What Makes A Good ABM Account Selection?

At Viewpoint Analysis, we partner with companies around the world to research their ABM accounts, helping them understand each prospect deeply and tailor messaging to the right contacts. After analyzing hundreds of organizations, we’ve learned that ABM account selection is the most crucial first step to success. In this blog, we’ll share our perspective on what makes an ideal ABM account - what to consider, what to avoid, and how to set yourself up for a powerful, personalized outreach strategy.

Companies talk a lot about the 'Voice of the Customer', but for us, we think the 'Voice of the Buyer' is even more important. Understanding your FUTURE customers is what the Voice of the Buyer is all about - and ABM is a central component of this. Using it to produce solid ABM account selection is a great start.

Defining Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Defining your Ideal Customer Profile might sound like a basic exercise, but it’s the foundation of every effective ABM campaign. Start by gathering your extended team - sales, pre-sales engineers, marketing, and leadership, to surface both hard data and soft insights about where you’ve succeeded and where efforts fell short.

Imagine you sell a solution that optimizes manufacturing throughput. You’ve seen tremendous traction in manufacturing and consumer packaged goods (CPG) firms, while higher education and local government have proven less receptive. Those successes and lessons learned become the pillars of your ICP. Firmographics like industry vertical, annual revenue thresholds, and geographic footprint form the first layer.

By interviewing stakeholders (what we call Buyer Group Research) you capture nuances that data alone misses. Salespeople recount how certain titles championed deals, while pre-sales engineers highlight technical hurdles. Pulling it all together, you build a composite persona that reflects not just an abstract ideal, but your real-world wins.

What Makes a Good ABM Account Selection?

With your ICP as your guide and the baseline, selecting accounts becomes both an art and a science. Here is what we've learned at Viewpoint Analysis from researching many hundreds of companies across the world:

The ABM Goldilocks Principle: Just the Right Size

Every prospect must be ‘just right’ - not so small that your ABM investment is overkill, and not so large that your team can’t manage the complexity. A mid‑market or upper mid‑market firm often hits the sweet spot: big enough to warrant a tailor‑made campaign but small enough to engage a concise list of stakeholders. If the account is too small, we are wasting investment. If they are too big (as we'll discuss below), it can make things hard too, but in different ways.

Public vs. Private: The Transparency Advantage

Public companies open windows into their strategy through annual reports, investor calls, and press releases. That visibility yields insight - planned expansions, M&A activity, or capital investments that inform your timing and message. With privately held firms, you’ll need to dig deeper via primary research and third‑party insights to paint a reliable picture.

Investment Propensity: Timing Is Everything

Is the account allocating budget toward your solution area? We recently researched a global bank which plans to spend nearly 40% of its operating expenses on IT projects over the next five years. Such signals - funding rounds, technology refresh cycles, or regulatory deadlines, reveal windows of opportunity. The flip side is that if we miss this - for example, let's say we call the CIO of the bank in 2030....we might not find much appetite.

Leadership Visibility: Signals from the Top

Some organizations cultivate outspoken C‑suite executives who publicly champion innovation. These leaders’ blogs, LinkedIn posts, and conference keynotes offer valuable information about priorities and pain points. When you align your messaging with their public statement, your approach resonates more naturally. Companies that are not as open, and where it is more difficult to find information, are much harder to target with strong ABM messages.

Geographic Alignment: Proximity Matters

Global enterprises often distribute decision‑makers across multiple regions. If your team is based in the UK, targeting an account whose leadership hub sits in London can be more effective than one managed solely from Tokyo or New York. Geographic alignment reduces friction and accelerates relationships. Most very large businesses have an executive team split across multiple countries - so if your account isn't managed from multiple countries, of you don't have the buy-in from your global business units, it's destined to be much harder to target.

Cultural & Organizational Fit: Aligning Values and Ways of Working

Beyond size and spending, the best ABM accounts share cultural traits - an appetite for innovation, a bias toward collaboration, and decision‑making rhythms that match your sales cycle. You’ll often see signs of this in how they communicate internally (e.g., active employee engagement on professional networks) and externally (e.g., participation in industry forums).

Competitive Positioning: Carving Out Your Advantage

Understanding the competitor landscape within an account can sharpen your value proposition. Look for indicators that current vendors are underdelivering - customer reviews, executive complaints in earnings calls, or gaps revealed in RFPs. Highlighting specific weaknesses of incumbents and demonstrating measurable gains you’ve driven elsewhere positions you as the partner of choice.

Stakeholder Mapping: Identifying Hidden Champions

High‑value deals often hinge on influencers beyond the C‑suite: department heads, project sponsors, and even external consultants. Incorporate stakeholder mapping into your account profiles - track who is quoted in press releases, which titles engage with your content, and the networks of advisors around the account. Revealing these hidden champions enables more targeted, multi‑threaded outreach.

Conclusion Selecting the right ABM accounts

Selecting the right ABM accounts is as important as your entire ABM put together. It is where ABM wins are won or lost. By defining a solid ICP built from your team's experience, applying the ABM Goldilocks Principle, and leveraging transparent, validated data, you ensure every campaign starts with the highest probability of success.

If you would like to learn more about how Viewpoint Analysis help companies like Riverbed, Nexthink, Informatica, AvePoint and many more companies research their most important ABM accounts, take a look at our Account Research Services.

You might also like to learn how to research ABM accounts yourself in our blog on the subject.