Strategic ABM is built on a deep understanding of your account. But understanding context is only half the job – you also need to analyse it. The right strategic frameworks help you move from raw insight to a clear picture of what matters most to the account, and why.
Once you have a solid grasp of an account’s situation – its market, its challenges, and where you fit in – the next step is to make sense of what you’ve found. That means using proven analytical frameworks to identify the issues most likely to shape the account’s priorities, and to understand the forces driving change in their market.
Two frameworks are particularly useful at this stage. A PESTEL analysis surfaces the political, economic, socio-cultural, technological, environmental, and legal or regulatory issues affecting the account, and helps you prioritise them according to their likely impact. A five forces analysis maps the shifting dynamics of power in the account’s market – across buyers, suppliers, competitors, new entrants, and potential substitutes – and again helps you focus on what matters most.
Used together, these frameworks give you a structured way to connect market dynamics to the account’s strategic priorities, so your conversations and propositions are grounded in their reality, not yours.
How do you use it?
The template below illustrates how to link environmental and market dynamics to the account’s strategic priorities and their associated KPIs. The example rows show how this plays out in practice across two different sectors – telecoms and retail – making it easier to see how the same framework can be applied across different accounts.
Generic PESTEL outputs rarely tell you anything useful. Their value in ABM depends entirely on how well they’re applied to a specific account. The goal is to identify the two or three dynamics that genuinely matter to this account, in this market, at this moment – and to connect those directly to the priorities and KPIs that leadership is being held accountable for.
Framing the account’s strategic priorities against the market dynamics driving them is the key move here. It enables you to develop messages that demonstrate genuine understanding of the account’s context – not just what they’re trying to do, but why they’re trying to do it, and how well they’re currently performing against their own targets.
AI tools can help you get a first cut of the analysis more quickly, but they need to be validated against what your sales and customer success teams know from direct account conversations. The template works best as a collaborative document – one that brings together external research and internal intelligence.
Find out more about building insight for Strategic ABM in Account-Based Marketing (Burgess, Kogan Page, 2025), or explore our Strategic ABM courses available through the ABM Academy.
Read our previous toolkit article which dives into the contents of a Segment ABM insight pack.
