ABM
Account-Based Marketing
In one line
Account-based marketing (ABM) flips B2B from 'lead by lead' to 'account by account', concentrating marketing and sales effort on a defined list of high-value target companies.
Going deeper
ABM exists because in B2B, a single deal can be worth millions, and treating those buyers as generic web traffic is wasteful. Instead you pick 50–200 named target accounts and run marketing and sales as one team focused on them.
The typical motion: define the target account list off your ICP, run personalised content and ads to decision-makers at those accounts, layer in personalised sales outreach, then extend through customer success. The KPIs are account-level — 'meetings booked across the target 50' — not lead-level.
ABM only works if marketing and sales actually operate as a single unit day to day. Narrowing ad targeting alone isn't ABM. On the tooling side, 6sense and Demandbase are the typical platform plays.
Related terms
ICP
An ideal customer profile (ICP) defines the company-level characteristics of your most valuable B2B customers — the anchor for targeting, content and sales decisions.
MarketingDemand Generation
Demand generation is marketing aimed at creating category awareness and intent from scratch — building demand that didn't exist yet, rather than capturing existing search demand.
MarketingDark Funnel
The dark funnel describes the reality that most B2B buying decisions actually form inside untrackable channels — Slack, DMs, podcasts, communities — long before the form fill.
MarketingMQL
A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a prospect whose engagement and fit signals indicate they are ready to be handed off from marketing to sales.
MarketingSQL
A sales qualified lead (SQL) is a prospect that sales has independently verified — confirmed intent, budget and authority — making them the real starting point of an active sales motion.
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