Hello everyone, welcome to Edition 21 of The ABM-er.
This month I’m setting out where I think ABM is heading next. I’ve just finished a new Insight paper, ‘From programme to principle: ABM’s next chapter’, and writing it forced me to put down in one place something I’ve been circling in conversations for a while now. The shift ahead of us isn’t a bigger or better ABM programme, it’s ABM becoming the principle that the whole go-to-market operation is organised around.
I talk to programme leaders every week through direct client work, plus run a quarterly ABM Leadership Forum and biannual ABM Benchmarking Study, and the same tension keeps surfacing. They’re being asked to prove commercial value as the wider marketing function transforms at the exact moment their operating model, their tools and even their job title are all in flux. It’s not a comfortable place to lead from, but I think it’s exactly where the opportunity sits.
B2B go-to-market is changing
A number of forces are remaking complex B2B go-to-market models at once.
AI is rewriting both sides of the buying process: suppliers are using it to personalise and orchestrate execution, buyers are using it to write tenders, score submissions and shortlist suppliers before a human ever sees the deal, and governance hasn’t caught up with either. AI is also closing the gap between what senior buyers have always wanted and what suppliers could actually deliver: genuine strategic relationships have always been constrained by the human hours needed to sustain them, and that ceiling is starting to lift.
At the same time, sustainable growth is narrowing to a smaller number of deeper relationships, not a wider funnel, and the boundaries of ABM itself are dissolving. For most of its life, ABM has existed as a specialist, separately reported programme. That containment is breaking down as account-based thinking spreads across field, industry, customer and partner marketing, and it raises a question every leader making this shift has to keep answering, not answer once: what’s marketing’s role versus sales versus business development, and how do you attribute return on investment across them.
ABM is moving from programme to principle
This is the leadership problem in short: how do you evolve a proven discipline into the organising principle for growth, without losing the rigour, the relationships and the results that made it work in the first place?
I think the answer is account-based growth: the shift from an ABM programme to a growth principle, delivered by orchestrating across marketing and other client-facing teams for the benefit of the customer. Three things distinguish this orchestrated growth from ABM as most businesses practise it today.
- It’s foundational, not departmental. Account-based principles run through sales, marketing, customer success and delivery, not owned by one team and defended at its edges.
- It’s sensed and responded to in real time, not planned once a year and executed in campaigns, because AI now makes real-time responsiveness possible at a scale human teams alone could never sustain.
- It puts the human moment at the centre, not the margins. The more execution AI takes on, the more the relationship, the judgement and the trust in what’s left become the actual differentiator. Orchestration, not automation, is the discipline that makes this work.
Done well, none of this is visible to the customer as orchestration. It just feels like dealing with a partner who understands them regardless of who they’re speaking to or what content they see, and who shows them the way forward rather than waiting to be directed.
It’s all about orchestrating success
For a business that makes this shift, three things become true.
- Account-based growth is recognised, and funded, as central to business strategy, with its contribution to revenue, retention and reputation articulated in terms the board already uses.
- The people doing the work think ‘account-in’ not ‘programme-out’, blending strategic marketing thinking, commercial acumen and AI fluency to orchestrate across marketing and increasingly the wider business.
- And hyper-personalisation becomes table stakes for every account, while relationships with the accounts that matter most are built on genuine customer intimacy, not just digital behaviour.
This is both a change in operating model and a change in mindset, and most marketing teams aren’t yet equipped to run a change programme this complex on top of delivering today’s results. It’s not a single change programme with an end point either; it’s a continuous one, and most teams are having to run it while still hitting their numbers.
I set out the full argument, and what it means for how you structure, resource and measure your team, in the new Insight paper. It builds on the thinking in Account-Based Growth (Burgess and Shercliff, Kogan Page, 2022) and Executive Engagement Strategies (Burgess, Kogan Page, 2020), and in the wider discipline as set out in ‘Account-Based Marketing’ (Burgess, Kogan Page, 2025). If you’d like a copy of the full paper, reply to this newsletter or get in touch directly.
See my previous article on ‘The human edge: lessons from a para cyclist and an AI strategist’.
