Key Takeaways:
- Target specific decision-makers and hidden stakeholders instead of relying on broad account-level outreach.
- Eliminate sales latency by synchronizing marketing and sales efforts to deliver personalized educational content at the precise moment of need.
Account-based marketing (ABM) requires precision, intelligence, and a deep understanding of human behavior. At B2B Marketing Exchange (B2BMX) 2026, powered by Advertising Week, LiveRamp’s Ed Vander Bush and Influ2’s Doug Madey discussed the importance of focusing marketing efforts on the right individuals. By treating key buyers as the main characters of your outreach, B2B marketers can drive unparalleled revenue growth and foster meaningful business connections.
Understanding the buyer’s journey forms the foundation of any successful account-based marketing strategy, the two stated.. As buyers move from initial awareness into deep consideration, their needs and expectations shift dramatically. Marketers must map these stages meticulously to ensure they provide relevant information exactly when the prospect requires it.
Buyer Journey and Personas
Personas play an equally critical role in this progression. Targeting an entire account often dilutes the message, whereas focusing on specific individuals allows you to tailor your communication to the distinct pain points of the decision-makers. This contact-level approach transforms generic outreach into valuable, consultative engagement.
Reflecting on this need for precise targeting, Vander Bush noted, “It really comes down to understanding not only the account, but the person on the other side of the process.”
Challenges in the Buying Process
Modern B2B purchasing decisions rarely happen in a vacuum, presenting significant challenges for sales and marketing teams. Buyers conduct extensive independent research, meaning that by the time they finally reach out for a meeting, they have often already finalized their decision. This dynamic forces revenue teams to engage prospects much earlier in the evaluation phase.
Another major hurdle is the presence of hidden stakeholders who influence the final decision but remain invisible within your CRM. When sales representatives execute unexpected outreach without understanding the full buying group, they risk alienating these unseen decision-makers. Navigating this complexity requires gathering deeper contact-level insights.
“Having been recently on the buying side, I was surprised by hidden stakeholders within my own company ” noted Vander Bush. “Colleagues who brought real, important perspectives to the table that become completely invisible if we were to try to reduce the buying journey to the account level.”
Latency and Orchestration in Sales
Latency in the sales process occurs when representatives react to outdated signals and reach out too late. Relying solely on account-level intent data often creates a lag, causing sellers to miss the critical window of opportunity when the prospect is actively seeking solutions. Eliminating this delay is essential for maintaining momentum in the deal cycle.
Vander Bush emphasized the importance of this alignment, stating, “Too often, we align around the real problem too late, waiting for a sufficient ‘score’ rather than orchestrating marketing and sales together around the signals that reveal what real people are trying to achieve as they move through the customer journey.”
To address the latency problem, revenue teams must master the orchestration of relevant materials. Serving the right content at the precise moment requires marketing and sales to operate in total alignment, moving beyond siloed activities. This synchronized effort ensures that the buyer receives continuous value without aggressive, premature sales pitches.
Personalization and Content Strategy
A robust content strategy relies heavily on personalization to drive internal consensus within target accounts. Vander Bush highlighted a case study involving a global brand where an internal champion recognized the immense value of a data clean room. However, this champion struggled to secure the necessary buy-in from skeptical colleagues across different departments.
Instead of aggressively pushing for more sales meetings, the team deployed a highly personalized content strategy. They distributed targeted educational videos designed specifically to provide thought leadership of those hesitant internal stakeholders. This strategic distribution of content naturally multi-threaded the account, elevating the conversation and ultimately leading to increased attendance at pivotal sales meetings.
“This wasn’t a time for a traditional multithreading strategy,” stated Vander Bush. “This was the time to put really well-timed, relevant educational content in front of those contacts our champion was trying to sell internally. That effort led to those contacts leaning in and asking to join the next call, because as their knowledge grew, so did their understanding of the potential business value of a clean room.”
Attribution and Campaign Impact
Proving the impact of targeted campaigns remains a persistent attribution problem for B2B marketers. Standard dashboards often fail to capture how specific marketing touches influence individual buyers over time. Accurately measuring this engagement is vital for demonstrating how ABM moves prospects further down the sales funnel. This is where taking a contact-level approach to your ABM program helps, because you can’t tailor the next message if you don’t know who engaged with what. There’s no context on which topic landed—or whether anything changed.
Such engagement can be measured at various points of the customer journey, even while performing different functions. For example, personalized messaging can serve as a powerful tool to overcome stubborn gatekeepers who block access to decision makers. By deploying the right level of personalization, you can bypass these barriers and deliver compelling arguments directly to the people holding the budget. This level of precision transforms stalled opportunities into active deals. Engagement that speaks directly to the attribution and impact of the campaign.
Vander Bush illustrated this impact with a real-world example: “I worked with a seller trying to close an end-of-quarter deal who was being blocked from everyone who needed to sign. Coming into that conversation, we were able to show how those stakeholders were already engaging, which opened the door to collaborating. We spent 20 minutes over Slack and hammered out a plan to deliver that personalized messaging to the right people.”
Collaboration Provides Results
The synergy between marketing and sales dictates the overall success of any account-based strategy, noted Vander Bush. Delivering personalized, relevant content requires both teams to share insights seamlessly and understand the buyer’s point of view.
When revenue teams collaborate effectively, they empower internal champions to advocate for their solutions with confidence.
“Understanding the buyer’s perspective fundamentally changes how you approach content creation and sales outreach,” he said. “Showing true value and relevance to stakeholders transforms your brand from a vendor into a trusted strategic partner. Delivering with empathy and specialized knowledge drive these engagements forward.”
