The B2B Buying Process is More Complicated Than Ever
Finding and targeting decision makers is becoming harder.
It’s partly because buying committees have swollen in size. The average enterprise B2B buying group now consists of five to 11 stakeholders, who represent an average of five distinct business functions, Gartner found.
But it’s also because today’s buyers are more independent than ever, leaving fewer opportunities for sales teams to influence deals
In fact, 75% of buyers prefer a rep-free sales experience, according to Gartner. And 81% of buyers will only contact vendors once they’ve gathered information and are ready to engage, Thunderbit shares.
Plus, the buying process is more competitive. The number of brands that are considered during the buying journey is 62% higher than in 2021, Dentsu reports.
And even when you cut through the competition and secure the deal, there’s still a high chance they could churn
In B2B, the professional services industry has an average churn rate of 27%, according to CustomerGauge. Their 2025 research found the highest churn lies with the logistics (40%) and manufacturing (35%) sectors, while the lowest churn is seen by IT services (12%) and energy and utilities (11%).
- Momentum ABM's 2024 Global Account-Based Marketing Benchmark
Account-Based Marketing is the Answer
If you’re going to break through the noise, align your brand closely with buying groups and engage prospects earlier and more effectively, you need to be considering accountbased marketing (ABM).
It’s the tactic that offers a data-driven path to resolve some of your attribution challenges, the way to align more closely with sales teams, and the secret to growing your pipeline with the accounts that actually impact your bottom line.
In this guide, we explain what ABM is, how you can get started with your existing martech stack - and how you can use AI to scale your efforts from as little as $20 a month.
This was the topic of a recent webinar discussion with Andy Johnson, Founder and Director of ABM agency HUT 3. If you missed it, watch the replay on our website.
So, Where Do We Start With ABM?
It’s called account-based marketing, so you need to start with your highest-value prospect, right?
Wrong.
The long B2B buying cycle means you may not see results – or any kind of return – for a year or longer.
That means that if you take a 1:1 approach, you’ll be sinking all your efforts into something that may not work. And you won’t get enough data to know whether your campaign is actually performing for a really long time. If you start with 1:1 ABM, you risk your pilot being scrapped because it doesn’t appear to drive any revenue.
But if you take a 1:few approach at the start and target multiple accounts, you give yourself a better chance of getting actionable data. This means you’ll be able to test and refine your tactics as you go. And by targeting more accounts, you’re more likely to see a return and get the buy-in for more ABM campaigns
Hybrid ABM approaches that combine digital campaigns with inperson events have seen deals sizes grow by in industries like manufacturing.
- Gilroy
Cheat Code: Start With Prospects That Already Visit Your Website
Another strategy is to focus on the businesses that are already engaging with your brand and use ABM to convert them.
There’s a simple, three-step strategy to find these target accounts:
1. Advertise freely on your usual digital platforms
2. Use website visitor identification tool like Lead Forensics to see which accounts are engaging with your website
3. Take those engaged accounts and allocate them to a 1:few or a 1:1 campaign
Want to find out which companies are already visiting your website but haven’t converted? Book a demo of Lead Forensics to try our software for a week. You’ll get to keep all the
The best way to see if ABM could work for you, is to try it on the prospects that are already interested in your brand. When you build a personalized, end-to-end marketing campaign that targets those prospects, you can engage, nurture and convert them before they bounce to a competitor.
Kirsty Dawe, CMO at Lead Forensics
Try The Award-Winning ABM Framework
If you’re not sure what process you need to follow in order to set up your ABM campaign, why not copy HUT 3’s framework?
This tried-and-tested methodology has five steps:
Step one: Gather insights and intelligence.
Pull together deep intelligence on the account, sector and line of business and get ideas from colleagues on what the key opportunities and challenges are.
Step two: Define your strategy.
Develop detailed profiles for target accounts or clusters, outline your targeting tactics and strategic roadmap, and make sure the sales and marketing teams are aligned.
Step three: Develop your value propositions and message playbook.
Create tailored messages for the different personas and account types, then put this together with a toolkit of messaging and content that will help sales and marketing teams.
Step four: Develop your campaign.
Produce bespoke campaign assets like videos, PDFs or social media posts, activate the campaign through your outreach channels, and keep sales and marketing aligned with ongoing communication.
Step five: Measure and optimize.
Define your KPIs and reporting processes, make sure your tech stack is integrated to help with measurement, report regularly on performance and send insights and opportunities straight to sales teams.
of B2B marketers saw increased opportunity with ABM.
of B2B marketers using ABM experienced larger deal sizes.
- Forrester and AdRoll
How Can AI Help?
With the right tool, AI can liberate your team from hours of manual research, copywriting and reporting. What would’ve taken days can be done in minutes with the right AI assistant.
AI is already used by 88% of marketers, according to insights from Survey Monkey. Of those, 90% say they use it for faster decision making, 93% say it helps them generate content faster, and 91% say they use AI to uncover insights more quickly.
And according to research by McKinsey into the economic potential of generative AI, if used by sales and marketing teams across all industries, AI could increase sales productivity by approximately 3 to 5% of current global sales expenditures. That’s equivalent to an estimated $486 billion!
But with every piece of software seemingly ‘powered by AI’, how do you know which tools are worth experimenting with and won’t be a total waste of time?
How do organizations use AI?
- Momentum ABM's 2024 Global ABM Benchmark generate insights into accounts engage clients and improve CX automate routine tasks
Start With Generative AI tools
If you’re just dipping your toe into AI, the easiest way to build it into your workflows is to use something like Chat GPT, CoPilot or Gemini to speed up your research.
These tools are much easier to adopt, which counters any concerns about long ramp times or additional training requirements. That’s good news for the 45% of employees who say they’d be more likely to adopt generative AI if it could integrate into their existing workflow, according to research by McKinsey.
Generative AI tools can help you:
• Understand the needs of different industries or businesses.
• Suggest ways to personalize existing content for different target accounts.
• Produce personalized content variations from source material.
• Interrogate data to spot patterns and help you unlock insights.
They’re so popular that you’ll find a wealth of advice online about how to write the best prompt or get the most valuable output from these generative AI tools.
However, they have one significant drawback: you must prompt them
They don’t work independently; you must keep giving them instructions. So, while it’s much faster than manually conducting all your research or tweaking designs in Canva, it still requires a lot of your time and focus.
Embrace Agentic AI for Future-Proof ABM Support
The next step in AI adoption is agentic AI. These autonomous systems act independently with minimal human oversight.
They’re capable of doing a range of things, from creating and revising plans based on logic or learned experience to remembering past actions and using external tools to complete tasks.
The best part? They’re easy-to-use and budget-friendly. They can be integrated into your workflows in minutes, so you’ll see the impact immediately and you don’t need to plead for any support from tech teams.
That’s why 92% of businesses plan to increase their investment in AI, according to research from McKinsey. The same report shares that 90% of Fortune 500 companies are already using the tool.
Nearly 90% of marketers use AI
Only 24% have experimented with agentic AI
- According to Forrester’s State Of Customer Obsession Survey, 2025
What Are the Opportunities for ABM?
There’s a whole range of things that agentic AI can help with, including:
• Gathering insights into accounts quickly
• Clustering relevant accounts together
• Producing multiple variations of content
• Personalizing assets
• Analyzing data and extracting insights
Ok, So What Is An AI Agent?
An agent is not automation
Automation follows a rigid, rules-based process and never deviates from it. It runs from A, to B, to C and with no reasoning along the way.
Instead, an AI agent is dynamic, flexible and capable of reasoning
AI agents have three components:
• The brain, which is usually fueled by an LLM like Chat GPT. This powers the agent’s reasoning, planning and language generation
• Memory, which helps the agent get smarter by remembering previous interactions.
• Tools, which is how the agent can interact with the outside world.
How Does AI Help You Do More With Less?
The best agentic AI works like an assistant; except they conduct tasks within minutes, not days.
These tools allow you to scale tasks like account research, asset personalization, data analysis and more. It’s how you can churn out a high volume of campaigns with relatively minimal human input and time.
What’s The Catch?
A healthy dose of skepticism is essential when working with any kind of AI tool.
They’re known to hallucinate and dream up facts that aren’t true. From fabricating URLs to making up statistics or jumping to inaccurate conclusions, there’s a lot that AI can get wrong.
So, while it will help you scale your ABM campaign, you need to ensure there are steps in your process that allow humans to check the quality and accuracy of what’s produced.
But don’t let this scare you too much: the ChatGPT-4 model is intelligent enough to pass the Uniform Bar Examination and rank in the top 10% of test takers, according to OpenAI’s technical report. And ChatGPT-5, which was released in August, is so smart it has PhDlevel intelligence, its Co-Founder claimed.
ChatGPT 5 now makes
The Best Agentic AI for ABM
There’s no shortage of tools claiming they’re capable of reinventing your marketing strategies, but many are costly and very challenging to set up.
When writing this guide, we researched many.
We played with Clay, set up workflow automations in N8N during a free trial, and prompted Gemini and Copilot. But nothing worked perfectly for us, until we got access to ChatGPT’s new agentic AI.
ChatGPT Agent Mode
If you have a paid subscription, you’ll get access to ChatGPT’s Agent Mode - and it’s a game-changer.
It goes beyond the basic LLM chat, which needs constant prompting, to become its own autonomous assistant that can think and act on your behalf.
It operates inside its own virtual machine to execute a range of tasks, from browsing websites, clicking links and filling out forms, to running code and generating downloadable assets like PDFs, spreadsheets and slide decks.
For ABM, this means you can task ChatGPT Agent Mode to take care of the manual tasks that keep you busy and prevent you from scaling your campaigns.
10% of the world’s adult population use
ChatGPT
Around 56% of work-related prompts involve users asking ChatGPT to complete tasks for them.
In 2025, ChatGPT reached 800 million weekly active users.
- OpenAI
What's Possible With ChatGPT Now?
Some of the things you can do with ChatGPT Agent Mode include: Research and Planning
• Research accounts and markets. Save hours of research time by asking the agent to research your target accounts. It can analyze competitors, look for industry trends, browse relevant sites, extract meaningful data and build a polished, downloadable document full of intelligence.
• Develop your ICP and prioritize accounts. Give the agent firmographic, technographic or behavioral data from sources like CRM exports or public sites and use spreadsheet functions or Python notebooks to refine the ICP. It can also highlight which accounts display new buying signals and flag those prospects that should be prioritized.
• Personalize content and outreach at scale. Stop manually writing LinkedIn messages or emails and get the agent to do this for you. It’s as easy as giving ChatGPT Agent Mode a template or sample and then specifying how it needs to be personalized or changed, and you can get a spreadsheet of message variations ready for you to edit and send.
Campaign Execution
• Create campaign assets. Each target account might need its own presentation or brief, which is time-consuming to produce. But if you ask the agent to gather the data, generate your charts and build editable slide deck summaries, you can scale-up your ABM easily.
• Enrich data.
If you upload a spreadsheet of data, you can ask ChatGPT Agent Mode to clean the data, cross-check company websites and summarize notes and win back hours of time.
• Test and optimize your user experience. If your digital journey has friction, you’ll see fewer conversions from your ABM campaigns. But by asking the agent to act as a prospect and navigate to a certain page or perform a certain action, you’ll be able to observe how it does and review any recommendations made for how to optimize your funnel.
Don't Overlook the Limitations of Agentic AI
The first consideration is that it’s only available to Pro, Plus and Team subscribers, and it’s not available to every user just yet. Its use is also limited, with Plus users given around 40 monthly Agent messages - so heavy ABM programs could devour this quickly.
It can also be slow, so it’s best if you leave it operating in a window on your desktop and move on to other things.
You should also be aware that it does ask permission to do things instead of automatically completing actions, but this is good as it gives you an opportunity to sense-check what’s happening.
Another challenge is that ChatGPT Agent Mode can’t integrate with ABM and CRM platforms, either. However, it can ask you to log in via ChatGPT and once authenticated, it can continue with the task(s) at hand.
Hours spent on manual research of target accounts
Insights report generated within minutes
Days spent rewriting content to tailor it for target accounts
Personalized content variations produced rapidly
Talented marketers distracted by data cleansing and enrichment
Speedy data enrichment and cleansing that frees up the team
Weeks of analysis to understand the performance of campaigns
Fast analysis in downloadable reports ready for circulation
Build Your Own Agentic AI Tech Stack
There are many reasons why you might not want to use ChatGPT. From concerns around confidentiality, regulatory compliance and data security to the fact you can’t trust the tool to not make up incorrect, biased or misleading information, it’s not the most reliable tool for business.
Instead, you may prefer to build your own Agentic AI tech stack to drive your ABM campaigns. You can create custom workflows that address specific actions and outputs.
Use AI-Powered Insights
One way to use AI to speed up your ABM campaigns is to get it to produce insight reports for you. What used to take weeks of research can now be done in a handful of days.
You need to break down the process into defined steps, which will look something like:
1. Create the research plan
2. Break down the research questions
3. Search for sources
4. Analyse the insight
5. Summarize the findings
This workflow could be used to generate reports on prospect accounts, look at industries or even report on specific types of roles.
How AI Can Help Your ABM Campaigns
Repurpose Content for Campaigns
Another way you can use AI to scale your ABM campaign is to build a content repurposing engine. You need to supply a piece of content, add some supplementary detail and get the agentic AI to remix it into a range of assets
For example, you could take thought leadership content and repurpose it into sectorspecific campaigns that retain the key message but tweak it in a way that will land with each audience.
This can be done with the free version of ChatGPT, as long as you prompt it clearly and make sure you review – and fact check – everything.
Personalize Content to Resonate with Prospects
As well as repurposing content, you can use AI to churn out personalized versions of key ABM campaign assets at scale
It’s as simple as sharing the insight report with your AI tool and providing a core piece of content before asking it to personalize the material according to what your research says will resonate most with each target account.
Tell Stories with Data
AI is also really skilled at helping you navigate lots of data. It’s possible to use AI tools to enrich your raw data, centralize it and then visualize everything so you can share insights.
This means you can take the same data set but present it in different ways. You can pull out top-level insights and learning and recommendations for executives, while leaders and those focused on ABM can receive more detail on account performance, ABM funnels, pipeline reviews, and more. Likewise, for those who are executing ABM campaigns, you can share even greater detail on things like channel performance, content engagement, social interactions and campaign or account performance.
Piece Everything Together to Create an ABM Engine
HUT 3 has built an ABM activity engine that’s powered by AI and drives much of their campaigns.
Their ABM tech stack is comprised of:
• Astrad’s managed programmatic advertising platform serves ads to target companies across the web.
• LinkedIn is combined with self-managed data to target and retarget decision makers on the social platform.
• Lead Forensics is used to find and track companies that visit the website.
• Turtl and Folloze are used to personalize content and deliver tailored content to engaged accounts.
• Cognism is used to find GDPR-compliant contacts for direct outreach.
• HubSpot, Salesforce Pardot and Marketo are used to nurture leads based on funnel stage, handoff leads and track their progression through the pipeline.
Build Your Own ABM Process
With the right tech stack and support, you should be able to build an ABM process that perfectly algins with your business
But if you need help to get started, this process is a good base to begin with:
1. Programmatic ads or sponsored content on LinkedIn attracts prospects and drives them to a landing page on the website.
2. Lead Forensics identifies which accounts are engaging with the paid activity. This helps HUT3 to understand if the paid campaigns are driving the right kinds of businesses to the landing page and gives visibility of the pages that those accounts are engaging with.
3. If it’s a 1:1 or 1:few campaign, Turtl or Folloze will be used to serve personalized content and encourage conversions on the website.
4. The engaged accounts will be enriched with data from Cognism that can be used for targeted outreach.
5. Leads are nurtured with email marketing, retargeting ads and outbound calls until they convert.
ABM Really Works…
Did you know that the B2B marketing organizations already using ABM allocate an average of 15% of their budget to this initiative? 89% of them currently use a dedicated ABM platform, according to research from Salesforce.
Furthermore, a study by Marketo and Reachforce found that companies using ABM became 67% better at closing deals when their sales and marketing teams are synced.
And research by AdRoll found that 75% of B2B marketers say ABM helps them find accounts that are the best fit for their business.
To put it simply, account-based marketing works. And there’s plenty of data to back this up.
But what does this look like in action? We’ve found four examples that showcase the tangible impact of using ABM.
Your Competitors Are Already Using ABM of marketers say ABM delivers a higher ROI compared to other marketing initiatives
The average ABM budget has grown by of CMOs expect to increase ABM staff in the next 12 months
Case Study: $100M in Pipeline Revenue From ABM
Communications agency Hotwire used website visitor identification software to uncover which companies were looking at their clients’ content, what sources led them to the sites, and what they did once they’d encountered the campaigns.
They ran several ABM campaigns, but the most notable was their financial services activity. This supported a pipeline revenue growth of $100 million and saw 100% engagement across the target market.
$100M of pipeline revenue generated
100% engagement across the target market
75 C-level contacts engaged
Crucially for our clients, Lead Forensics visitor tracking opens a window into a prospect’s intent. Intent data supports ABM projects by revealing what their targets do once they’ve come into contact with their campaign. Lead Forensics deciphers web traffic in an insightfully granular way.
Josh Turbill, Social & Digital Director at Hotwire
Case Study: 137% Increase in ARR
ABM agency HUT 3 ran a year-long 1:1 ABM program for automation platform UiPath that more than doubled new executive engagement
Their ABM strategy also resulted in an increase in annual recurring revenue (ARR) of 137% from the accounts that were targeted by the program.
Case Study: Pipeline increased by €255 million
Global IT services company Atos increased its pipeline by €255 million thanks to an ABM demand program also run by HUT 3.
They targeted senior decision-makers and influencers in the healthcare industry across multiple regions for 12 months.
There were about 34 accounts that sat on the UiPath ABM program. You can tell from these stats that ABM generally does pay off when it’s done correctly.
Andy Johnson, Founder and Director of HUT 3
Case Study: £150K Lapsed Customer Closed Thanks To
ABM
Graymatter used visitor identification software to detect which businesses were on their website. They analyzed website behavior, looking for buying signals to prioritize the prospects that were mostly likely to convert — or find out when lapsed customers were back on their website — and targeted those accounts with ABM campaigns.
Within 48 hours of setting up their website visitor identification tool, they won back a lapsed client with a deal worth £150,000 They also found 167 tender opportunities in just six months.
£150k deal signed with a lapsed customer
167 tender opportunities identified in 6 months
48 hours to generate ROI
Dave Pickering, Head of B2B at Graymatter
Case Study: Upselling Clients Across Geographies with ABM
Temporary fencing and barriers business ZND wanted to expand its work with European customers across to their US territories. They worked with website personalization SaaS company Webeo to create an ABM audience of prospects whose companies were already working with ZND in Europe.
The Webeo integration with Pardot allowed ZND to match a visitor to their target ABM segment and serve them a personalized experience on their website. The content was customized to show the visitors that their European counterparts were already working with ZND.
This ABM campaign helped ZND to maximize its cross-sell opportunities and generated an 189% uplift in conversions. It also reduced the bounce rate of key landing pages by 39%
Bonus: End the Dark Funnel and Start Proving ROI
When you combine your ABM efforts with website visitor identification software, you unlock a whole new realm of attribution possibilities
Instead of working in the dark with anonymous visitors and untracked prospect activity on your website, you’re able to see exactly which companies are in-market and browsing your domain
Plus, you can connect their activity to your pipeline and get visibility of the campaigns that actually move the needle long before they complete a form.
That means no more guessing where revenue comes from, and clear data that shows how each prospect found your website and what they’re engaging with.
Not Already Using Lead Forensics?
Website visitor identification tools like Lead Forensics helps you to see which accounts are engaging with your campaigns. This insight helps you refine your target list and decide which companies to pursue with 1:1 personalization.
If you’re not already a Lead Forensics customer, sign up for a free demo. We’ll show you which unidentified companies are actively researching your solutions, and you’ll get to keep the data after the demo finishes. It’s the fastest way to kickstart your first ABM campaign with real, actionable accounts - and it probably already integrates with your existing tech stack.
