accounts now have a meeting with a salesperson. The sales team spends its time on those eleven, not on all 250.
ABM costs more for each account than broad marketing does. So it suits companies whose deals are large, where winning a few accounts pays for the effort.