Transforming the Entire Customer Journey with ABM: From Initial Interest to Adoption & Scale

Driving Customer Centricity with an ABM-Powered Customer Journey

Authors:? Nancy Harlan & Shams Naim

Date: February 2025

Traditional demand generation relies on broad-based marketing campaigns designed to capture leads, nurture them into marketing-qualified leads (MQLs), and then pass them to sales. This approach is reactive—marketing generates interest, and sales engage once a lead expresses intent. However, this process is often siloed and transactional, addressing only the immediate needs of individual stakeholders rather than fostering a strategic, company-wide engagement. More critically, these tactics fail to engage senior decision-makers, such as the C-suite, who require a more personalized and value-driven conversation.

Further complicating the playing field are two key market changes[1]. First, there is a radical shift in how stakeholders at large enterprises want to engage - with buyers being more content-driven, technically savvy, and requiring personalization over generic messaging. Secondly, the shift in commercial models towards subscription-based business models is requiring sales & support teams to be far more customer centric and aligned to long-term success of customers.

With this as the new playing field, high performing B2B sales organizations should establish a strategic initiative that integrates account-based marketing (ABM), sales, value engineering, and customer success into a unified team. This proactive approach shapes the entire customer journey—from initial interest to adoption and to scale—by anticipating and engaging key accounts with tailored messaging, personalized content, and coordinated outreach that aligns with the customer's strategic goals.? It engages the right target at the right time in their journey. This ensures you meet customers where they are and how they want to, rather than force them into your typical marketing/sales ?“play” or “motion”.?

Key Stakeholders for a Successful ABM-Powered Customer Journey

An ABM-powered customer journey requires collaboration across multiple functions within the organization. The key stakeholders include:

1. Marketing Leadership – Drives ABM strategy, ensures alignment with sales goals, and delivers tailored campaigns that resonate with target accounts.
2. Sales Leadership – Champions the ABM approach within the sales organization, ensuring account specific strategy is aligned with ABM, and that extended sales teams are fully engaged in executing ABM plays.
3. Account Executives (AEs) – Work closely with marketing to engage high-value accounts with personalized outreach, strategic messaging, and targeted relationship-building.
4. Value Engineering – Investigate how the product or solution can specifically and measurably affect the strategic goals of the target company, ensuring clear ROI and business value alignment.
5. Customer Success Teams – Play a crucial role in post-sale delivery, ensuring the customer succeeds in driving value, and extends beyond the initial sale to drive long-term customer value.
6. Product & Customer Marketing – Provides key insights into pain points, use cases, and competitive differentiators to ensure that ABM content is highly relevant. Post sale, ensures the value “story” has been captured to drive advocacy initiatives.
7. Data & Analytics Teams – Measure the effectiveness of ABM campaigns, track engagement, and provide insights that refine future ABM strategies.

Aligning these key stakeholders can be the most challenging aspect of establishing an ABM-powered customer journey. It is critical that all agree on what constitutes the “right” accounts. You must focus on accounts that warrant this approach by asking: If we do this right, will this account become a flagship customer, fostering a mutually beneficial partnership that drives value for both organizations? Rely on data from the data/analytics team as the first step to establishing the target lists. From there, both sales and marketing need to provide input to get to the “right” list.

ABM and the Customer-Centric Journey

A true 1:1 ABM strategy transforms the customer journey by prioritizing engagement at every stage—from awareness to purchase, adoption, and scale. This shift places emphasis on:

• Deep Account Insights and Personalization – Understanding key pain points and aligning messaging with the customer's strategic priorities.
• Multi-Stakeholder Engagement – Engaging decision-makers at every level to drive consensus and value realization.
• Customer-First Content and Experiences – Providing educational and value-driven interactions that move beyond traditional sales pitches. Content must always capture the strategic priorities of the target company.
• Integrated Sales, Marketing, Value Engineering and Customer Success Collaboration – Ensuring alignment across all customer touchpoints to deliver a seamless experience.
• Continuous Value and Post-Sale Expansion – Driving long-term engagement and maximizing customer lifetime value.

Enhancing Each Stage of the Customer Journey with ABM

ABM improves outcomes at every stage by ensuring personalized engagement and strategic alignment:

1. Awareness & Interest – Leverage targeted advertising, executive outreach, and thought leadership to create awareness, demand, and credibility within high-value accounts.
2. Consideration & Evaluation – Deploy tailored content, industry-specific case studies, and personalized demos to engage decision-makers and build trust.
3. Purchase & Implementation – Offer customized onboarding, executive sponsorship, educational events, and solution workshops to ensure smooth adoption and early wins.
4. Adoption & Value Realization – Capture success stories and share with new areas to drive interest. Engage customer success teams early to track progress, deliver proactive support, and identify expansion opportunities. Leverage customer champions to highlight their innovative work and to identify future pipeline.
5. Renewal & Expansion – Target new areas of the business using relevant use cases and success stories. Execute custom communications, campaigns and events to evangelize the value of the partnership and business impact.? Utilize ongoing executive alignment, ROI reporting, and strategic planning to drive upsell and renewal conversations.

Metrics to Track Your Program’s Success

To measure the effectiveness of an ABM-powered customer journey, organizations should track key metrics, including:

• Engagement Metrics – Account engagement scores by functional area and title, time spent on content, and participation in executive programs.
• Pipeline Sourced & Influenced – Number and value of ABM-engaged deals and engaged large ($250K+) in the pipeline.
• Win Rate Improvement – Percentage of ABM-targeted deals that convert compared to non-ABM deals.
• Deal Size Growth – Increase in average contract value (ACV) and deal expansion rates.
• Sales Cycle Acceleration – Reduction in time from first engagement to closed-won.
• Customer Retention and Expansion – Renewal rates, product adoption rates, and expansion revenue from existing ABM-targeted accounts.
• ROI of ABM Efforts – Attribution of revenue to ABM campaigns compared to traditional marketing initiatives.

Success Story: Expanding Software Company’s Footprint in a Global Financial Services Firm

In early 2022, the Software Company secured an initial engagement with a leading global financial services firm, deploying its enterprise automation solution in the finance department. Post-deployment, the ABM team was engaged to help drive awareness, adoption, executive alignment, and expansion across the organization. Recognizing the account’s high potential for lifetime value, the sales team led a strategic, cross-functional effort to maximize growth.

• Sales spearheaded the expansion strategy.
• Customer Success ensured adoption and helped the customer achieve their desired outcomes.
• Executives provided sponsorship and advocacy.
• Value Engineering engaged new departments, identifying relevant use cases and business impact, and steered the entire team to the areas of the business that should be a high-priority focus.
• ABM developed a comprehensive engagement plan, defining key audiences, crafting tailored messaging, and executing targeted communications, campaigns, and events.

The ABM Impact:? Creating Awareness, Demand and Energy in the Enterprise

• 302% YoY growth in responses indicating an impact on overall awareness of the company and product.
• 446% YoY growth in net-new responses proving the message was getting to new targets.
• 48% of responses came from outside the initial “land” department proving engagement in new areas of the business.
• 32% engagement from leadership (2% C-level, 6% VP, 24% Director) proving the message was getting to decision makers and expanded buying committee members.
• 27K+ unique page views on Software Company’s customer hub, learning portal, and website showing overall energy within the account and the individuals’ desire to learn more.

?Results

This coordinated, data-driven approach grew the transaction 3X to a $40M+ long-term contract, with the customer champion becoming an external advocate for Software Company talking openly about the business results achieved from the partnership and solution.

Next Steps and Conclusion

If you want to begin this strategic program at your company, consider these first steps:

1. Establish cross-functional collaboration between account-based marketing, sales, customer success, and value engineering.
2. Ensure leadership alignment around the initiative, including your CRO, CMO, and CCO(Chief Customer Officer).
3. Develop an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and segment accounts based on revenue potential, strategic fit, and likelihood of engagement. ICP should include data that indicates propensity to buy and/or a compelling event that will take place in 6-12 months. But overall analyze your most “successful” account relationships to date, define their specific qualities and map those qualities to your target list will ensure you are identifying the accounts that you will have the greatest opportunity for success.

Integrating ABM at every stage of the customer journey empowers companies to build a comprehensive, customer-first strategy that boosts retention, fuels growth, and creates enduring business impact. As revenue cycles shift from one-off deals to continuous consumption-driven buying, it's essential to secure success in every sale, continuously identify and activate new target audiences, and nurture champions whose success stories drive further adoption and value capture. ABM can be the lynchpin to maximizing the lifetime value of every customer relationship.

About the Authors

Nancy Carlyle Harlan is a dynamic marketing leader with deep expertise in ABM, executive marketing, and customer marketing. She has built and led high-impact account-based marketing programs at both UiPath and Qlik, driving significant revenue growth and engagement. Recognized as an ABM thought leader, Nancy has earned prestigious awards, including the B2B Marketing Gold Award “Delivering 1:1 ABM at Scale” (2024) and the ITSMA Marketing Excellence Gold Award (2020). She is passionate about customer-centric marketing and driving meaningful business outcomes. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Shams Naim is a seasoned GTM strategy leader with more than 10 years in digital software and professional services. His background includes building and implementing high impact, customer-centric programs with $50M+ revenue impact, as well as market leading professional services practices. He has won EY’s Innovation Award twice for two solutions he helped bring from idea to market with multi-million dollar revenues in each. He holds a Business & Engineering degree from Drexel University. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

[1] McKinsey – What the future science of B2B sales growth looks like