Over the last decade, B2B marketing adopted more technology than any previous era. And yet pipeline efficiency declined. MQL conversion rates stagnated. Buying groups expanded while marketing teams quietly reverted to the volume tactics they once claimed to outgrow.

Account-based marketing was supposed to fix this. Instead, many organizations now ask whether ABM still matters at all.

The uncomfortable answer may be simpler than expected: ABM didn't fail. The discipline underneath it did.

The Numbers Tell Two Stories

On paper, ABM looks like a clear winner. Companies aligning ABM with account-based advertising report 60% higher win rates. Organizations implementing ABM document an average ROI of 145%, with elite programs delivering returns between 7.5x and 9.1x. Deal sizes increase. Companies with synchronized sales and marketing teams experience 24% faster revenue growth over three-year periods.

And yet approximately 80% of ABM programs launched in recent years have failed to deliver expected results.

Both things are true. ABM works extraordinarily well when executed properly. Most organizations don't execute it properly.

The failure patterns are remarkably consistent. Lack of alignment between sales and marketing remains the most frequently cited reason for ABM failure. Sales teams don't trust or prioritize marketing-sourced accounts. No clear handoff process exists. Marketing tracks vanity metrics like impressions and clicks instead of revenue impact. One study found that misalignment can cost B2B companies revenue slippage of up to 10%.

Forty-two percent of marketers cite limited access to accurate and actionable contact-level data as a primary barrier. Account intelligence stays trapped across CRM fields, intent platforms, enrichment tools, and sales notes. Nobody has the complete picture. Operations teams spend weeks cobbling together data in error-prone spreadsheets that don't scale.

But data and alignment problems aren't really the root cause. They're symptoms of something deeper.

Technology as Shortcut

The pattern repeats across every marketing era. Teams buy technology expecting it to solve problems that require discipline, strategy, and cross-functional commitment. The platform becomes the shortcut. Skip the ICP development. Skip the sales alignment conversations. Skip the messaging work. Just implement the tool and ABM happens.

It doesn't work that way. It never has.

During the ABM platform craze of the mid-2010s, vendors sold the dream of personalization at scale. And the technology could deliver that, technically. But personalization without strategy just means faster, more scalable irrelevance. Teams implemented "personalization" that was really just token swapping. "Hello {{First_Name}}, I noticed {{Company_Name}} is in the {{Industry}} industry." Robotic. Useless. A waste of everyone's time.

The same pattern is emerging with AI. Teams layer AI onto broken processes expecting transformation. But AI can't tell you your CRM data is wrong. It just gives you conclusions based on what it sees. False positives. Bad direction. The garbage in, garbage out problem accelerates when the garbage processing runs at machine speed.

The Distinction That Matters

Here's where the path forward gets clearer. One-to-one ABM, the original discipline of one marketer building bespoke plans for strategic accounts, still deserves its own function. Some organizations place it within marketing. Others within sales. Either works. It remains a discrete, resource-intensive practice for your highest-value targets.

One-to-many ABM is different. That should simply be your demand generation motion now.

ABM served its purpose. It broke the bad habits. The batch and blast. The reliance on MQL volume over quality. It forced focus on right accounts, right people, customized messages, signals to guide timing. The discipline of ABM taught marketing organizations how to think this way.

With current technology, data infrastructure, and AI capabilities, there's no reason this can't be your full go-to-market approach. Running ABM as a separate skunkworks team alongside "regular" demand gen creates the exact silos and misalignment that cause failure in the first place.

What the Fundamentals Actually Require

The work that makes ABM succeed isn't glamorous. It doesn't fit neatly into a technology purchase.

First, genuine ICP development. Not TAM sizing for board presentations. Your total addressable market is a vanity number. Your ICP defines who will actually succeed with your product, who your sales team can realistically engage, who won't churn in six months. This isn't a marketing exercise. It's company-wide. It affects product development, customer success resourcing, sales hiring, and marketing focus. Playing into TAM narratives for investor optics undermines the focus that makes ABM work.

Second, deep research on what your ICP segments actually care about. Not generic industry challenges. Specific priorities, strategic imperatives, the problems keeping executives awake. Most marketing teams don't have budget for this research at scale. AI tools with deep research capabilities help. But the research has to happen. Generic platitudes contribute to noise. Relevance cuts through it.

Third, signal integration so you understand where accounts sit in their buying journey. Intent data has become table stakes. Organizations using it report a 70% increase in qualified pipeline compared to traditional lead generation. But signals without context produce the same old problem: sales gets told an account is "showing intent" without any clarity on who to call or what to say.

Fourth, buying group orchestration. Marketing over-indexed on individuals with MQLs. ABM over-indexed on accounts. The real target is the buying committee. Top of funnel, each stakeholder needs messaging in their own language. As they progress, consensus messaging aligns the group around shared language and shared understanding. When they finally engage sales, they've already internalized your framing. That's what makes you a leading contender, not email volume.

Fifth, data hygiene. This has become non-negotiable. If your CRM data is unreliable, your ICP will be wrong. Your AI insights will be wrong. Your signal interpretation will be wrong. Everything downstream compounds the error. Slow down to go fast.

The Broader Shift

ABM's relevance question sits within larger changes to B2B buying behavior.

Seventy to ninety percent of the buying journey now happens digitally before prospects talk to sales. The dark funnel, where 73% of buyer activity remains invisible to marketing analytics, shapes outcomes before you ever see a form fill. Research from 6sense shows that 95% of the time, the winning vendor is already on the buyer's shortlist before first contact. By the time someone reaches out, preferences are largely set.

Zero-click search adds another dimension. Nearly 60% of searches now end without a website visit. Gartner predicts organic search traffic will decrease by 50% or more by 2028 as AI-powered search captures attention. The old playbook of driving traffic and capturing leads continues to erode.

These shifts don't make ABM irrelevant. They make discipline more important. When you can't rely on inbound volume, when buyers form opinions before you know they exist, when AI intermediates discovery, the organizations that win will be those doing the deep work. ICP clarity. Research-driven messaging. Signal-informed timing. Cross-functional alignment.

The technology helps. But the technology was never the hard part.

The Real Question for 2026

Every year, marketing teams plan strategies around new tools, new channels, new tactics. Most of those plans will underperform because they skip the foundational work.

ABM revealed something uncomfortable about B2B marketing. When forced to focus on specific accounts, align with sales on shared targets, develop relevant messaging for defined audiences, and measure outcomes that matter to revenue, most organizations couldn't do it. They reverted to volume. They blamed the technology. They declared ABM dead.

The question for 2026 isn't whether ABM matters. It's whether your organization has the discipline to do marketing well.

If the answer is yes, ABM principles embedded into your full demand generation motion will outperform. If the answer is no, the next tool won't save you either.

For more on how ABM evolved and where marketing discipline broke down, listen to our conversation with Jessica Fewless, one of the original architects of modern account-based marketing, on this episode of Some Goodness.