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Learn what’s working now, and what’s next.
It sounds counterintuitive…after all, most people obsess over building perfect “best-fit” account lists.
But when done in the wrong order, your best-fit list becomes your biggest barrier to pipeline.
What I see happening too often
Teams spend weeks building a list of accounts that “look like their ICP” or “match closed-won attributes.”
Then they run campaigns, track response rates, and scratch their heads when sales ignores half the list.
It’s not just about choosing the “right accounts.”
It’s about choosing them in a way that connects them to your business goals and forces alignment with sales up front.
Here’s what tends to go wrong:
You pick accounts that “look nice on paper” but aren’t priorities for the business.
You fail to factor in internal alignment so sales doesn’t trust or adopt the list.
You ignore where you already have warm relationships.
You treat list building as a marketing exercise instead of a GTM exercise.
In short: your list has potential, but it’s detached from your company’s direction.
Your experiment this week
Run this quick test.
No tools. No dashboards. Just a spreadsheet and a bit of honesty.
Pull your “best-fit” list.
Export your current target accounts from Salesforce, HubSpot, or whatever you’re using.Add a new column called “GTM Goal Alignment.”
For each account, write which GTM initiative it supports:
Enterprise expansion, vertical push, retention, cross-sell, etc.Mark any that don’t clearly map to a company goal.
If you can’t connect an account to a GTM priority, mark it blank or “none.”Now sort and scan.
How many of your “targets” actually align to a GTM goal?Cohort and build.
Group your “targets” by GTM goal and build your strategy around each of those separately.
Those are your high-leverage accounts. That’s an account list.
Everything else is noise, it may look like ABM, but it’s not helping you hit company objectives.
What you’ll notice
When you see the list, the disconnect becomes obvious.
You’ll realize how much effort is going into accounts that aren’t part of your company’s current strategy.
That’s not a campaign problem, it’s a focus problem.
And once you fix it, sales alignment becomes automatic, because you’re literally working from the same map.
P.S.
This diagnostic is a small part of what we build together inside the ABM Targeting System, a 1-hour working session where we rebuild your targeting logic directly from your company’s GTM priorities.
If your ABM feels disconnected from what leadership actually cares about, let’s fix that.
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Author: Tyler Pleiss