This International Women’s Day, we are full of gratitude. Grateful for the talented, generous, brilliant women who own 80% of our company and make up so much of our team. Grateful for the hundreds of women practitioners who have trusted us with their development. And grateful to be part of a discipline – account-based marketing – that women are shaping so profoundly.
This year’s IWD theme is Give to Gain – and it could not resonate more deeply with who we are and how we work. From the very beginning, Inflexion Group has been built on a simple belief: that when you share knowledge openly and generously, everyone grows. That the more you invest in the people around you, the stronger the whole community becomes. We see that belief reflected back at us every single day — in our team, in our ABM Academy alumni, and in the incredible women who champion ABM across the world.
We’d like to take a moment to celebrate them.
The numbers that move us
We’ve always known that women are a vital force in marketing. Across the industry, women make up around 60% of the marketing workforce globally. And in North America, women now hold more than half of all Chief Marketing Officer positions. It’s a far cry from the Mad Men era, and something worth pausing to appreciate.
And when we looked at our own data, the numbers stopped us in our tracks. Of the 835 practitioners who have earned an ABM Academy badge from us — professionals from companies across 36 countries – 73% are women. That’s more than 600 women who have invested their time and energy in deepening their ABM expertise. Three in every four. We did not expect the number to be quite so striking, and it filled us with an enormous sense of pride and purpose.
And closer to home: 14 of our 18-strong team are women – nearly 80%. We don’t take that for granted for a single moment. It is a reflection of the extraordinary people who have chosen to be part of this journey with us, and we are so glad they did.
Beyond our team, we are privileged to convene the ABM Leadership Forum — a group of 19 of the very best ABM programme leaders from around the world. Twelve of those nineteen members are women. The Forum’s mission is as ambitious as it is collaborative: to bring together the most forward-thinking minds in ABM to tackle the discipline’s most pressing challenges together. While we protect the privacy of our members, we can say that they represent some of the world’s most respected organisations. That more than half of that leadership group are women feels like exactly the kind of thing worth celebrating today. These are the people actively defining what excellence in ABM looks like; they’re pushing the boundaries and they are doing it with enormous skill, generosity, and vision.
Where it all began: Our founders
Inflexion Group exists because of Bev Burgess. Bev is widely regarded as the worldwide authority on account-based marketing – she coined the phrase back in 2003 — but what makes her truly remarkable is not the accolades. It is the extraordinary generosity with which she has shared everything she has learned. Through decades of consulting, through research, through six published books (most recently Account-Based Marketing: The Definitive Handbook for B2B Marketers, Kogan Page, 2025), Bev has given the ABM community an immense and enduring gift. We are grateful to be part of the organisation she built.
“Give to Gain has always been more than a principle for me – it’s the way I try to live and work. When I started sharing everything I knew about ABM, long before it was mainstream, I wasn’t thinking about what I’d get back. I was thinking about what the community needed. And what I’ve discovered, over and over again, is that generosity compounds. The more freely you give your knowledge, your time, your encouragement – the stronger and more generous the whole community becomes. Looking at the 600-plus women who have come through the ABM Academy, many of them now leading programmes and inspiring their own teams – that is the most meaningful return I could have hoped for.”
Bev Burgess, Co-founder and Chief Executive, Inflexion Group
Alongside Bev, co-founder Louise Jefferson has poured her heart into building the ABM Academy into what it is today – a truly global centre of excellence for ABM training. With over 30 years of hard-won experience in B2B marketing, Louise brings warmth, rigour, and real-world wisdom to everything she touches. The Academy is her gift to the next generation of practitioners, and we could not be more proud of what she has created.
“What drives me every day is the moment a practitioner goes from feeling uncertain about ABM to genuinely owning it – and then taking it back into their organisation and doing something remarkable with it. That’s the whole point. The Academy exists to give people something real and practical that they can actually use. When I see the women coming through our programmes – the ambition they bring, the questions they ask, the confidence they leave with – I feel an enormous sense of hope. They’re not just the next generation of ABM practitioners. They’re the people who are going to redefine what excellence looks like.”
Louise Jefferson, Co-founder and ABM Academy Director, Inflexion Group
The remarkable women in our team
One of the things we cherish most about Inflexion Group is the depth and diversity of experience our team brings. These are people who have lived ABM, built programmes, and led teams inside some of the world’s most complex organisations. We feel incredibly lucky to have them. Here they are.
Dorothea Gosling – Executive Consultant Based in Germany, Dorothea leads our Technology and Pursuit Marketing Practices, and her passion for how AI and marketing technology can transform ABM is infectious. With 30 years of international experience – including winning SiriusDecisions’ prestigious ROI Award at DXC Technology – she brings a depth of knowledge that our clients treasure. We are so glad she is on this team.
Jacqueline Gummer – Executive Consultant Jacqueline has spent 25 years helping organisations move beyond transactional selling to build the kind of deep, meaningful customer relationships that last. Her time leading Oracle’s ABM journey gave her a perspective that is rare and invaluable – and she shares it with enormous generosity.
Corrinne Heading – Executive Consultant Corrinne lives in Australia and has spent her career doing the hard, important work of connecting marketing strategy to real business outcomes – across EMEA, Asia Pacific, and North America, in industries from financial services to healthcare. Her creativity, curiosity, and commercial acumen light up every room she is in.
Meg Heuer – Executive Consultant Meg co-founded the ABM practice at SiriusDecisions (now Forrester) in the US and has dedicated her career to advancing the discipline. She now co-hosts Account-based Fridays, a weekly LinkedIn video podcast that shares go-to-market wisdom with practitioners around the world. She gives constantly, and the ABM community is richer for it.
Catherine Ahern – Senior Consultant Catherine spent 17 years at Accenture and built a UK ABM programme that truly moved the needle. She knows what good looks like from the inside, and she brings that hard-won knowledge to every client and course with warmth and real care for their success.
Louise Clark – Senior Consultant Louise was the first dedicated ABM-er globally at Salesforce – a fact that tells you a great deal about her. With 30 years in B2B marketing at companies including Microsoft, she has an extraordinary track record of building things from scratch that others then take to scale. We learn from her every day.
Laura Holmes – Senior Consultant Laura built the UK marketing function at cyber specialist NCC Group from the ground up, introducing vertical marketing, ABM, and a global thought leadership platform. Her ability to make complex programmes work in the real world is a gift, and she brings it to our clients wholeheartedly.
Louise Power – Senior Consultant Now living in Prague, Louise spent most of her career embedded within sales organisations at HP and HPE, which gives her a perspective on ABM that is wonderfully rare – she understands, at a deep level, what sales teams actually need from marketing. Her empathy for both sides of that relationship is something her clients value enormously.
Sally Robins – Senior Consultant Sally has spent her career helping organisations find their voice and hold their nerve through transformation – rebrands, restructures, mergers and more. She brings calm, strategic clarity to everything she does, and the way she quietly makes things better behind the scenes is something we are very grateful for.
Kathy Hunter – Consultant Kathy has 40 years of experience in production and content management, and she is, in many ways, the quiet backbone of everything we do from her Florida base. She ensures that Inflexion Group’s knowledge and assets are always fresh, always accessible, always fit for purpose. We simply could not do any of this without her.
Alison Sherratt – Project Manager Alison has spent over 20 years helping organisations communicate through complexity – and her ability to bring people together, keep things moving, and make sure nothing falls through the cracks is something the whole team relies on and is deeply thankful for.
Lauren Burgess – Marketing Assistant Lauren is the newest member of our team, and she has brought such energy, creativity, and enthusiasm since joining in 2025. Her graphic design degree and natural instinct for communication have already made a real difference to how we tell our story. We are excited to see where her career takes her – and proud that it is starting here.
To our incredible Alumni community
If there is one thing that has truly humbled us, it is thinking about the 613 women who have come through our training programmes. Each one of them made a decision – often while juggling demanding jobs and busy lives – to invest in their own development. To go deeper. To take ABM seriously as a craft.
They work at some of the world’s leading companies, from Accenture to Kyndryl and Pegasystems to Red Hat, and they are practising ABM in 36 countries. They are not just alumni – they are the living proof that Give to Gain works. What they learned, they took back into their organisations and their teams. The ripple effect of that generosity is immeasurable.
“Being an ABM-er is a tough gig that takes patience and perseverance. I always say my external network are my cheerleaders – they understand the challenge. I’ve had numerous times where I’ve thought I’m not making progress, and then I speak to someone who thinks what I’ve achieved is amazing. Hearing how others have delivered successfully and the challenges they’ve faced is invaluable.”
Vicky Jones, Associate Director, UKIMEA Head of Clients, Arup and ABM Academy Alumni
To every one of those women: Thank you. Thank you for trusting us. Thank you for showing up. Thank you for everything you are doing to advance ABM in your corners of the world.
Honestly? There is still work to do
We want to be honest, because that is part of who we are. For all the progress there is to celebrate, the journey is not finished. Women in marketing still face a persistent pay gap – research shows female marketers typically earn less than their male counterparts, and the disparity tends to grow with seniority. That isn’t right, and it deserves to be called out.
We also noticed, in researching this piece, that there is no publicly available data on the gender breakdown of ABM practitioners specifically. The discipline does not yet tell its own story carefully enough. We would love for that to change – because visibility matters, and the contribution of women to ABM is something worth counting and celebrating with precision.
In the meantime, we will keep doing what we have always done: sharing knowledge openly, developing practitioners who go on to lead, and doing our part to build a community where women’s contributions to ABM are seen, valued, and celebrated loudly.
Happy International Women’s Day!
To every woman in our team, in our alumni community, on our ABM Leadership Forum and in the wider world of ABM.
You are not just part of the story of ABM. In so many ways, you are the story.
Give to gain. Share to grow. Celebrate to inspire.
