Account-based go-to-market has matured into a model that aligns marketing and sales around curated high-value accounts to deliver personalized engagement and measurable revenue. Execution complexity, organizational inertia, and outdated success metrics hinder desired outcomes. Volume-first MQL funnels prioritize activity over account readiness, creating misalignment between marketing and sales. Effective account-based practice begins with a total account list derived from an ideal customer profile and focuses on buying group targeting. Current infrastructure and tools often fail to support account and buying group targeting. Marketing must reclaim strategic influence in revenue conversations by adopting account-based principles across demand generation.
In the traditional MQL-based funnel, marketing tries to generate as many leads as possible, scoring them based on engagement activities like form fills or content downloads. Sales then works only on the subset that meets a particular score. This volume-first approach can create a disconnect, with marketing rewarded for generating activity rather than delivering accounts that are truly ready to buy.
"The infrastructure for account and buying group targeting is still missing," Potter said. "Even the tools don't have it right yet." By contrast, an account-based approach starts with a total account list (TAL), a carefully curated list of all the companies a business could and should be selling to. This TAL comes from the company's ideal customer profile (ICP), which defines the types of organizations most likely to deliver long-term
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