Glossary

Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a B2B strategy in which sales and marketing teams collaborate to create highly personalized campaigns targeting specific high-value accounts rather than broad audiences. Instead of casting a wide net, ABM treats each target account as an individual market with tailored messaging, content, and outreach.

Get Started

Read more terms

Traditional demand generation casts a wide net and waits for leads to self-select. ABM inverts this model: first define which specific accounts you want to win, then deploy coordinated marketing and sales resources to engage those exact companies. This approach is particularly effective for complex B2B deals with long sales cycles and multiple stakeholders, where building relationships and credibility with a specific buying committee is more important than generating high volumes of generic leads. ABM programs typically operate across three tiers. Tier 1 (1:1 ABM) involves fully custom campaigns for a small number of strategic accounts — each with unique content, messaging, and outreach designed specifically for that company. Tier 2 (1:few ABM) involves semi-personalized campaigns for clusters of similar accounts that share industry or persona characteristics. Tier 3 (1:many ABM) involves personalization through segmentation for broader groups of target accounts, often using marketing automation. Personalized video is increasingly a central tactic in ABM programs, particularly for Tier 1 accounts. A personalized video from a VP of Sales or CEO that references a target account's specific business challenges, recent news, and strategic priorities creates a uniquely impactful first touch that standard content cannot match. Outvid enables ABM teams to create personalized video outreach not just for the handful of ultra-strategic Tier 1 accounts, but across their entire Tier 2 and Tier 3 account lists — bringing the impact of 1:1 video to the scale of programmatic ABM.

What should I know about Account-Based Marketing (ABM)?

Quality Over Quantity

ABM deliberately narrows focus to a defined list of high-fit, high-value accounts. The goal is winning the right accounts deeply, not attracting the most leads broadly.

Sales and Marketing Must Align

ABM requires genuine collaboration between sales and marketing — shared account lists, shared metrics (pipeline and revenue from target accounts), and coordinated outreach rather than separate campaigns.

Personalization Must Match Account Depth

The degree of personalization should scale with account value. Tier 1 accounts deserve fully custom messaging; Tier 3 can use segmented personalization. Undifferentiated messaging in an ABM context defeats the purpose.

How is Account-Based Marketing (ABM) used in practice?

An enterprise software company runs a Tier 1 ABM program

For their 50 most strategic target accounts, the marketing and sales teams jointly research each company, create account-specific landing pages, and use Outvid to produce personalized executive videos from the CEO addressing each company's specific strategic priorities. The program generates a 40% higher win rate on Tier 1 accounts compared to non-ABM pipeline.

A mid-market SaaS team scales ABM with AI video

A team with a Tier 2 ABM list of 500 accounts uses Outvid to generate personalized video emails at scale — each one referencing the account's industry, tech stack, and a relevant use case. What would have been 500 individually recorded videos becomes an automated campaign run in hours, with the personalization quality of manual ABM at programmatic scale.

Frequently asked questions

What size company should use ABM?

ABM is most appropriate for B2B companies with an ACV (Annual Contract Value) above $10K–$20K and a well-defined ICP. When deal sizes justify concentrated sales and marketing investment on specific accounts, ABM typically outperforms broad demand generation.

How is ABM different from traditional lead generation?

Traditional lead generation attracts a broad pool of potential buyers and filters them down. ABM identifies specific target accounts first, then deploys targeted resources to engage those accounts — a fundamentally different and more deliberate approach.

What metrics should I track for an ABM program?

Key ABM metrics include: target account engagement rate, target account pipeline coverage, win rate on target accounts, deal cycle length on target accounts, and revenue from target accounts. These differ from traditional lead gen metrics like MQL volume.

Learn more

ABM Use Case Personalized Video Outbound Sales Buyer Intent Multi-channel Outreach How to Set Up Email Authentication for Cold Outreach

Bring Video Personalization to Your ABM Strategy

Outvid generates personalized video outreach for every account on your ABM list — giving every target company the 1:1 treatment, automatically.