Scaling ABM Pipelines: Common Challenges Solved

Samuel Hall
2 days ago
15 min read

Updated: 1 day ago

Scaling ABM pipelines can increase revenue by 208%, deliver 10x ROI, and reduce wasted marketing spend. But scaling isn’t easy.

Key challenges include resource allocation, data fragmentation, sales-marketing misalignment, and maintaining personalisation at scale. Here’s how to tackle them:

Resource Allocation: Use tiered account grouping (high-value accounts get personalised attention, lower-value accounts use scalable strategies).
Data Integration: Centralise data from CRMs, marketing platforms, and analytics tools to eliminate silos and improve targeting.
Sales-Marketing Alignment: Share KPIs and goals, hold regular cross-team meetings, and use integrated tools for seamless collaboration.
Personalisation at Scale: Leverage AI and modular content to create tailored campaigns efficiently without overloading your team.

Scaling ABM requires clear processes, unified data, and strong team collaboration. Organisations applying these strategies have seen results like a 220% increase in conversion rates and £28.4M in influenced pipeline.

Read on for actionable steps to overcome these challenges and grow your ABM strategy.

Developing a centralized ABM playbook and scaling ABM with Andy Culligan

Fixing Resource Allocation Problems

When you're scaling from just a few accounts to managing many, it can stretch your team thin, scatter budgets, and make personalisation feel impossible. To tackle this, you need a structured plan that matches your resources to each account's potential. Forget the one-size-fits-all approach - focusing strategically on key prospects ensures they get the attention they deserve.

Creating Tiered Account Groups

Organising your accounts into tiers based on their potential value and strategic fit is a game-changer. This method replaces guesswork with a clear framework, ensuring your resources are directed where they matter most. Here's how it works:

Tier 1 accounts: These are your top priorities. They require highly tailored content and direct engagement, as they represent your most critical prospects.
Tier 2 accounts: These accounts benefit from scalable personalisation, often supported by marketing automation, offering a balanced level of attention.
Tier 3 accounts: Managed with segmented messaging and tailored offers, these accounts allow you to efficiently reach a broader audience without overextending your resources.

This tiered system ensures your high-priority accounts get the personalised support they need, while lower-tier accounts are still managed effectively through broader strategies.

Step-by-Step Scaling for Growth

Grouping accounts is just the beginning. To refine resource allocation and support growth, a phased approach works best:

Start with a pilot programme focused on select key accounts. This allows you to fine-tune your content, engagement strategies, and ROI measurement. It’s a low-risk way to test and optimise your approach.

Next, bring in automation tools to manage routine tasks without compromising personalisation. For instance, marketing automation platforms can handle email campaigns, social media interactions, and lead scoring. Research shows that 74% of B2B marketers consider AI-powered automation a major driver of ROI.

As your strategy scales, coordinate multi-channel campaigns spanning email, social media, web personalisation, and even direct mail. One case study found that using predictive AI to unify campaign execution doubled email response rates, tripled web traffic from high-intent accounts, and boosted form submissions.

Finally, use data analytics to continuously refine how you allocate resources. By combining intent data with predictive lead scoring, 92% of B2B marketers improved their lead prioritisation and conversion rates. In one example, a tiered targeting approach backed by predictive analytics led to a 220% increase in conversion rates and faster pipeline progression.

Collaboration across teams is crucial too. Regular alignment meetings, shared dashboards, and unified metrics keep everyone - marketing, sales, and customer success - focused on the same high-priority goals. In fact, 68% of B2B organisations say this kind of teamwork is essential for scaling ABM campaigns successfully.

Fixing Data Fragmentation Issues

As your ABM campaign expands, managing fragmented data sources becomes a critical challenge. Your CRM might store account details, marketing automation platforms track engagement, and analytics tools measure performance - but these systems often don’t communicate effectively. This lack of integration creates blind spots that can derail your strategy. To scale ABM pipelines effectively and maximise ROI, unified data is essential.

On average, knowledge workers spend about 30% of their time searching for information because data is scattered across multiple platforms. For ABM campaigns, this disorganisation makes it nearly impossible to identify which accounts are actively engaged or to pinpoint where your budget is yielding the best results.

"Each touchpoint is storing data about your customer about that customer journey... We're optimising the customer journey in a micro sense, but each new optimisation is creating a macro problem of a new siloed source of data that we need to bring together to get a holistic understanding of our customers."– Ganesh Subramanian, Director of Product Marketing at Snowflake

The consequences extend beyond wasted time. Fragmented data leads to delayed insights, inconsistent reporting, and inaccurate ROI calculations. Nearly 45% of marketers face data integration challenges, while 40% struggle with messy CRM data that hinders ABM tracking. These issues make it hard to allocate marketing spend effectively and often result in reporting inconsistencies that obscure campaign performance.

Combining Data Sources for Better Results

To address these challenges, consolidating your data is a crucial step in scaling ABM efforts. By centralising firmographic, technographic, and behavioural data, you can create a complete account view, enabling better decision-making and more precise targeting.

Start by auditing your data systems to uncover gaps and overlaps that lead to duplicate or conflicting information. A staggering 35% of marketers report difficulties mapping leads to accounts, often due to siloed data that lacks proper connections.

Focus on integrating three core data types:

First-party data: Information from your website, CRM, and marketing platforms provides reliable insights into account behaviour and engagement.
Third-party intent data: This data reveals broader buying signals across the web, offering additional context, though it may lack precision.
Technographic data: Understanding the technology stacks of your target accounts helps you tailor messaging and identify compatibility opportunities.

The results of effective data integration speak volumes. For example, in 2024, Keboola leveraged Cognism to access Bombora’s intent data, focusing on topics relevant to their data integration solutions. They identified 20 companies per week showing strong intent signals and used verified direct dial mobile numbers to reach decision-makers. This approach resulted in £95,000 in pipeline, with intent data driving 60% of their demos.

To ensure success, clean and enrich your data regularly. Establish clear guidelines for data collection, storage, and usage across platforms. This prevents the "garbage-in, garbage-out" issue that can undermine even the most sophisticated ABM strategies.

Using Technology to Connect Data

Once your data sources are unified, integrating technology can automate processes and enhance data usability. API-driven platforms are particularly effective at connecting disparate data streams automatically. It’s important to choose tools that integrate seamlessly with your existing CRM and marketing automation systems while allowing for future scalability.

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) are especially useful for consolidating customer data from various sources into a single, actionable view. These platforms go beyond data storage - they clean, enrich, and harmonise information to generate insights. Modern CDPs handle both structured and unstructured data, offering a more comprehensive view of account engagement and intent.

"The data cloud was purpose-built for this problem like this... It is the next evolution of how data is being leveraged across organisations. Being able to store all your data in one place and leverage it without managing complex pipelines and many copies of data - this is the promise of the data cloud."– Ganesh Subramanian, Director of Product Marketing at Snowflake

When selecting platforms, prioritise those with robust API capabilities and real-time synchronisation. Real-time data updates allow you to respond instantly to account behaviour, unlike batch processing, which can introduce delays. For instance, Salesforce Data Cloud enables immediate responses to customer actions, triggering personalised engagement in real time.

Integration should go beyond simply connecting systems. Aim to create automated workflows that feed clean, enriched data into reporting tools, reducing manual effort and errors. Consider the example of Leadspace’s B2B data enrichment tools, which transformed a team’s workflow by eliminating the need to pull, dedupe, and verify lists from multiple vendors. Instead, they could build lists more efficiently from a single source, significantly reducing their data management workload.

"Leadspace's B2B data enrichment tools significantly reduce the amount of data management work my team has to do every day. Previously we'd have to pull multiple lists from multiple different vendors for every single project, then dedupe, compare, verify, and so on. Now, we have a way to build our lists more effectively and efficiently, from a single source. It's a huge change."– Shannon Copeland, Chief Operations Officer

The technology market offers a variety of specialised tools for data integration. Platforms like 6sense, Demandbase, and ZoomInfo Marketing have strong integration capabilities, with Gartner Peer Insights ratings of 4.4/5, 4.5/5, and 4.6/5 respectively. The key is to select tools that complement your existing systems rather than complicate them.

However, remember that technology alone won’t solve fragmentation issues. Establish clear data governance frameworks, standardise measurement practices, and monitor systems regularly to ensure your integrated setup continues to deliver accurate, actionable insights as your ABM strategy evolves.

Improving Sales and Marketing Team Alignment

Even with access to unified data and advanced tools, misaligned sales and marketing teams can derail Account-Based Marketing (ABM) efforts. Miscommunication or lack of coordination between these teams can significantly impact results. In fact, 25% of teams operate in silos, which can cost B2B companies up to 10% in revenue losses. Only 17% of organisations achieve full alignment between sales and marketing.

When these teams fail to work together, the results can include inconsistent messaging, inefficient use of resources, and missed opportunities with high-value accounts. For example, sales teams end up spending 40% of their time on unproductive prospecting.

On the flip side, the benefits of alignment are hard to ignore. Companies with well-aligned sales and marketing teams experience 24% faster growth rates, 27% faster profit growth, and are 67% better at closing deals. They also enjoy 36% higher customer retention rates. These gains become even more critical in ABM, where coordinated efforts to engage target accounts are a must.

"Make sure that you have that Marketing and Sales alignment because if you don't have that at the very beginning, you're never going to have it."– Amy Hall, Global ABM Manager at Hitachi Vantara

However, a major challenge remains: only 31.8% of sales reps and marketers align on analytics and metrics. This disconnect can make it difficult to scale ABM pipelines effectively, as both teams need to share a unified approach to engage target accounts. Establishing clear, shared goals is critical to overcoming this issue.

Setting Shared Goals and Metrics

To align sales and marketing efforts, it's essential to replace separate KPIs with shared revenue goals. Instead of marketing focusing on MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) and sales chasing closed deals, both teams should prioritise metrics that drive ABM success, such as pipeline velocity, account engagement depth, and revenue generated from target accounts.

"Marketing must shift from merely driving leads to generating revenue."– Alex Kracov, founder and CEO, Dock [15]

Some effective shared metrics for ABM include:

Conversion rates from target accounts
Pipeline growth within your ideal customer profile
Account engagement progression

For instance, if your ABM strategy generates three opportunities valued at £50,000, £75,000, and £100,000, the influenced pipeline creation would total £225,000.

"When the Sales and Marketing teams are looking at the same metrics and trying to hit the same North Star, lots of other pieces of ABM fall into place."– Samantha Mayer, SMB and Pardot Growth Marketing, Salesforce Pardot

Shared metrics should directly link to business outcomes. Since 94% of B2B buying decisions involve a group of three or more stakeholders, metrics like multi-touch attribution, account penetration rates, and engagement quality across buying committees are essential.

Building Clear Team Roles for ABM

To bridge the gap between sales and marketing, you need clearly defined roles and responsibilities. Without this clarity, teams risk duplicating efforts or sending mixed messages to high-value accounts.

Start by creating shared lead qualification standards that both teams agree on. Currently, only 25% of marketing-generated leads are qualified enough to move to sales. This disparity often stems from differing definitions of what constitutes a qualified lead within a target account.

A unified lead scoring model can help. This model should evaluate factors like account fit, buying stage, and multi-stakeholder engagement. Assign roles accordingly:

Marketing: Focuses on account research, multi-channel campaigns, and nurturing leads.
Sales: Handles personal outreach and deal progression.

To address common challenges, consider the following solutions:

Challenge	Solution
Lack of Communication Between Teams	Schedule regular inter-department meetings and use tools like Slack for open communication
Differing Priorities and Metrics	Align on shared goals and KPIs. Tools like HubSpot CRM can unify metrics
Inconsistent Messaging	Develop a cohesive content strategy with input from both teams. Tools like Trello can help manage content calendars
Siloed Data and CRM Systems	Integrate CRM and marketing automation tools for a unified view of customer interactions. Platforms like Salesforce are ideal for this

Formalising roles and KPIs for everyone involved in ABM is essential. For example, customer success teams can provide insights into opportunities for account growth and retention strategies.

"If you don't have marketing and sales aligned and using the same set of data, then you're not really doing ABM."– Liam Doyle, SVP of Product Management, Salesforce

Regular cross-team meetings can keep everyone on track. These sessions allow teams to discuss market conditions, refine campaigns, and ensure consistent messaging across all touchpoints. Marketing can adjust strategies based on sales feedback, while sales can use marketing insights to improve outreach.

ABM roles need to adapt to the account's stage in the buyer journey. For instance, early-stage accounts might require more nurturing from marketing, while late-stage accounts demand focused sales efforts. Clear handoff procedures between teams ensure seamless transitions.

Another helpful approach is appointing ABM leaders to act as liaisons between sales and marketing. These leaders ensure both teams stay informed about account developments and strategic shifts, which is especially important when scaling ABM across multiple account tiers.

Finally, your technology stack should support these roles without creating new silos. 74% of organisations using integrated CRM and marketing automation tools report better alignment between sales and marketing. Choose platforms that provide visibility into each team's activities while maintaining clear ownership of tasks and outcomes.

Balancing Scale with Personalisation

Once you've improved data integration and team alignment, the next hurdle is maintaining personalisation while scaling your ABM efforts. This is no small feat - 78% of enterprise ABM practitioners say personalisation at scale is their biggest challenge. Yet, the rewards are clear: large organisations using ABM at scale report 208% higher revenue growth compared to those sticking with traditional marketing methods.

The key lies in strategic resource allocation and leveraging smart technology. Instead of trying to personalise every single interaction for every account, successful ABM programmes use a tiered approach. This method aligns the level of personalisation with the value of each account.

"In practice, it can become inefficient to over-personalise messages to accounts with low or no probability to buy and to under-personalise accounts with a high probability to buy. That's why tiering accounts is so important in ABM."– Joe Kevens, Founder of B2B SaaS Reviews and Director of Demand Generation at PartnerStack

A global tech company offers a great example of this. Using Karrot.ai, they scaled their ABM programme from 100 to 2,000 target accounts by adopting a tiered approach and building a modular content architecture. The results? A 187% increase in target account engagement, a 64% boost in MQL-to-opportunity conversions, and an influenced pipeline of around £28.4 million in just six months. Additionally, 78% of their sales team reported having more meaningful conversations.

In this tiered system, high-value accounts receive highly personalised 1:1 attention, while lower-value accounts benefit from automated personalisation.

Using AI for Modular Content Creation

Artificial intelligence is changing the game for ABM personalisation. AI-assisted workflows have slashed campaign build times by 50–70%, freeing up time for teams to focus on strategy and building relationships.

A modular content strategy plays a crucial role here. Instead of creating entirely bespoke materials for each account, businesses can develop modular content assets that are dynamically tailored to account characteristics like industry, company size, buying stage, and engagement history. Think of it as building blocks - value propositions, case studies, product features, insights, and solutions - that AI can assemble into personalised messages.

Charlesgate demonstrated the power of this approach, achieving a record sales quarter with over £3 million in revenue for their lead sales rep. Their AI-powered ABM content strategy delivered highly tailored messaging to each target account. It's no surprise that 89% of marketers report positive ROI from personalisation in their campaigns. Modern AI tools can even adjust in real time, offering more technical content when a prospect shows interest in detailed information.

By combining modular content with AI capabilities, businesses can achieve impactful personalisation without blowing their budgets.

Getting More Personalisation Within Budget

Personalisation doesn't have to be expensive. In fact, McKinsey found that personalisation can cut customer acquisition costs by up to 50%, increase revenue by 5% to 15%, and improve marketing ROI by 10% to 30%.

The first step is smart segmentation. Go beyond basic demographics to include individual preferences, company traits, industry trends, and job-specific needs. For example, a European telecom company used AI and generative AI in its personalisation engine, leading to a 10% higher engagement rate among customers receiving tailored messages.

Even small changes can make a big difference. Personalised email copy, for instance, can boost open rates by 53%. Budget-friendly strategies include:

IP tracking to create targeted website experiences.
Behavioural smart content that adapts to visitor actions.
Customised email sequences tailored to account characteristics.

A North American retailer saw a 3% increase in annualised margins within three months by using predictive analytics to understand customer responsiveness and testing various approaches.

The most effective personalisation often comes from understanding your audience deeply, rather than creating new content for every interaction. While 71% of buyers want personalised interactions, this doesn’t mean reinventing the wheel. Instead, focus on delivering timely, relevant messages based on each account's stage in the buying journey.

Social media is another cost-effective way to personalise. With 84% of C-level and VP-level buyers influenced by social media, tailoring ads and organic posts to specific account segments can boost engagement without requiring significant content investments.

Conclusion: Key Points and Next Steps

Main Solutions Summary

Successfully scaling ABM pipelines comes down to addressing four critical challenges: resource allocation, data integration, sales-marketing alignment, and personalisation at scale. Organisations that adopt tiered account grouping models often see a boost in revenue, with some reporting measurable gains. For example, unified data systems that consolidate account intelligence have proven transformative - Vymo saw a 4.5X increase in MQL-to-SQL conversion rates by integrating CRM with AI-powered insights.

Aligning sales and marketing teams is another cornerstone of ABM success. Companies with aligned teams are 103% more likely to exceed their goals. When these teams share objectives and work from the same data, revenue growth becomes not just possible but predictable.

Personalisation at scale has also evolved. Thanks to AI-driven tools, businesses no longer have to choose between speed and relevance. Saleo, for instance, created 350 personalised landing pages for 1,750 contacts in just 43 hours - an 8X improvement in content production speed.

The numbers speak for themselves: 97% of marketers agree that ABM delivers superior ROI, and large organisations have reported up to 208% higher revenue growth through ABM initiatives. These strategies not only address scaling challenges but lay the groundwork for sustainable, high-ROI ABM practices.

Using ABM Answered for Ongoing Growth

Beyond these strategies, ongoing learning and support are essential for maintaining momentum. This is where ABM Answered becomes a valuable resource. The platform offers a library of over 1,000 short-form video solutions, providing quick, actionable guidance for teams facing specific ABM challenges.

The collaborative community within ABM Answered is another standout feature. By connecting with other ABM practitioners, teams can gain practical insights from those who’ve navigated similar hurdles. These real-world perspectives complement theoretical strategies, helping organisations solve problems faster and avoid common missteps.

ABM Answered also provides tactical tools like personalised video games and battlecards to help teams tackle scaling challenges. For organisations seeking tailored solutions, the platform’s incubator programme allows for co-developing and launching new ABM tools.

Scaling ABM pipelines isn’t about achieving perfection from the outset. It’s about applying proven strategies, learning from real-world examples, and having access to ongoing support. Companies that have achieved a 187% increase in target account engagement and influenced pipelines worth £28.4 million have done so by adopting systematic approaches, leveraging the right tools, and building strong community connections. These frameworks not only address immediate challenges but also pave the way for consistent and scalable revenue growth.

FAQs

How can organisations optimise resource allocation when scaling ABM pipelines?

To make the most of your resources while scaling Account-Based Marketing (ABM) efforts, it’s essential to focus on prioritisation and teamwork. Begin by pinpointing high-value accounts that promise the best return on investment (ROI). By channelling resources into these key opportunities, you can ensure your efforts are directed where they will have the most impact.

Strong collaboration between sales and marketing teams is equally important. Take stock of your internal resources - both personnel and technology - to confirm they’re being used effectively. Incorporating marketing automation tools can be a game-changer, helping to simplify workflows while maintaining a personalised touch. This way, you can handle larger campaigns without overloading your team or sacrificing quality.

How can I address data fragmentation in Account-Based Marketing (ABM) campaigns?

To address the issue of fragmented data in ABM campaigns, start by bringing together data management platforms (DMPs) and customer data platforms (CDPs). These tools work together to gather and unify data from various sources, eliminating silos and offering a complete picture of customer interactions. This unified approach lays the groundwork for better targeting and more tailored personalisation efforts.

It's also crucial to establish clear data governance policies. These policies help standardise data formats across teams, ensuring consistency and accuracy. On top of that, using advanced analytics tools can improve data quality and deliver deeper insights into customer behaviour. By focusing on these solutions, you can overcome data fragmentation and fine-tune your ABM strategies for better results.

How does AI help personalise ABM strategies at scale?

AI is transforming how personalisation is scaled in Account-Based Marketing (ABM). By leveraging data analytics and machine learning, it helps marketers craft highly targeted and meaningful interactions. With AI, vast amounts of account data can be processed efficiently, enabling the identification of specific needs and preferences to deliver customised content and campaigns.

Take personalised messaging, for instance. AI can automate recommendations and communications based on real-time insights, making every interaction feel relevant and engaging. On top of that, predictive analytics powered by AI allows marketers to anticipate customer behaviour, fine-tuning their strategies to drive better engagement. The result? Greater efficiency and improved outcomes across ABM efforts.