Best Account-Based Marketing Software

Account-based marketing (ABM) software realigns marketing and sales departments away from general branding and lead generation strategies by identifying quality target accounts prior to implementing a tailored marketing strategy. ABM tools automate and reduce the lengthy process of identifying prospects and dedicating the right resources to nurture the most promising accounts. ABM software enables users to generate highly qualified leads, craft personalized buying journeys, increase customer lifetime value, and build further opportunities for in-pipeline accounts.

ABM software allows users to combine prospect data with real-time customer experience technologies to facilitate an account-based marketing strategy. This enables organizations to align marketing and sales teams toward the company’s goals. Account-based marketing software can be used to acquire new accounts, nurture existing and promising accounts, and expand and grow enterprise accounts. Some ABM tools can integrate with third-party sales and marketing applications, such as marketing automation platforms and customer relationship management, or CRM software, to better target and prioritize communications with key accounts.

Best account-based marketing (ABM) software at a glance:

Best account data management software: HubSpot Marketing Hub
Best account-based orchestration platforms: HubSpot Marketing Hub
Best account-based analytics software: HubSpot Marketing Hub

These software solutions are ranked using an algorithm that calculates customer satisfaction and market presence based on reviews from our user community. For more information, please check out G2’s Research Scoring Methodology.

Account management systems also provide tools to make sales or marketing automation systems more account-centric, such as:

Target list creation, with automated tools to wean out poor-fit accounts.
Marketing funnels and sales pipelines that document how overall accounts are moving through the buying cycle in addition to lead-based movement.
Account engagement analytics, documenting and measuring clicks, conversions, and calls across all contacts at an account.

How to Choose

Account management systems should be evaluated based on their alignment with marketing’s ABM strategy. Sketch out how account data is being acquired, what records it needs to update, what data needs to be recorded, who needs to see it, and which other systems it needs to flow to. An account management product must support your organization’s workflow and strategy.

Account Intelligence

What It Does

Account-based marketing substitutes a traditional wide-top funnel with a narrower and more focused marketing funnel. Accounts need to be qualified before they become leads, and this requires data. Account intelligence products help with three main functions:

Connect existing leads in a marketing database to their respective accounts and provide relevant data to qualify those companies.
Connecting marketers to potential accounts based on their ideal account persona.
Implementing a lead scoring engine to qualify leads better and optimize a marketer’s target account list.

How It Does It

Sales Intelligence platforms traditionally focus on data like contact information and company personnel hierarchy. Account intelligence expands this focus to:

Firmographic data, such as industry, location, IT infrastructure, or investment history.
IP address data, pegging IP addresses to known companies and company departments.
Buying signals, also known as intent data or predictive marketing, detailed further below.

Intelligence platforms are often plagued with stale, missing, or irrelevant data. As a cure, account intelligence platforms have begun relying more on feeds of automatically updated account data. The variety of data provided differs greatly between platforms but can include media mentions, social media sentiment, website domain analysis, and employee web and search engine activity. Account intelligence platforms can deliver this data wholesale or utilize it to interpret buying signals, such as notifying marketers when a target account receives a sizable investment or an account’s employees are researching products similar to their own.

Because of this shift toward big marketing data, marketers are now burdened with industry noise instead of interpretable buying signals. To make platforms more useful, some vendors have developed lead scoring or lead qualifying systems to guide marketers to their ideal accounts. A lead scoring or account scoring engine may evaluate accounts using:

Persona, a marketer’s pre-defined set of firmographic and buying signal criteria.
Proprietary algorithm with relevant criteria/behavior determined by the ABM provider.
Artificial Intelligenceor machine learning, delivering account prospects similar to those that already have high close rates or have shown high levels of engagement.

Ideally, lead scoring both qualifies existing leads (to determine their match to a product portfolio and an ideal client persona) as well as delivers new qualified accounts that are exhibiting buying behavior.

How to Choose

Account intelligence platforms should be evaluated on these criteria:

Accuracy of data
Robustness of data

Availability of data for target accounts
Varied sources and types of data
Relevant data to industry or selling strategy

Effectiveness of lead qualification

Account-Based Advertising

What It Does

When negotiating complex or expensive sales, a buyer receives input and approval from a number of stakeholders in their organization—many of which a sales team may never come in contact with. Account-based ad targeting is designed to sell to everyone involved in the buying process, even those that sales never speaks with. By placing highly targeted and highly personalized advertising stock, marketers can influence buying decisions and build brand awareness in a company at low cost (very few impressions), even before sales reaches out. Account-based ad targeting helps with these areas:

Segment audiences by account
Serving ads on an account-by-account basis.

How It Does It

Account-based advertising segments audiences by serving ads to:

Specific IP addresses used by target accounts.
Cookied website visitors from target accounts.

The system typically provides a database of known IP addresses, while additional addresses can also be obtained from certain website visitors or an email exchange. Website visitors receive cookies when landing on your page, which can catch account stakeholders working from other locations. These systems then integrate with ad exchanges or provide demand-side platforms (DSPs) with the ability to place ads in front of the leads that marketers have already qualified. Any channel including mobile and SMS marketing, social, search, display, and video advertising that account contacts encounter during their workday can carry brand messaging.

How to Choose

Account-based advertising platforms should be evaluated on these criteria:

IP address availability
Ease of ad campaign orchestration

Building multi-channel campaigns
Syncing IP- and cookie-targeted campaigns

Advertising effectiveness

Reaching target audiences
Engagement

Digital Personalization

What It Does

An effective account-based marketing strategy often entails crafting tailor-made buying journeys for each account or for each account persona. Each account contact that encounters the brand needs to be served content in line with the buying proposition that sales and marketing have developed. This can be done with personalized proposals and on-going sales conversations, but (as discussed in regard to advertising) decision makers that sales never speak with are also researching your product independently. Account-based personalization delivers web experiences to visitors specifically designed for them based on their associated account.

How It Does It

Web personalization software evolved out of A/B testing platforms used to optimize websites. A/B testing platforms deliver different web experiences to randomly selected visitors. Combining A/B testing’s traffic bifurcation capabilities with real-time audience segmentation allows web or mobile experiences personalized to individual visitor needs. For account-based personalization, the real-time data is the same account IP address and retargeting cookies discussed in the advertising section. When a predetermined IP address or a cookied browser accesses a site, account-based personalization software deploys a custom page designed particularly for that sale.