It’s been just over a month at my new company, tasked with owning 6sense and building the ABM strategy from scratch.

I thought I'd hit the ground running.

Instead, I spent my first weeks staring at our product suite, broad, deep, sold across multiple buyer types and industries, and wondering where to even start.

Account selection? Which products? Which segments? Which motion?

Every option felt defensible and none felt right.

That's when I sat down with our CMO.

The priority for the year was one thing: establish a cross-sell process and build pipeline through cross-sells inside our top 600+ customers.

That conversation didn't answer every ABM question I had.

It gave me one priority and that was enough.

Since then, the work, alongside our demand gen team, has been understanding how cross-sells work and how we can build that into a repeatable ABM motion.

The right foundation for the priority the business already set.

This is where most ABM strategies can break.

ABM isn't something you design in isolation and then plug into the business later. At this level, it's a GTM lever. The business sets the direction and ABM supports it.

Here's what that looks like in practice:

That's it. Not five segments or three competing priorities. Just one motion, done well.

When you do that, alignment gets easier:

It's already tied to what the business cares about.

Once the foundation works, you expand. Take the same principles (account selection, sales alignment, measurement) and apply them to net-new acquisition, industry expansion plays, or whatever's next.

But running all of it at once, without anchoring to a clear foundation, process and priority, is where ABM strategies go to die.

The takeaway isn't that your perspective doesn't matter. It does. It just needs to land in the right order.

ABM works best when it's aligned to the business first, shaped by your experience second.

So if you're building or resetting your ABM strategy right now, start with one question:

What does the business actually need this year?

Start there. Everything else gets easier.

P.S. If you're walking into a new ABM role this quarter, hit reply and tell me what your CEO or CMO is asking you to focus on. I'll send back a quick gut check on whether your strategy actually matches it.

I'm taking on 3 new ABM consulting clients this quarter.

In 60 days together, you'll have:

Past clients have used this work to build $500K+ pipeline from churned accounts and double cross-sell conversion.

Book a 20-minute fit call →

Not a fit for teams without a defined ICP or under 50 employees.