Beyond the Funnel.
Why real growth in B2B starts with focus, alignment, and the accounts that matter most.
The Reality of How Buying Actually Happens
For years, business buying was drawn as a neat funnel.
Awareness. Consideration. Decision. Job done.
It gave everyone a sense of order, marketers could track where someone sat, sales could plan the next step, leaders could see movement on a chart. But real life has never worked quite that cleanly.
A few years back, Gartner redrew the picture and confirmed what most of us already knew: the B2B buying journey isn’t linear. People don’t glide down a funnel, they loop, stall, compare notes, and change direction. They read reviews, join communities, dip into Slack channels, listen to podcasts, message peers on WhatsApp. They collect dozens of impressions long before they ever fill out a form or reply to an email.
And when they do, it’s rarely one person making the call. It’s a web of stakeholders, each with their own priorities, pressures, and perspectives. Some are senior, some are new, some are quietly influential. Context shifts constantly: budgets tighten, teams reorganise, new leaders arrive. What mattered last quarter might not matter now.
This is the world we’re selling into- fluid, human, and full of noise.
And yet most organisations still treat it like a sequence.
That’s where Strategic Account-Based Marketing (ABM) comes in.
What Strategic ABM Really Is
ABM often gets confused with a campaign. It isn’t.
A campaign can live inside ABM, but ABM itself is a business strategy. It’s how a company aligns sales, marketing, customer success, and anyone else who touches the customer around the accounts that matter most.
Think about it: some accounts are the size of small countries. The potential revenue is huge. The landscape inside them is vast, full of departments, stakeholders, and shifting priorities. In that kind of environment, why wouldn’t you treat one account as a market of its own?
That’s the simple distinction, and the big difference.
Inside those organisations, there can be six, ten, or more people involved in a buying decision. Each with a different role, goal, and level of influence. Their focus changes, their team changes, their business changes. So ABM isn’t about pushing messages into a funnel. It’s about navigating a living, breathing system.
Insight matters more than reach.
Relevance matters more than repetition.
Alignment matters most of all.
The Shape of Strategic ABM
Strategic ABM focuses on a small number of key accounts, sometimes a handful, sometimes one or two, where the commercial potential or strategic importance justifies deep investment.
These might be existing clients you want to grow, new accounts that match your ideal profile, or major pursuits sitting on the table that you can’t afford to lose. Sometimes it’s about reputation, shifting how a key client sees you so that new doors open.
It’s not a volume game. It’s precision work.
And it takes time, often nine to twelve months before you really see whether the approach is influencing, moving, or converting the account.
Because this isn’t short-term lead generation. It’s long-term value creation.
That’s also why ABM has gained traction in complex organisations: it forces alignment. When you bring together sales, marketing, product, and service teams to think as one, not in silos, you start creating experiences that feel consistent and intentional. Everyone has a shared language and a shared outcome.
And that’s where the Three R’s come in.
The Three R’s of Strategic ABM
Revenue.
Of course ABM is about driving growth, but it’s not about chasing deals at any cost. It’s about shaping the right opportunities with the right customers. It means understanding where you can truly add value, how to increase deal size and velocity, and how to retain and expand those relationships over time.
Reputation.
Reputation is what makes your brand the safe choice in high-stakes decisions. ABM builds it by positioning your company as a trusted partner who understands the customer’s world, their pressures, their ambitions, their language. It’s about earning credibility, not demanding attention.
Relationships.
Everything else depends on this. Strong relationships create access, insight, and trust. They enable collaboration. They turn accounts into advocates. ABM deepens those relationships by aligning every touchpoint, from marketing to service, around a single, coherent narrative that feels personal, not programmed.
Strategic ABM isn’t a trend. It’s a response to how buying really happens now, messy, multi-layered, and human. It’s about focus, alignment, and value.
And when it’s done right, it doesn’t just win accounts. It changes how your business grows.
If this resonated, and you’re wondering how to make it real in your world, let’s have a chat.
This is the work I do: helping teams turn complexity into clarity and growth that actually lasts.
👉 Email me directly: andrews_samantha@hotmail.com
👉 Or message me on LinkedIn: Samantha Andrews
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