Every ABM team has bought into the same promise: go after the right accounts and everything else (the people, the pipeline) falls into place.
Turns out, the truth is a lot messier than that.
Vector recently surveyed 239 demand gen and ABM marketers to uncover the gaps between what they were sold they could do with ABM and what they can actually do.
Jess Cook, VP of Marketing, and Joshua Perk, CEO, are hosting a webinar on October 8 to walk through the data. Register here.
I saw a LinkedIn post this week from Mike Clapson, VP of Sales at Ashby. One of their earliest customers, a recognizable brand he didn't name, had just come back after churning.
The post wasn't a marketing win. It was a sales win.
Clapson credited patient relationship-building, real champion development, and strong cross-functional partnership for getting the account back. He called it "uniquely rewarding" to earn back an early customer.
Nobody on that deal was working a cold account.
The alignment problem isn't a meeting problem
Vector's new "Reality of ABM" report asked GTM teams what's actually breaking their ABM motion. Sales and marketing alignment came in as the #2 most-cited bottleneck, right behind account prioritization. And it's not for lack of trying: 46.9% of teams say they meet with sales weekly.
They're talking constantly. They're still not aligned.
Here's why.
67.8% of ABM programs are built around net-new logo acquisition, or in other words, cold accounts that have never talked to you.
When one of those accounts shows engagement, marketing hands sales a signal with almost nothing behind it: 47.7% of programs are still identifying buyers off assumed job titles instead of verified engagement, and only 18.4% can consistently explain why an account's score even changed.
Sales isn't ignoring your signals because they're not paying attention. They're ignoring them because the signal doesn't come with proof. Vector's own framing nails it: reps need "irrefutable proof" before they'll act.
Closed lost and churned accounts solve this by definition
I've run this play multiple times at Clari and Movable Ink, and it works for one reason: the context problem is already solved before you send anything to sales.
If I ran a 4-week cohort where your team builds and launches a win-back program on your own closed lost and churned accounts, where would you land?
A closed lost or churned account isn't a cold score. It's:
An identified buying committee: you already know who was in the room
A known pain point: they told you, explicitly, what problem they were trying to solve
A known objection: budget, timing, a champion who left, a feature gap that's since shipped, you know exactly why they didn't sign or why they left
Send that account to sales the moment it shows renewed engagement, and you're not asking them to take a lead score on faith. You're handing them a deal they already understand.
That's the difference between "here's a signal, good luck" and what happened at Ashby: a deal sales actually wanted to work, because the context was already there.
What I'd do with this
If 67.8% of your ABM budget is still pointed at net-new, you don't need a better lead score. You need to re-think how you’re building your account list.
The good new is I put the exact system for building that list including the CRM fields to audit, the filters, the execution framework into the Churned Customer Win-Back Playbook.
If sales keeps ignoring your signals, is it really an engagement problem, or is it a context problem? Reply and tell me which one you're actually fighting.
