8 Reasons Why Your ABM Program Is Not Working and How to Fix It
15 min
Executive summary:
Many ABM programs fall short due to misaligned targeting, lack of personalization, and outdated engagement strategies. This article identifies eight root causes of poor ABM performance and presents strategic solutions designed to optimize impact across the full buyer journey.
Learn how to elevate your ABM strategy from disconnected tactics to a measurable growth engine.
Account Based Marketing (ABM) has long been considered an effective marketing discipline for focused strategies that target strategic, high-value accounts.
However, buying groups at these accounts are often complex. According to INFUSE Voice of the Buyer 2025, these groups typically comprise four to six individuals or more.
Average size of buying groups by geographic location:
Region
Global
North America
Europe
APAC
Buying group members
15+
4-6
4-6
15+
Average
20%
34.3%
35.9%
28.4%
Source: Voice of the Buyer 2025
These extensive buying groups, in combination with lengthy purchasing cycles, can represent a formidable challenge and barrier to performance goals for revenue teams.
As a result, ABM strategies can easily falter due to misalignment between marketing execution and the non-linear and often individualistic nature of modern buyer journeys—failing to meet high expectations for personalized, buyer-led experiences.
"Organizations that treat ABM as more of a short-term tactic will find that strategies yield poor performance due to a fundamental misalignment with the complexity and length of B2B buyer journeys. The key is to stop treating ABM as a tactic, and to start thinking about it as an always-on, dynamic strategy.”
VP APAC, INFUSE
This article examines eight critical factors that negatively impact the performance of ABM programs and outlines strategic areas of focus to help realign and optimize initiatives for measurable impact.
8 areas of focus to improve ABM performance
1. How to improve account selection
Improve pipeline quality by targeting high-intent accounts, not just high-revenue ones.
When selecting target accounts, it is easy to revert to a checklist approach akin to a shopping list of accounts that is based on maximum potential revenue. However, moving beyond a surface-level fit is essential.
In-market status, demonstrated intent, budget availability, and alignment with your organization’s Ideal Client Profile (ICP) are all critical indicators that should inform which accounts make the list. By leveraging insights and intent signals, marketing and sales teams can identify the accounts most likely to engage and convert.
It is also essential to consider not only basic targeting criteria, but a prospect’s technology install base and competitive landscape insights—adding an extra layer of intelligence that supports more strategic, data-driven account selection. This ensures time and resources are concentrated on high-value opportunities with the highest relevance, intent, or displacement potential, ultimately driving long-term growth and supporting broader revenue goals.
The size of the target account list is equally important. An overly expansive account list can dilute strategic focus, reduce personalization quality, and strain internal resources. Personalized engagement, especially in one-to-one or one-to-few ABM models, is extremely challenging and often ineffective across a bloated list.
Instead, a refined and manageable list enables deeper personalization, better alignment with buyer needs, and stronger engagement across the buyer’s journey. In addition, it allows for the orchestration of meaningful, intent-driven outreach that resonates with the right stakeholders at the right time.
Ultimately, ABM thrives on precision and depth. By intelligently selecting and sizing account lists, organizations can achieve stronger engagement, more impactful pipeline performance, and greater efficiency.
Best practices for effective account selection
"Analyze existing clients and identify common characteristics, considering factors such as firmographics and technographics, to identify their pain points and goals. Consider how they make purchasing decisions and determine key influences to develop tailor-made messaging that resonates.”
VP Global Client Strategy, INFUSE
2. Steps for building an effective ABM blueprint
Create cross-functional alignment and measurable ABM results with a clear, data-informed blueprint.
Developing an ABM blueprint plays a crucial role in overcoming common challenges. This can be achieved by leveraging data insights, such as your target account selection, their priorities, and findings on the most effective timing for engagement.
Together, these insights provide a dependable foundation for your ABM strategies, enabling you to scale meaningful results.
A blueprint helps to:
Best practices for creating an ABM blueprint
3. Ways to leverage demand intelligence in B2B marketing
Use buyer signals and data-driven insights to craft more compelling, timely engagement. ABM programs that have been tailored precisely to the unique characteristics and priorities of each buyer within the buying group will ultimately have a greater impact.
While challenging, this requires a deep understanding of buying group members’ specific challenges and objectives, including the commonalities behind buyer motivations, behavior, and purchase triggers—also known as demand intelligence.
By actively leveraging historic data insights from accounts in similar industries or with similar structures, organizations can plan engagement tactics based on account buyer signals, ensuring that outreach is relevant, timely, and compelling.
Moreover, demand intelligence enables precision targeting and resource allocation. By understanding which accounts are in-market, their priorities, and their buying journey stage, teams can prioritize efforts where they are most likely to generate impact.
Best practices to source demand intelligence to develop an in-depth understanding of buyers
4. Managing buying group complexity in ABM
Influence all decision makers by addressing the complex structure of B2B buying groups. While ensuring a balance between the scale and targeting of ABM programs is essential, overlooking key members of the buying group can significantly impact performance.
Larger deal sizes often involve large, cross-functional committees, requiring careful research and continuous monitoring of their evolving behaviors. While buying groups operate as a collective, each member must be approached as an individual with unique motivations and needs.
Without properly mapping out the full buying group, organizations risk engaging the wrong individuals at the wrong stage of the journey, leading to stalled deals and missed opportunities due to challenges remaining unaddressed.
For example, given the pressure buying group members face when making purchase decisions, fear of messing up (FOMU) is a key influence. This makes buyers more cautious of choosing the wrong solution, vendor, or timing, and results in them needing to validate every step.
By identifying buying signals, tracking engagement, and adapting outreach to match and de-risk each stage of the decision making process, organizations can increase their chances of influencing key stakeholders and accelerating the buying journey.
Below is an example of a buying group structure and potential pain points:
Buying group member
Initiator/Influencer
Manager
Operational/IT professional
C-level
Financial manager/director
Pain point
Seeking access to relevant information on challenges
Onboarding and implementation
Technical feasibility, security, integration
Alignment with business goals
Cost and budget constraints
Best practices for navigating buying group complexity
Transform target accounts into revenue with precision ABM
INFUSE demand experts are here to design personalized, buyer intent-driven programs that engage the
entirety of your buying groups and convert high-value accounts—faster.
5. Best practices for deep personalization in ABM
Drive relevance and conversions with deeply personalized messaging for each stakeholder.
ABM thrives on tailored content and meaningful, targeted engagement. When messaging is generic, it fails to capture the attention of buyers and reduces both engagement and conversions.
This is a prevalent issue, as according to Demand Gen Survey, 2024, 51% of buyers find that the nurturing content they receive is too generic and irrelevant to their needs, highlighting the need for buyer-led content.
Every client is unique, and more importantly, every individual buyer within a buying group has distinct priorities, pain points, and decision making roles. Content that fails to address these specific challenges or offer relevant insights is unlikely to achieve meaningful engagement or drive the desired business impact.
For ABM to succeed, content must be deeply relevant—not only to the business but also to the specific role, region, and context of each buyer.
Best practices for personalizing content for buying group members
6. How to create a seamless buying experience for B2B accounts
Accelerate decisions with an ABX strategy that connects every touchpoint in the buying journey.
Today’s buyers expect personalized, immersive experiences that are tailored to their unique journey. Fragmented or inconsistent engagement frustrates prospects, introduces friction, and slows down decision making. In contrast, a seamless, intuitive buyer journey—designed to deliver the right information at the right time—accelerates purchase decisions and builds trust.
Meeting this expectation calls for full organizational alignment around a buyer-centric strategy. Account-Based Experience (ABX) elevates traditional ABM by orchestrating every touchpoint—marketing content, sales outreach, digital experiences, and client success—into a unified, value-driven journey. This holistic approach ensures continuity and relevance across all channels and moments of engagement.
ABM is not a departmental effort; it is an organizational commitment. Structured collaboration, shared service-level agreements, and consistent messaging are essential to eliminate confusion and maintain efficiency. Multi-threading engagement across buying groups, geographies, and channels is vital to ensure all stakeholders feel supported throughout the process, while maximizing account value.
At its core, ABM is about serving prospects and derisking decision making with clarity and value. In a risk-averse environment defined by the fear of making the wrong choice, enabling buyers and forging trust is critical. ABX transforms this vision into a reality by aligning internal teams to meet external expectations, ensuring each interaction contributes meaningfully to a cohesive and compelling buyer journey.
What is multi-threading?
Multi-threading refers to the strategy of engaging multiple stakeholders within a target account simultaneously, rather than focusing on a single or limited number of contacts.
It involves building relationships with multiple roles and customizing outreach and messaging for each buying group member—including across multiple regions. Having a deep understanding of who owns each part of the decision process is key.
Best practices for implementing ABX
7. Strategies to optimize ABM programs using real-time data
Maintain performance by continuously optimizing ABM tactics based on real-time buyer behavior.
To succeed, ABM cannot be utilized as a one-time campaign—it is a dynamic, iterative process that demands continuous refinement. Real-time data insights are essential for fueling optimizations and ensuring that ABM strategies remain aligned with evolving buyer needs.
Insights that can be leveraged to guide performance optimization include:
Ongoing learning and adaptation are essential to maintaining ABM performance. Without regular optimization, programs may struggle to stay aligned with buyer behavior and deliver consistent results.
Best practices for optimizing an ongoing ABM program
8. How to prove ROI for account-based marketing initiatives
Secure continued investment in ABM by proving impact with meaningful ROI metrics.
Difficulties in demonstrating return on investment may diminish the perceived strategic value of ABM within the organization. When success metrics and tracking mechanisms are not clearly defined from the outset, it becomes challenging to assess program effectiveness and to communicate impact.
In the absence of a common definition of success, sales and marketing teams may pursue divergent objectives, resulting in a lack of clarity regarding progress.
To maintain momentum and scale account-based efforts effectively, teams must agree and align on well-defined key performance indicators, monitor performance with discipline, and communicate results consistently across all relevant stakeholders.
Best practices for measuring and demonstrating the value of ABM programs
"Misalignment between marketing and sales teams can jeopardize the performance of ABM programs and a buyer’s experience with your brand. When these departments operate in silos, ABM efforts suffer. Ensure both teams share common goals and maintain open communication for a cohesive strategy.”
VP Global Client Strategy, INFUSE
Key takeaways
Empower Your ABM Strategy with Precision Demand
INFUSE demand experts are poised to craft targeted, buyer-led journeys to engage your priority accounts. We combine precision targeting, buyer signaling, and high performance omnichannel engagement to help you identify, reach, and convert key buyers—at scale.
