To build a successful account-based marketing (ABM) program, focus on strategically targeting specific, high-value accounts that align with your ideal buyer profile.

Identifying these high-converting accounts takes significant time and resources.

Most sales teams spend 10-15 hours per month on account selection (depending on how often you select accounts to target as part of your ABM program).

Manual selection often misses high-value accounts and wastes hours on poor fits. Your team should focus on engaging warm leads that convert.

UserGems finds ICP-matching accounts and automates account selection, so your team can focus on engagement instead of research.

What is an account targeting strategy?

Account targeting focuses your sales and marketing on specific high-value accounts that will generate the most revenue.

This strategy concentrates resources and efforts on a select group of companies. You tailor messages and interactions to each account's specific needs, which drives higher conversion rates and stronger relationships.

This often involves close collaboration between sales and marketing teams to create personalized experiences for each target account.

What is target account selling?

Target account selling (TAS) is a strategic B2B sales approach that focuses on identifying, prioritizing, and engaging a select group of high-value customer accounts that have the greatest potential for generating significant revenue and aligning closely with a company's ideal customer profile (ICP).

Key characteristics include:

• Focused effort: TAS directs sales resources and efforts toward a limited number of specific, high-potential accounts. The emphasis is on quality over quantity.

• High-value accounts: The accounts targeted are those deemed most valuable to the business, often due to their large revenue potential, strategic importance, or likelihood of a long-term partnership.

• Personalized engagement: A core component of TAS is tailoring sales and marketing efforts to the unique needs, challenges, pain points, and decision-making processes of each individual target account. This often involves in-depth research into the account's structure, key stakeholders, and business objectives.

• Cross-functional collaboration: Successful TAS typically requires close alignment and collaboration between sales, marketing, and sometimes customer success teams to streamline efforts and ensure a unified and personalized experience for the target account throughout the buyer's journey.

• Long-term relationships: The goal focuses on building strong, lasting relationships with key decision-makers within the target accounts, fostering loyalty and repeat business. TAS aims to build strong, lasting relationships with key decision-makers within the target accounts, fostering loyalty and repeat business.

• Strategic and research-driven: It's a research-intensive methodology that involves understanding the target accounts deeply. This includes identifying key players, their roles, their motivations, and the overall organizational structure.

Target account selling is all about being highly selective and strategic in who you sell to, and then investing the time and effort to deeply understand and personalize the sales approach for those key accounts to maximize the chances of winning large, valuable deals and fostering long-term business relationships.

Why is an account targeting strategy necessary for successful ABM?

Account targeting is the foundation of ABM. Without it, your efforts scatter and ROI drops. ABM concentrates sales and marketing resources on a defined set of target accounts. A robust targeting strategy ensures ABM efforts remain focused, efficient, and likely to achieve desired results.

• Resource optimization: ABM requires personalized content, tailored outreach, and tight sales-marketing alignment. Account targeting focuses these resources on accounts with the highest ROI potential. You avoid wasting time and budget on poor-fit accounts with low revenue potential.

• Effective personalization at scale: ABM treats each target account individually, with personalized messaging and tactics. This requires deep understanding and personalization. An account targeting strategy identifies these specific accounts, allowing teams to research their unique needs, pain points, organizational structure, and key decision-makers. This insight helps you create messaging that drives engagement and conversions.

• Sales and marketing alignment: A clear target account list aligns sales and marketing on the same accounts and goals. This alignment is critical in ABM. Both teams target the same companies with coordinated plays.

• Clear focus and prioritization: Account targeting narrows thousands of potential customers to a focused list of high-priority accounts. This focus lets teams give each account the attention it needs to convert.

• Improved lead quality and conversion rates: By concentrating on ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and accounts that are most likely to buy, ABM inherently focuses on quality, emphasizing targeted lead generation tactics. Effective targeting drives better conversion rates and larger deal sizes.

• Measurable results: A defined target account list makes it easier to measure ABM success and ROI. You can track key metrics like account engagement, pipeline velocity within target accounts, and revenue generated from these specific accounts.  ‍

• Strategic foundation for all ABM activities: Every subsequent step in an ABM program—from content creation and campaign development to sales outreach and relationship building—is built upon the initial selection of target accounts. If the targeting is off, the entire ABM strategy will be flawed.

How to implement an account targeting strategy? 8 key steps

1. Define (and refine) your ICP

Before targeting accounts, define your ICP clearly.

Look at your most successful customers. Identify common characteristics such as industry, company size, revenue, geographical location, technology stack used, pain points they faced, and the solutions your product/service provided.

Then, gather quantitative and qualitative data. Use firmographic data (industry, size, revenue), demographic and technographic data, as well as behavioral data. Also, gather qualitative insights through customer interviews and sales team feedback.

This data-driven approach defines your ICP and buyer personas. This document outlines the attributes of companies most likely to buy and succeed with your product.

2. Identify potential target accounts

Use your defined ICP to scan your existing database, market intelligence tools, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and other B2B databases to find companies that match your criteria.

Then, look for companies showing buying intent. This could include those researching solutions like yours, visiting your website (especially key pages like pricing), engaging with your content, hiring for relevant roles, or experiencing significant company events (e.g., funding, mergers, new leadership).

Gather input from sales and leadership.Your sales team knows which accounts are most likely to close. Leadership may also have strategic accounts they wish to target.

3. Research and qualify target accounts

Research each potential account thoroughly. Understand their business model, financial health, strategic priorities, challenges, key executives, and organizational structure.

Determine who the decision-makers, influencers, champions, and blockers are within each target account. Map out key stakeholders’ roles and responsibilities.

Evaluate how well each account matches your ICP and their revenue potential. Consider their budget, authority, need, and timeline.

4. Tier your target accounts

Segment them into tiers (e.g., Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3) based on their strategic importance, potential deal size, and how closely they match your ICP.

Tier 1 accounts get the most personalized engagement. Tier 2 and 3 use more scaled approaches.

5. Develop account-specific plans and personalized messaging

Tailor your messaging to address the specific pain points, needs, and goals of each target account (or tier).

Then, determine which channels and tactics you'll use to reach key stakeholders: personalized emails, targeted ads, direct mail, social selling, or events.

For example, develop content (such as case studies, white papers, webinars, and presentations) that speaks directly to the challenges and interests of your target accounts.

💡 PRO TIP: Most ABM campaigns fail because they lack personalization. But personalization requires a refined target buyer profile.

Understand your ideal buyer, their pain points, and how they make purchase decisions. Then create personalized landing pages and social ads.

This LinkedIn ad drives demo requests. Prospects regularly mention it on calls, saying they screenshotted it or shared it with their team.

Pick a subset of accounts and test your personalized ads and other relevant content to find out what works for you.

Once you see higher engagement or conversion rates, scale the same approach to more accounts in that segment.

6. Align sales and marketing teams

Sales and marketing coordination drives higher close rates on warm accounts. Sales and marketing should:

• Track the same performance metrics or KPIs

• Run ads and outreach simultaneously

Establish regular meetings for sales and marketing to share insights, coordinate efforts, and provide feedback.

💡PRO TIP: At UserGems, sales and marketing:

• Working together to decide which accounts to target and maintaining focus on the agreed-upon list.

• Tracking the same key metric: meetings booked.

• Simultaneously running LinkedIn ads and ADR outreach to target accounts to increase booking rates.

7. Execute your strategy and engage target accounts

Implement your planned marketing and sales activities.

Coordinate interactions across channels so target accounts get a consistent experience.

Focus on building long-term relationships that extend beyond immediate wins.

8. Measure results and optimize accordingly

Monitor ABM metrics such as account engagement (website visits, content downloads, email opens/clicks from target accounts), pipeline velocity for target accounts, deal size, win rates for target accounts, and overall ROI from ABM efforts.

Review performance regularly. Analyze what's working and what's not. Are you targeting the right accounts? Is your messaging resonating? Are your channels effective?

Adjust your ICP, target account list, messaging, and tactics based on performance data and market feedback.

Account targeting requires ongoing optimization, not one-time setup.

Best practices for implementing an account targeting strategy

• Start small and focused: Begin with a manageable list of target accounts to refine your processes before scaling.

• Prioritize quality over quantity: The success of ABM hinges on focusing on the right accounts with strategic value and high conversion potential.

• Data is your foundation: Invest in good data sources and ensure your existing data is clean and accurate. Continuously enrich your account and contact data.

• Invest in the right tech stack: Utilize tools for account identification, intent data, CRM, marketing automation, sales intelligence, and analytics to support your ABM efforts.

• Be patient and persistent: ABM is a long-term strategy. Building relationships with large, strategic accounts takes time and consistent marketing and sales effort. Remain patient as results develop over time.

• Focus on providing value: Every interaction should aim to provide value to the target account, whether it's through insightful content, helpful advice, or a solution to their specific challenges.

• Develop an "always-on" mentality for research: Continuously gather intelligence on your target accounts and their industries. Things change, and your approach needs to adapt.

• Celebrate small wins: Recognize and celebrate milestones and successes along the way to keep teams motivated.

5 ways to identify and prioritize high-value accounts with UserGems

Instead of relying on salespeople to identify which accounts to go after, automate the process with UserGems. We help boost your ABM strategies by showing you warm paths into target accounts and prioritizing which ones to target using customizable filters.

Take a look at the following ways UserGems automates tracking a variety of buyer signals to save you time, keep your pipeline full, and kick pipeline anxiety to the curb.

Here’s how:

1. Automate champion tracking

Alumni customers or people who have previously bought, used, or demoed your tool are more likely to convert.

The reason is simple: they’ve seen or experienced the benefits of using your tool in a previous role.

In fact, targeting or involving old customers in closing new deals generates:

• 114% higher win rates

• 54% bigger deal sizes

• And, 12% shorter sales cycles

However, manually tracking alumni customers (or Gems as we call them) is time-consuming and prone to human error. Our data shows that when B2B companies rely on manually tracking customer job changes, they miss a whopping 85% of these champion-based sales opportunities.

With UserGems, it’s easy to automate champion tracking by connecting your CRM to our pipeline generation tool, which can significantly streamline this part of your sales strategy.

From there, UserGems gives you a list of warm leads to target every month.

Every time a past customer, user, or prospect joins a new target account, UserGems automatically adds them as a new contact in your CRM ­— along with their new contact information.

Cobalt took the plunge and started automating champion tracking with UserGems. The result? They created 91 UserGems influenced opportunities, totaling $1.7M in new business pipeline.

2. Review relationship type and persona to prioritize accounts

Successful ABM initiatives focus on not only finding high-value accounts but prioritizing going after the ones that are most likely to convert faster.

This means once you have a warm target account list from UserGems, start reviewing which lead personas and relationship types to prioritize.

By looking at their persona, rank prospects by those that match your ideal customer profile (ICP) the best.

For example, here at UserGems, we target three main personas: marketing, sales, and RevOps. So when an account has a new CMO hire (which aligns with our ICP), we automatically move it higher up in our list of priority accounts.

Similarly, by reviewing relationship type, you can see the exact way a lead used your tool at their previous company.

For example, if a lead is categorized as a “buyer” because they have decision-making power, you can prioritize them over someone labeled an “end user” who may not have as much say when it comes to allocating the company budget.

3. Look at the number of new contacts in target accounts

In addition to reviewing target accounts’ persona types to prioritize leads, review how many ideal personas are at the company overall.

If an account has a higher number of ICP-aligned new hires, for example, rank them higher in your target list.

What’s more, assess the number of newly joined executives at target accounts. Again, the bigger the number, the higher the account should be on your priority list.

Why? Because these executives have the budget to make a buying decision in your favor.

Prospects taking on new roles typically invest in new tools. Our internal data confirms new executives spend 70% of their budget in the first 100 days. Reaching out to them during this time significantly increases your odds of catching their attention and closing the deal.

4. Use the number of Gems as intent data

Another way to prioritize accounts to dedicate your ABM resources to is by using UserGems’ custom field (included in our packages) called the UserGems number of UserGems.

Essentially, the UserGems number of UserGems is a buying signal indicating how many Gems are working at a target account.

Use it to create a report that specifies the number of Gems you need at a target account for it to be warmer (therefore, higher priority) than others.

For example, you might want the UserGems number of UserGems to be greater than 3 or 5 (or whatever your preference is) for it to move the lead higher up in your priority list.

Once you set this number, UserGems automatically syncs the report into your CRM tool — giving you a list of high-priority target accounts for your ABM approach.

5. Target existing customers to expand and cross-sell

Lastly, prioritize paying customers for your account-based marketing programs.

The play here? Going after teams at your existing customer accounts that aren’t already using your product to expand usage and adoption.

We used this account-based marketing approach at UserGems when we started noticing customer success teams showing interest in using our pipeline generation tool.

Our marketing team ran hyper-personalized LinkedIn ads targeting customer support teams that pointed out how UserGems would benefit them — while letting them know their organization was already using our tool.

Simultaneously, sales reps reached out to other relevant folks at the account with the same personalized messaging.

Using this ABM strategy we not only expanded but also increased retention (reduced churn) as our tool’s usage was no longer siloed into one department at existing customer accounts.

Leverage the same play to drive expansion within customer accounts as well as cross-sell if you own multiple products.

Bonus: Automate building buying committees to target

As B2B buyers become more risk-averse, buying committees are growing.

In turn, the changing purchase behavior is making it harder to sell, making the sales process longer as teams have to regularly track changing roles and new hires at specific accounts.

Fortunately, there’s an easy fix. Automate this work with UserGems.

It surfaces ICP-matching key decision-makers at target accounts and then adds them to your CRM.

This boosts your sales team’s productivity and reduces your reliance on SDRs to prospect into key accounts each month.

Account tracking also assists your marketing team with account-based segmentation — helping them create persona-based ad campaigns for your ABM strategy. This is particularly useful for LinkedIn ads as the platform doesn’t offer inclusion and exclusion filters to build your ad audience.

Once you identify prospects to target in your ICP account, you can segment them using “persona,” “seniority,” and “job title” inclusion and exclusion filters in UserGems.

 By doing so, your ads won’t show to broad segments such as “marketing.” Instead, optimize spend by excluding irrelevant departments such as “content marketing” and “product marketing.”

We use Account Tracking for building our LinkedIn ad audience as well. The results have been great — our match rates have increased between 80% and 90%. Meaning that more of our target personas are seeing our personalized ads, improving our conversion rate.

Watch the full replay of Dig Deeper with UserGems, where Justine breaks down how to use UserGems to improve account-based targeting strategy:

Smarter account targeting with UserGems

For any solid account-based marketing (ABM) plan, figuring out which accounts to actually target is a make-or-break step. You want to focus your energy on high-value companies that are a great fit, but finding them and knowing which ones to prioritize can be a real time-sink.

That’s where UserGems comes in to help your account targeting strategy. UserGems gives you a more direct and effective way to identify and prioritize your target accounts.

Here’s how UserGems helps you build a better target account list:

• Finds accounts with a built-in advantage: UserGems automatically spots when your previous customers, users, or key prospects move to new companies. This immediately flags potential target accounts where you already have a warm connection.

• Helps you prioritize intelligently: Once these accounts are on your radar, UserGems provides signals to help you rank them. You can see how many of your "Gems" are at a particular company or if they’ve landed in leadership roles that match your ideal customer profile. This means your team can focus on accounts that are more likely to engage and convert.

• Identifies the right people within those accounts: Beyond just flagging the company, UserGems helps you quickly find the key contacts and decision-makers you need to connect with inside your target accounts.

• Assists with personalized outreach: With Gem AI, UserGems can also help draft relevant messages and even automate parts of the outreach process, making it easier to connect with these key contacts in a timely and personalized way once they're identified.

• Spots expansion opportunities: Account targeting applies to customer retention and expansion as well as new business. UserGems also helps you see when your champions move to new departments or teams within companies that are already your customers, opening doors to sell more or introduce new products.

Essentially, UserGems helps streamline how you choose and rank your target accounts by using real-time data about your most valuable connections. This means your sales and marketing teams can spend less time searching and more time engaging with companies that have a higher chance of becoming great customers.

Want to see how UserGems can make your team’s account targeting more effective? Book a demo with us!

FAQs

What is a target account?

A target account is a specific company or organization that a business has identified as a high-value prospect and a good fit for its products or services. These accounts are selected based on various criteria such as their revenue potential, industry, size, strategic alignment with the business's offerings, and likelihood to convert into a long-term customer.

Sales and marketing efforts are then specifically focused on engaging and nurturing these identified target accounts.

How does account targeting impact the traditional sales funnel?

Account targeting, especially within an ABM framework, often "flips" the traditional sales funnel. Instead of starting with a wide pool of leads and gradually narrowing it down, ABM starts by identifying and targeting specific high-value accounts (the narrow end) and then expands efforts to engage multiple stakeholders within those accounts. The goal is still to guide them through a buying process and close deals, but the initial focus is much more precise.

Can account targeting help with customer retention and upsell opportunities?

An account targeting strategy proves highly effective for customer retention and expansion in addition to acquiring new logos. By continuing to monitor existing key customer accounts for changes, new initiatives, or potential pain points, businesses can proactively engage them with relevant solutions.

This provides an excellent customer experience and opens doors for upsell or cross-sell opportunities, maximizing customer lifetime value. UserGems, for example, helps identify when previous champions move to new departments within an existing customer account, creating warm paths for these conversations.

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