How Does Account Based Marketing Work?
Account-based marketing is a highly targeted, highly personalized approach to gaining new customers for your B2B SaaS business.
The basic process for account-based marketing consists of three core activities that take place in sequence:
- Identify Target Accounts
- Engage with Personalized Marketing Campaigns
- Convert and Expand

Identify Target Accounts
The first step in an ABM strategy is to identify target accounts. As a starting point, B2B SaaS marketing teams should talk to their colleagues in sales, investigate customer data, and survey existing customers to define their total addressable market (TAM) and formulate an ideal customer profile (ICP).
Marketers should choose to target prospective customers who strongly match their ICP, indicating a high likelihood that they will become customers in the future. Marketers may also wish to pursue reputation-enhancing partnerships with high-profile customers.
Engage with Personalized Marketing Campaigns
After identifying target accounts, the next step is to engage those accounts with personalized marketing campaigns.
Creating highly-customized campaigns for specific accounts is expensive, so it’s normal for marketers to reduce the level of personalization when there are lots of accounts to target, or to focus their resources for marketing personalization on the most important target accounts.

At Directive, we often segment target accounts into three tiers, applying the greatest level of marketing personalization for high-priority Tier 1 accounts, and the least for lower-priority Tier 3 accounts. Accounts in the middle tier will be clustered into small groups and receive lightly customized messaging according to their shared attributes and pain points.
In an ideal world, every target account would receive 1:1 personalization – but in practice, our system does a much better job of winning high-value accounts and maximizing overall ROI.
Convert and Expand
After successfully engaging and building relationships with target accounts, B2B SaaS companies can schedule a product demo and hopefully convert the prospect into a paying customer.
But it doesn’t stop there. Existing customers must be effectively nurtured and supported to prevent churn, and account managers should also be developing up-sell and cross-sell opportunities with their existing customers – not just chasing the next customer all the time.
An account-based approach acknowledges that B2B SaaS businesses can grow by expanding their relationships with existing customers – not just by developing new ones.