Ninety-two percent of B2B buyers enter a purchase with a vendor already in mind. Forty-one percent have already picked one. (Forrester, 2024) That decision didn’t happen in your CRM, your nurture stream, or your last campaign; it happened in the dark. Yet, most ABX programs are still optimized for a funnel that arrives too late to matter. 

What gets in the way is rarely the technology. The problem is that the investment in platforms happened faster than the investment in how teams actually operate together. Most teams already have the tools they need, but they stay focused on their own P&L structures, siloed around individual solutions, with no real commitment across the organization. Nobody’s agreed on what success actually looks like, so everyone keeps optimizing for their own metrics. Accounts aren’t segmented at a meaningful level or, if they are, the lens is too broad to act on. 

The fix is the operating model. Three foundations need to be in place before any platform investment pays off: a shared vision, coordinated engagement, and a bias toward execution, in that order. 
 

1. Build a Shared Vision, Grounded in the Accounts You Already Know 

Teams can't coordinate around a destination nobody has defined. And that definition needs to be specific to be useful. A shared vision isn’t a high-level picture of an ideal account journey. It’s a set of personalized journeys shaped by account size, relationship depth, industry, technology footprint, and existing spend. These variables exist in your data today, even if that data isn't perfectly clean. 

Getting that specificity right also means rethinking how you measure progress. Lead volume, MQL counts, and individual campaign performance don't reflect how account-based strategies actually create value, and the disconnect runs deeper than most leaders realize: Forrester’s 2024 alignment research found that 82% of C-suite executives believe their sales and marketing teams are aligned, while 65% of the people actually doing the work say they aren’t. 

Closing that gap is foundational to making ABX work. So is tracking at the contact level, not just the account level. When someone leaves, you need to know the people around them, such as their manager, their direct reports, and their peers, so the relationship doesn't leave with them. And when they land somewhere new, you’ll already have a warm relationship at what would otherwise be a cold account. 

Increasingly, the most influential touchpoints in a buying journey, such as peer conversations, community discussions, and AI-mediated research, never show up in your CRM at all. The teams that gain ground are the ones treating that visibility gap as a measurement problem to solve rather than a limitation to live with. 

2. Move from Account Ownership to Coordinated Engagement 

A common assumption is that ABX fails because nobody owns the account. In most B2B organizations, that's not quite the issue. A clear account owner usually exists. The real problem is the trust gap between sales and marketing. And it’s getting worse on both sides of the deal: the average B2B purchase now involves 13 stakeholders across two or more departments (Forrester, 2024), and 74% of those buying groups experience unhealthy internal conflict before they reach a decision (Gartner, 2025). Generic content widens both gaps at once. 

Sales doesn't believe marketing's content will land with their accounts, and blanket content gives them good reason for that skepticism. The bar has moved sharply in the last 18 months: buyers can now get a credible answer to any generic question from ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini in seconds. Anything marketing produces that a buyer could have gotten from a free AI tool isn’t differentiation, it’s just noise. What sales actually needs is engagement that's specific enough to move a deal. 

That requires a different way of working together. Instead of a campaign, think about coordinated outreach to 10 to 15 contacts at a single account, across direct mail, sales-facilitated conversations, SDR outreach, and digital, with messaging differentiated by role but pointed at a shared goal. Instead of a product overview, build a product evolution narrative for an account that's engaged with a competitor or considering moving upmarket. The goal is for every touchpoint to feel deliberate, with sales and marketing working in sync. 

3. Pick an Account and Go 

Once you have a shared vision and a coordinated engagement model, the only thing left is to use them. That might require ignoring the instinct to wait for cleaner data or a more complete framework. Teams often spend cycles debating ideal customer profiles and segmentation models while no actual ABX work gets done. Meanwhile, 86% of B2B purchases stall before close (Forrester, 2024). The accounts you’re carefully planning around are quietly slipping into that 86% while you wait. 

When you wait for perfect alignment before executing, you miss out on real-world learning. Intent signal data, firmographic inputs, and CRM hygiene all matter, but they matter most once you've committed to starting. 

Take the data you have, imperfect as it may be, and pick one account of each size where you see the most whitespace. Identify influential contacts, design coordinated messaging, and go. Run parallel tracks where you can, such as a high-priority prospect and an existing customer in a key industry where there's room to expand. The insights compound faster when you're learning across both motions at once, and the momentum you build by going deep through execution will do more for your program than additional planning ever could.