Email: me@tatjanavehovec.me
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The Quick ABM Audit
Every B2B Revenue Team Should Run
This ABM audit takes about 15 minutes. If you cannot finish it, that is already your first finding.
Real ABM changes how your sales and marketing teams work together.
Most B2B marketing teams know the promise: align with sales, focus on the right accounts, personalise at depth, and watch the pipeline respond. The logic is sound. The execution rate is not.
Gartner research found that buyers spend only 17% of their journey meeting with potential suppliers. The remaining 83% is independent research, internal discussion, and comparison, mostly invisible to the selling organisation. In the dark social. ABM is the strategic response to that reality. Rather than broadcasting to everyone and hoping the right people notice, you build your presence deliberately inside the accounts where decisions are already forming.
The problem is that a target list and a personalised email sequence are outbound tactics with better targeting. Real ABM changes how your sales and marketing teams work together. If your sales colleagues are still waiting for marketing to send them leads, the foundation is not in place yet.
Four vitals. Check them against your current programme today.
Why ABM Programmes Stall Before They Prove Anything
The pattern is consistent. A company invests seriously in ABM, with real intent and real budget. Over time the programme gets reduced to its most manageable parts: a list, a sequence, an engagement report. The four vitals go unmonitored.
Think of it like a patient with four readings on the monitor. One healthy number does not make a healthy patient. One strong metric does not mean your ABM is working. The four vitals are precision, depth, alignment, and impact. Most teams track a fraction of one. This audit checks all four.
Vital 1. Account Selection: Does Your Target List Know Why It Exists?
The question is simple: why is this account on your list?
If the answer is “it matches our firmographic filters” or “sales mentioned them,” the selection is not strategic. A target list built on company size and sector is a starting hypothesis. ABM resources, time, content, sales attention, executive access, are expensive. Spreading them across accounts chosen by database logic rather than strategic intent drains budget without producing pipeline.
A precision-built ICP does two things most teams skip. First, it includes intent signals: reasons why this account is likely to buy in the next 12 months. New funding, leadership change, technology investment, regulatory shift. Second, it defines exclusion criteria: the accounts that look right on paper but have structural reasons they will not convert.
Diagnostic question:
Can you name three specific reasons, beyond company size and sector, why each of your top ten target accounts is on the list right now? And at least one reason why a similar-looking account is not?
Vital 2. Messaging Depth: Are You Speaking to the Account or Broadcasting at It?
The CFO and the Head of Engineering at your target account have different vocabularies, different pressures, and different definitions of value. You don’t personalise communication if you send them the same case study.
Real messaging depth requires two things working together.
Stakeholder-level specificity: content that speaks to each decision-maker’s context, not the account’s context in aggregate.
And account-level intelligence: enough knowledge of the organisation’s current situation and internal debates that your communication feels like you have been paying attention.
This is the vital that most clearly separates ABM from expensive outbound. When messaging is this specific, it does not feel like marketing. It feels relevant. And relevant content is what gets forwarded in a Teams thread between two people who are actually evaluating you.
Diagnostic question:
Without opening your CRM, can you name the top three strategic priorities of your top five target accounts right now? If not, the messaging programme does not have a foundation yet.
Vital 3. Sales and Marketing Alignment: One Team or Two Departments Coordinating?
Alignment is the most cited aspiration in B2B go-to-market strategy and the most poorly executed. Most organisations have replaced genuine alignment with a handover process. Marketing creates something, calls it a qualified lead, passes it to sales, and measures itself on volume. Sales receives it, applies its own judgement, and either works it or files it. Both sides have data that supports their version of what happened.
If marketing is measuring campaign metrics and sales is measuring pipeline, you have two separate programmes running in parallel. It’s not ABM.
– Tatjana Vehovec
Real alignment is orchestration. Sales and marketing co-plan the next move for specific accounts together, on a regular cadence. A 30-minute weekly account stand-up covers the essentials: which stakeholders have engaged, what content they have seen, what the next best action is, and who owns it. That conversation does not happen naturally. It has to be built into the operating rhythm.
Diagnostic question:
Is there a standing weekly meeting (a sprint) where sales and marketing discuss specific named accounts, not segments or personas, and jointly decide the next move?
Vital 4. Impact Measurement: Are You Tracking Activity or Commercial Progress?
Open rates show whether an email arrived at a moment when someone clicked. They tell you almost nothing about whether an account is moving toward a decision.
Two metrics together give a reading that campaign dashboards cannot. Pipeline velocity: how fast are target accounts moving through the sales stages compared to accounts outside the programme? Account penetration: how many stakeholders within a target account are engaged, across how many functions?
High engagement with slow pipeline velocity means the programme is building awareness without creating urgency. That is a useful diagnosis. It tells you exactly where to focus next.
Diagnostic question:
In your last quarterly review, did you discuss pipeline velocity and account penetration by named account, or did you review campaign engagement metrics in aggregate?
What the Full Audit Tells You That a Campaign Report Cannot
All four vitals together show whether your ABM is a revenue system or a well-organised content distribution programme. Both can look similar in a quarterly slide deck. They perform very differently when a competitor moves into an account you considered yours.
The gaps this audit surfaces are architectural, not execution problems. Architecture can be redesigned. If three vitals are healthy and one has a gap, you have a specific, solvable problem. If all four are partially working, the programme has good instincts but needs stronger systems underneath.
This 15-minute version gives you a reading. A full ABM audit goes inside your CRM, your content, your sales loops, and your account intelligence to find the specific friction points suppressing performance.
You have already invested in ABM. The question worth asking now is whether the architecture is proportionate to that investment, and whether the four vitals are reading what they should be.