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If your company moved to a named account model this year, RevOps (or sales ops, depending on your org) probably spent months doing data analysis, carving up territories, assigning tiers, and handing every rep a book of accounts they're expected to hit their number with.
Then marketing launched its next campaign, and more times than not, it targeted the same broad ICP filters it used last year.
So here's the question I want you to sit with this week.
RevOps already picked the accounts sales has the best chance to win, so why are your campaigns targeting anyone else?
When campaigns still target by ICP while sales works named accounts, you're creating demand at accounts no rep owns. The leads route to nobody, sales ignores them (and honestly, they should, because those aren't their accounts), and a good chunk of your budget goes to accounts your own company already decided were less likely to close.
RevOps already did the segmenting
Back in April I wrote that your ICP is a starting point, not a strategy.
Named accounts take that a step further, because the segmentation you were supposed to do inside your ICP has already been done for you, by region, territory, product line, and customer versus prospect. Your ICP still decides who makes the named account list, but once that list exists, it shouldn't be what your campaigns target anymore. And if you think the accounts are wrong, that's a conversation to have with RevOps, not a reason to quietly build your own.
This has always been a rule of thumb for me, but this is the first time I've had to train a whole team on it. We've been moving to named accounts at Sphera all year, and this quarter I'm building the enablement for our demand gen team on how it all works in Salesforce: how customer and prospect accounts are identified, which regions we focus on, and how sales ops structured the account universe. The goal is simple. Every campaign should target a segment of the accounts sales is already working, versus a broad ICP definition.
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?
Run this before your next campaign launches
This is the checklist our demand gen team is starting to use. Run it on your next campaign brief:
What's the campaign objective?
Customers or prospects?
Which region and territory?
Which industries and product lines?
Which named accounts look like the ones that already drive above-average pipeline, ACV, and TCV?
If you can't answer questions 2 through 4 from your CRM, that's not a campaign problem. It's a conversation you need to have with RevOps before you build anything.
No named accounts yet? Start here
You don't need RevOps carving up territories to stop targeting by ICP:
Start with the objective. Decide what you're trying to market and eventually sell, then which accounts fit it best: company size, vertical, region.
Profile your best customers who match it. Pull a list of them with ACV, TCV, contract length, number of products in use, plus any firmographic or technographic data you have, then ask the LLM of your choice to analyze the list and break down what those accounts have in common. (Stick to your company's approved AI tool, and strip account names if you need to.)
Turn that profile into a prospect list. Filter your CRM using the attributes from that breakdown, and bring RevOps or sales ops into the exercise so the list matches how sales actually sees the world.
Where ABM fits now
Once demand gen is targeting segments, ABM stops having to define the account list and run the plays at the same time. It becomes the bespoke layer on top: 1:1 and 1:Few plays inside the named account universe, like a cluster of customers ripe for a cross-sell.
Check this before Monday
Pull last quarter's campaign targeting and leads and look at what percentage came from accounts a rep actually owns. If that number is lower than you expected, your campaigns and your sales team are working off two different maps, and no amount of lead scoring is going to fix that.
Reply with the number you find. I'm curious how wide the gap is.
P.S. If you're in the middle of this shift and want a second set of eyes on how your segments are structured, that's exactly what my ABM coaching is for.
