Martin Lloyd is Global ABM Director at FICO, where he was brought in to build the ABM function from the ground up and completely reimagine how the company approaches its most strategic accounts. Working within the Executive Customer Marketing team, Martin is responsible for identifying where the biggest white space and growth opportunities lie and developing highly personalised programmes to reach them.
We sat down with Martin to talk through his journey into ABM, the mistakes that shaped his thinking, and what it really takes to make strategic ABM work in a complex enterprise environment.
Interview
You’re at a dinner party and someone asks what you do – how do you explain ABM?
Traditional field marketing takes a large set of target accounts and treats them as a single market, building broad, homogenised campaigns focused mainly on brand awareness. In ABM, you flip that entirely. You take one account and treat it as a market in its own right. That means deeply understanding the whole buying committee, knowing their strategic priorities, their technology setup, and their growth ambitions. Whilst also building campaigns, messages, and activations that are specific to that one organisation, based on what will resonate with the people inside it.
How did you get into ABM? Was it intentional or by accident?
It was intentional. Looking back at previous roles working at a regional level, I realised I had been doing a version of ABM for years without calling it that. FICO had always run a one-to-few motion, so the instinct was already there. When I was approached about building a brand new function, implementing true one-to-one ABM for our most strategic accounts, it felt like a natural progression. Even if the scale of the shift from field marketing to genuine strategic ABM was significant.
What’s the biggest risk you’ve taken in your ABM career, and did it pay off?
At my previous company, I invested in building personalised microsites through an agency before any of the foundational work was in place. There was no real data on whether microsites were appropriate for those accounts, no clear way to measure engagement beyond content downloads, and marketing and sales were not culturally aligned. The result was a significant spend on a flashy campaign that was essentially fired out, and we hoped for the best. It largely became redundant.
The lesson was stark: a case of wanting the house without building the foundation first. I now use microsites very differently — as a dedicated hub within a broader relationship-building strategy, integrated into an ongoing engagement journey rather than deployed as a standalone tactic.
What was your ‘lightbulb moment’ during the Academy course?
The breakthrough for me was the approach to the buying committee. I already had a bird’s eye view of my accounts and knew what initiatives were planned, but the training shifted my thinking towards understanding each individual stakeholder and their actual human problems. Once you understand those problems, you can build an activation schedule and engagement journey that truly resonates, rather than one that simply looks comprehensive on paper. The banking case study was particularly relevant because it mapped directly to the work I was doing at FICO.
In practice, this led to the creation of the ‘FICO Times’, a templated publication modelled on the Financial Times, launched for the FT Banking Summit. It has since evolved into a quarterly format, integrated into a microsite, with print versions for targeted distribution to key stakeholders and workflow triggers built around buying signals, intent signals, and role changes.
What’s in your ABM toolkit that you couldn’t live without – and what’s the most overrated thing everyone raves about?
The single most important element is account insight. Technology is secondary. The foundation of everything I do is my relationship with the sales team and understanding what they know about the account, structured into what FICO calls the Account Insights and Intelligence Document. This captures both internal proprietary knowledge, including individual relationships and whether contacts are proponents, detractors, or unknowns, and publicly available account information which is updated quarterly. This document drives strategic decisions about whether to pivot or stay the course.
The most overrated? Intent tools. They are easy to sell because the value looks immediate, but they do not actually tell you much about what an account needs or wants. The GDPR restrictions in Europe limit their scope significantly, and even where the capabilities are stronger, there is a real risk of tipping into invasive personalisation. Intent tools have a place, but the critical mistake is treating them as something that will guide your strategy and deliver on your plan. Strategy must come before tools, always.
Fast-forward five years – what does success look like for you?
My goal is for the ABM programme is for it to become the default marketing strategy at FICO. It would replace the current field marketing approach of homogenised, drumbeat campaigns with a scalable ABM model that identifies where the most impactful elements of a one-to-one motion can be applied more broadly. That includes existing customers with clear expansion potential and prospective accounts with limited FICO awareness today. I am already seeing elements of the ABM programme being adopted by the wider field marketing team, and FICO’s adoption of Seismic will enable digital sales rooms and microsites at scale, which will be important for our expansion.
If you could give aspiring ABM-ers one piece of advice, what would it be?
Get as close to your sales team as possible. Get involved in QBRs, try to get in front of customers, show up to events you are not running, and be present in person as much as you can. Salesforce does not capture the full picture. There are unlogged opportunities, service issues, and cultural dynamics within accounts that only come through in conversation. Unless you truly understand the individuals working on those opportunities, you cannot propel pipeline or deal velocity, no matter how sophisticated your multi-touch programme is. Bug the sales team! When there is a gap in their diary, grab five minutes with them. Be on top of it consistently, not just in scheduled meetings.
Final thoughts
Martin’s story is a refreshingly honest account of what building an ABM programme from scratch actually looks like. Not a polished case study, but a live, evolving programme, with real missteps, real pivots, and real lessons learned along the way. What comes through clearly is that the fundamentals matter far more than the tools.
If there is one thread running through everything Martin shared, it is that ABM only works when you are close enough to the account to understand what is actually happening inside it. And that closeness does not come from tools.
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 James Houselander, Director of Global ABM at HPE.
Find out more about our ABM Academy Alumni network.
