What is the right number of accounts for Account Based Marketing?

Account Based Marketing and Selling has a numbers challenge at its core.

As a strategy, ABM is a vital way to narrow your focus and maximize your resources. But what’s the right number of accounts to include in that target list?

Starting from a total addressable or serviceable market is the right approach. Then, use firmographic and behavioral/intent scoring to prioritize accounts within that set. That’ll get you to a stack-ranked list of accounts. But then what? Where do you draw the line? 500 accounts or 5,000?

It’s going to be a question of diminishing returns for your resources.

You could focus all of your ad spend, social energy, SDR / AE outbound, etc. on a set of 10 accounts. But at what point are you over-saturating your audience? You can’t have your team calling the same 100 people across 10 accounts over and over. You can’t serve up the same campaigns to the same people too. They’ll simply burn out.

On the flip side, you can’t allocate your resources to a list of 10,000 accounts. You likely don’t have the resources to do it effectively. Ads will be sporadic and inconsistent across these accounts. Outbound will be infrequent. You can’t get results without enough concentration of outreaches and you can’t test what is working.

OK, so what’s the middle ground? You have to test because no two companies will have the same ideal number of target accounts. So, what should you be looking for?

For me, it comes down to a leading and lagging set of indicators that you’ll have to keep adjusting around.

On the leading side, you want to look for sufficient coverage across your accounts. From a marketing perspective, measure the degree to which your ads are serving across your target accounts. Are you getting a solid spread? Are you able to deliver ABM campaigns, like mailers or events, consistently to all members?

And from a sales perspective, like the post from SetSail below, are your outbound efforts consistently reaching your audience? Too many accounts divided up across your sellers can mean missed opportunities to synchronize marketing efforts with outbound efforts.

On the lagging side of the equation, it’s about results. Testing your focus on smaller or larger numbers of accounts will yield changes in your conversion rate and pipeline generated. By monitoring the correlation between these measures and the volume of accounts in your target list, you can better adjust the number of target accounts.
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