account-based-marketing

# Account-based marketing Account-based marketing inverts the usual model: instead of generating leads and finding out which accounts they came from, you choose the accounts and work them. It is a good fit for a narrow set of businesses and an expensive mistake for the rest. ## Qualify the model before adopting it It works when deal sizes are large enough to justify per-account effort, the addressable market is small enough to enumerate, buying groups have several people, and sales cycles are long enough for sustained effort to compound. **It does not work when the deal size cannot carry the cost**, when the market is too large to name, or when marketing and sales will not actually coordinate. That last one is the usual failure: the tooling gets bought, the account list gets built, and the program becomes a more expensive way to run the same campaigns. Run the arithmetic first. Total program cost divided by the number of accounts, against expected deal value and a realistic win rate, tells you the tier structure you can afford — or that you cannot afford this at all. ## Build the list from fit and evidence, then hold it still Start from the accounts that already look like your best customers — not by revenue but by why they bought and whether they stayed. Add observable signals: hiring, technology in use, funding, regulatory pressure, a change in leadership. **Then commit.** A list that churns quarterly cannot compound, and compounding is the only reason this model be...