Account-based marketing gets sold as a marketing initiative: pick your target accounts, build tailored content and run targeted campaigns at them. Marketing owns it, reports on it, and gets asked why it isn't converting.

It isn't converting because ABM was never a marketing-only strategy to begin with.

It starts as an experiment

In practice, I've seen this go wrong before it even properly starts. A business decides to have a go at ABM because everyone else seems to be doing it, not because it's actually been thought through as a strategy. It becomes something to try: pick a few accounts, run some activity at them, see what happens.

Nobody's actually bought into it beyond whoever suggested it. Sales isn't on board, leadership hasn't weighed in, and there's no real commitment behind it, just an experiment. That's usually where it fails, or more often, just quietly fizzles out.

The buying group is the whole point

Most B2B purchases now move through a wide group of stakeholders, not one buyer, and Gartner's research suggests a large share of that buying journey happens before sales is formally contacted, though how much varies sharply by sector and deal type, particularly in relationship-led service businesses, where a salesperson who's already built trust with the right people can be shaping that decision long before any formal enquiry lands. That means a group of people is already working the accounts ABM targets, on their own timeline, often before there's any formal sales conversation.

Marketing can reach that group. It can't close it. Sales can close it, but only if they know who's actually in it, what each of them has already seen, and where the account is in that process. Run ABM as a marketing campaign with sales bolted on at the end, and you get well-targeted content landing on the right accounts with no one following up in the way those accounts actually expect.

Where it actually breaks

The failure point is almost always the handover, or the absence of one. Marketing selects accounts based on firmographic fit. Sales has its own view of which accounts are actually winnable right now, based on signals marketing doesn't see: a champion who's gone quiet, a competitor already in the building, a budget that's frozen until next quarter. Run the two lists separately and you get effort spent on accounts sales already knows are dead, and no effort on the ones sales is quietly trying to close.

What alignment actually requires

Shared account selection, agreed between both teams before anything gets built. A shared view of what's happened with each account, so a salesperson never opens a conversation blind to what marketing has already sent. And follow-through owned jointly, not handed off once and forgotten.

None of that needs to be complicated. It needs both functions treating the account as one shared relationship rather than two separate work streams that happen to target the same company.

Measurement can't stay split either. Marketing tracks impressions, clicks and downloads. Sales tracks pipeline and closed revenue. Neither number tells you whether the account is actually moving. An account can generate plenty of marketing engagement and still sit stalled in sales, or clear every sales stage while marketing has no idea what content got it there.

Shared ABM needs a shared measure. Not one number that replaces marketing's or sales' own reporting, but an account status both teams read the same way: engaged, in conversation, or stalled. That keeps both sides working from the same picture of where an account stands, rather than two reports that happen to be about the same company.

A one-off handover doesn't work either. Account lists shift. A champion leaves, a competitor gets in first, budget opens or closes. A short, regular review between marketing and sales, not a quarterly deck, is what keeps the list honest and stops effort going to accounts that quietly died weeks ago.

ABM done properly is one of the few marketing approaches that forces sales and marketing to actually talk to each other about the same accounts, at the same time. That's the value in it. Treat it as a marketing tactic instead, and you'll have good content landing on the right desks with nobody following it up.