Sarah Jones ACIM, a marketing consultant specialising in Account-Based Marketing (ABM), led CIM’s most recent member exclusive webinar on B2B marketing strategies for 2026. The webinar addressed common challenges like sales-marketing misalignment and the effectiveness of ABM for different product values.

Jones’ experience as a marketing consultant has meant she has worked with global brands and supports teams in acquisition, retention, and engagement. She is also a course director for CIM, leading the ABM masterclass. Throughout the webinar, Jones emphasised the importance of ABM in driving growth, focusing on audience, messaging, channel, and measurement.

Modern ABM 

The evolution of ABM from an activity to a strategy mean ABM’s results are stronger, longer-lasting customer relationships and better business outcomes. Rather than executing fragmented activities, organisations can focus on orchestrating people, processes, and technologies to create ongoing, coordinated conversations with high-value accounts.

ABM is described as an ongoing conversation from acquisition to retention, requiring collaboration from all teams and often taking months or years to achieve success. Jones highlighted the importance of coordinating personalised marketing messages across sales, customer service, and marketing teams.

The session also covered the challenges of ABM, such as low impact, slow pipelines, and lack of strategic clarity, and the need for precision, orchestration, and technology to achieve real results. Jones launched a poll to understand the biggest challenges holding attendees’ ABM strategy back, with results showing that too many accounts, unclear priorities, and personalisation challenges are common issues.

Strategic actions and advantages 

To address many of the common challenges with ABM, Jones’ recommended focusing on tactical actions such as reviewing output metrics and considering objectives and KPIs.  Identifying friction in the customer journey, understanding the impact of ABM campaigns, and using technology can also provide competitive advantages.
Jones encouraged attendees to test and learn, make honest assessments and move from activity-based to strategy-led approaches to improve ABM performance. The goal is to move from an isolated outreach to a structured, long-term approach that builds trust that delivers measurable value right from acquisition.

Personalisation, messaging, and channel execution

Personalisation with purpose means efforts are intentionally focused on what truly matters to each decision-maker and account. This addresses specific pain points and motivations of key stakeholders to highlight friction points and demonstrate value.

Messaging should be persona-led, addressing commercial or operational concerns, and supported by internal alignment and role-specific objection lists. Channels should be consistent and focused, with robust messaging pillars and core stories that resonate across different channels. And measurement is crucial for demonstrating account progression, pipeline quality, and business impact, with clear metrics and KPIs to align with stakeholders.

This purposeful approach avoids collecting unnecessary data and ensures that every interaction is meaningful, enabling you to deliver better impact for both the customer and your business.

Measuring ABM success and optimising performance

Measurement shows whether your ABM efforts are advancing key accounts through the pipeline, improving engagement, and delivering business results such as increased revenue, retention, or expansion.
Clear metrics provide a shared language for sales, marketing, and leadership, ensuring everyone knows what success looks like and are focused on the right outcomes. Jones suggests breaking down ABM approaches into core areas: audience, message, channel, and metric, and focusing on alignment, optimisation, and strategic clarity.

During the webinar, she suggested a 90-day action plan to review and optimise ABM activities, including building strategic clarity, testing and implementing, and improving based on progression data. The plan includes updating ideal customer profiles, mapping messaging to objections, and creating detailed account plans and playbooks to ensure alignment and success. CIM members can watch back the webinar here to review the 90-day plan and create their own.

Final thoughts

The session concluded with Jones reiterating the importance of having a sponsor for ABM, aligning sales and marketing teams, and the possibility to use AI tools to support ABM efforts. The webinar provided a comprehensive exploration of Account Based Marketing with expert insights and practical frameworks, and Jones showed attendees how to turn ABM activity into measurable business impact.

ABM is an ongoing journey that thrives on collaboration, continual assessment, and a commitment to delivering real value for both businesses and clients. 

Looking for further learning opportunities on ABM? CIM’s ABM Masterclass training course takes a deeper dive into the three strategic approaches to ABM and will help you deliver maximum performance.