Lise West is Head of Marketing at Altron Digital Business, where she is working to embed account-intelligent thinking across the full marketing function. A graduate of the ABM Practitioners course, she came to ABM through direct exposure to a dedicated COE ABM team before stepping into a broader leadership role. With a clear belief in the primacy of the sales-marketing relationship, Lise brings a strategic, relationship-first lens to everything she does.
Interview
You’re at a dinner party and someone asks what you do – how do you explain ABM?
I actually use the dinner party itself as the analogy. If you’re hosting twenty people you don’t know well, you put out a big spread and hope something suits everyone. ABM is when you know exactly who’s coming, you’ve checked the dietary requirements, you know one guest is trying to impress a customer and you’ve planned the whole evening around making that work. Same effort, different intention, but with a better chance that the evening goes the way you want.
How did you get into ABM? Was it intentional or by accident?
Intentional in interest, accidental in timing. I’d always found ABM compelling as a concept – the idea of marketing that starts with relationships rather than reach just made sense to me. But if I’m honest, I didn’t fully understand what it looked like in practice until I did the Practitioners course. By that point, I was already working alongside the COE ABM team, learning from them in real time, so the course gave me the framework to properly understand what I was seeing around me. Then a shift in business strategy moved me into the COE team directly, which meant learning on the job in the best possible way. And now, having just stepped into a Head of Marketing role, I find myself using that ABM thinking to shape the broader marketing strategy, which feels like a natural next step rather than a departure point.
What’s the biggest risk you’ve taken in your ABM career, and did it pay off?
The real risk, if I’m being candid, is the one I’m currently taking. Moving into a Head of Marketing role and actively trying to bring an ABM-inspired lens to our full marketing strategy – not just protecting a programme, but letting that thinking influence how the whole function is shaped and where we choose to focus. It’s a deliberate shift and it means making some considered choices about prioritisation. I’m genuinely confident in the direction and the early signals are encouraging. It won’t happen overnight, but I believe the logic is sound.
What was your ‘lightbulb moment’ during the Academy course?
Probably the moment I stopped thinking of ABM as a marketing methodology and started seeing it as a business one. In hindsight, it sounds obvious, but once that mind shift started happening, a lot of other things fell into place. Why alignment matters more than activation, why the relationship between sales and marketing is the real foundation, why even the best content won’t move the needle without the right internal conditions and focus around it. That clicked for me during the course and I’ve been thinking about everything differently since.
What’s in your ABM toolkit that you couldn’t live without – and what’s the most overrated thing everyone raves about?
I can’t live without a genuine relationship with sales. Not a scheduled check-in or a polite working arrangement – an actual partnership where you’re looking at the same accounts, reading the same signals and having honest conversations about what’s working and what isn’t. That’s the engine. Everything else from tools, to content, to data only works properly when that foundation is solid. On the tools side, AI is increasingly useful for pulling together account intelligence quickly, although I think the value is in how you apply it.
Most overrated? The pressure to personalise everything at scale. What actually resonates with accounts is the sense that you genuinely understand them – their priorities, their pressures, the conversations they’re already having. That takes real attention, and it doesn’t always need to be elaborate. Sometimes a well-timed, well-considered piece of content lands better than a highly produced campaign that’s trying to be too many things at once.
Fast-forward five years – what does success look like for you?
An organisation where the marketing strategy is genuinely account-intelligent from top to bottom, where ABM thinking isn’t just sitting in a separate programme, but is embedded in how we go to market across the board. For me, personally, success looks like having built a marketing function that the business trusts as a strategic partner, not a support service – one where thinking is in terms of relationships, reputation and outcomes, not just campaigns and outputs.
If you could give aspiring ABM-ers one piece of advice, what would it be?
Get close to sales before you do anything else. Not to report into them, not to be directed by them, but to genuinely understand how they think, what their accounts actually need and where marketing can add real value. It’s the piece of advice I’ve heard most consistently from the people who’ve been doing this well for years and, the more I work closely alongside our dedicated ABM team, the more I see why. ABM without that relationship stays tactical. With it, it has the potential to shift something much more meaningful for the business.
Final thoughts
Lise’s journey is a good reminder that ABM expertise doesn’t have to stay contained within a programme. The principles, deep account understanding, close alignment with sales, and a focus on meaningful outcomes rather than volume metrics, are just as powerful when applied to an entire marketing function. As more marketers move into senior roles with ABM experience behind them, that kind of thinking has the potential to reshape how organisations go to market altogether.
Ready to start your own ABM journey? Get in touch with us or explore our ABM Academy courses to find the programme that’s right for you.
Read our previous Alumni Spotlight where we chatted to Martin Lloyd is Global ABM Director at FICO.
Find out more about our ABM Academy Alumni network.
