What is it and why do you need it?
Deciding to bid for a large, complex opportunity is a significant decision for any business. It takes a large amount of time and money to do well, and the result is ultimately binary – you win or lose. Qualifying opportunities in or out is a critical and ongoing process.
Where Pursuit Marketing is deployed, Inflexion Group’s research suggests that companies spend on average $50,000 USD against an average deal size of $61m USD – that’s just 0.08 per cent of the value of the deal. But whatever your budget, it’s important to make sure you’re investing in the right deals.
At Inflexion Group, our recommendation is that ABM leaders should have their own qualification criteria to decide which deals to support with Pursuit Marketing. Especially if they need to prioritise across multiple opportunities.
How do you use it?
Decide on your qualification criteria with sales leaders and the business. Examples of possible criteria you could use are shown in the table below.
Whether you decide to only support those deals that meet all criteria, or those that meet at least four of the six criteria, for example, is your choice. Ideally, you’ll agree this with your sales leaders in advance too, so that you have a clear explanation for why you do – or don’t – support specific deals. Over time, a view of the common criteria that are typically not met, such as if sales are always coming to you too late for marketing to have any significant impact, will allow you to provide feedback to sales leadership and help the company improve sales and marketing alignment around these strategic growth opportunities.
Read more about this approach in ‘Account-Based Marketing’ (Burgess, Kogan Page, 2025), or take the on-demand course on Getting Started with Pursuit Marketing from the ABM Academy.
Learn how to apply an ABM readiness assessment in our previous toolkit article.
