Account-Based Marketing Agency for B2B Tech, SaaS and MSPs
Your sales team already knows which accounts they want. But the marketing budget and targeting is spread across way more than that.
With account-based marketing, Filament helps you close that gap. Focus your spend on the companies your sales team is actually pursuing, and engage the full buying committee rather than the one contact who happened to fill in a form.
Filament builds and runs ABM programmes for B2B technology companies, SaaS vendors, MSPs and fintechs across Australia, Asia Pacific and North America.
Broad demand generation does not match how B2B tech gets bought
Your product carries a five or six figure annual contract value and a six to nine month evaluation. There is a proof of concept. Procurement gets involved. Security review adds six weeks. Five to ten people have a say. Multiple stakeholders shape the outcome, and one of them at most will ever complete a form.
Volume-led demand generation is built for none of that. It optimises for the number of leads, which means it optimises for the people easiest to reach: analysts, students, competitors, and practitioners with no budget authority. You get a healthy pipeline report and a quiet sales team.
ABM allocates differently. It aligns sales and marketing teams around high-value accounts and the decision makers inside them, not broad spend.
Three failures repeat across B2B technology marketing teams.
Lead volume disconnects from account coverage
You generated four hundred MQLs last quarter. How many came from the sixty accounts on your sales team’s target account list, where multiple stakeholders and decision makers have a say? Most marketing teams cannot answer that, because the reporting was never built to ask the question.
One contact is not the account
A sysadmin downloads a whitepaper. Marketing scores them, nurtures them, and routes them to sales. That sysadmin has no budget and no authority to open a vendor evaluation. The CIO who does has never heard of you.
The message is pitched at nobody in particular
One value proposition has to work for a CISO who cares about risk transfer, a CFO who cares about three-year cost, and an engineer who cares about the integration path. Written for all three, it lands with none.
ABM inverts the sequence. You agree the accounts first, then build the marketing around them with personalised messaging shaped to each stakeholder’s pain points. That means the other key decision makers across the account, not just the CIO or the sysadmin.
What account-based marketing is
Account-based marketing is a B2B strategy that treats named companies, rather than individual leads, as the unit of marketing. In account based marketing (ABM) you define a finite list of specific accounts, map the people inside them who influence the purchase, and run coordinated marketing and sales activity against that list. Adjust for who needs what, or the value proposition misses each role’s distinct pain points.
The difference from conventional demand generation is the direction of travel. Demand generation casts wide and filters down. ABM focuses on a defined set of accounts and works to create demand inside them with personalised messaging for procurement, finance, operations, and other stakeholders inside the buying group.
Three characteristics separate real ABM from targeted advertising with a nicer name.
A finite account list both teams have signed off
Not a persona. Not an industry vertical. A list of named companies with an owner against each one, agreed by marketing and sales together. If sales did not help build the list, they will not work it.
Buying committee coverage, not lead capture
Account-level measurement
ABM programmes are measured on account engagement, pipeline created inside the target list, average deal size and win rate. Lead volume is not a meaningful metric when the population is capped at eighty companies.
ABM is not a channel. It is a way of allocating budget and attention. The channels it uses are the ones you already run.
ABM vs inbound marketing
The two get positioned as alternatives. They are not. They solve different halves of the same problem, and most B2B technology companies should run both.
Inbound creates the category presence that makes ABM outreach credible when it arrives. An account that has never encountered you treats a targeted campaign as cold outreach. An account that has read your technical content twice treats it as a follow-up.
The three ABM tiers, and which one you need
ABM is not one motion. It runs at three levels of intensity, and choosing the wrong one is the most common reason programmes stall.
One-to-many: programmatic ABM
One hundred to 1,000 accounts, personalised at segment level rather than company level. Grouping is by industry, technology stack, company size or region. Delivery runs through advertising audiences, dynamic website content and segmented email.
Lowest cost per account, lowest depth. It works when your product has broad horizontal applicability and your contract values do not support bespoke work.
One-to-few: cluster ABM
Twenty to fifty accounts, grouped into clusters of five to ten that share a specific trigger: the same platform migration, the same compliance deadline, the same vendor end-of-support date.
Assets are built per cluster, not per account, which keeps production viable while still speaking to a real situation rather than a generic pain point. For most mid-market B2B technology companies this is the tier that produces a readable result fastest.
One-to-one: strategic ABM
A single account, treated as its own market. Bespoke research, custom content and dedicated landing environments. This is the model for strategic accounts, where personalised outreach is built around the realities of individual accounts rather than broad segments.
The test is content economics. Account based marketing campaigns work here only when the production model supports that level of custom execution. If your contract value cannot absorb several thousand dollars of bespoke production per account, one-to-one is not viable. This is the enterprise motion, and it is covered separately below.
How to choose
Work backwards from deal value and buying committee size. Small committees and lower contract values point to one-to-many. Complex evaluations with identifiable shared triggers point to one-to-few. Multi-year, multi-stakeholder pursuits point to one-to-one.
If you are running ABM for the first time, start at one-to-few. One-to-many produces signal that is hard to read. One-to-one produces cost before it produces proof.
The GTM Foundation Stack applied to ABM
Every Filament engagement runs on the same four-part structure. An ABM strategy uses it as follows.
Market: which accounts, and who inside them
Account selection is the basis of the account-based marketing strategy Filament applies. We identify target accounts against your ideal customer profile, weighted by three inputs: fit against the profile, timing signals available to us, and sales conviction. Accounts nobody in sales believes in do not enter the programme, regardless of how well they score, whether they look like high value target accounts on paper or sit among existing accounts.
Then tiering. Which accounts justify one-to-one attention, which cluster, which sit in the programmatic tier. This is also where we separate true key accounts from broader lists and decide where expansion with existing customers makes commercial sense.
Then buying committee mapping. For a typical infrastructure or security purchase that means the CIO, the CISO, the infrastructure or platform lead, procurement, and the practitioner who will operate the product daily. We document what each role is measured on, what they lose if the project fails, and who they need to convince internally, especially when the goal is to grow relationships with high-value customers.
Your ICP definition is upstream work. If you do not have one, that is the GTM Playbook, not an ABM programme.
Message: what each role actually needs to hear
The central failure of most ABM is that personalisation stops at the company name in a subject line. Real personalisation is role-level.
The CISO evaluates you on risk transfer and audit evidence. The infrastructure lead evaluates you on migration effort and what breaks during cutover. The CFO evaluates you on three-year total cost against the incumbent. The practitioner evaluates you on whether the product makes their week easier. Same product, four different arguments, all of which need to be true at once.
Because Filament works only in B2B technology, we write the technical argument directly. There is no translation layer between your product team and the copy, and no discovery period spent explaining what a hypervisor is.
Experience: what the account encounters
Cluster-level landing pages that reflect the trigger the group shares. Content sequenced so the second asset assumes the first was read. Sales collateral that matches what marketing put in market.
The failure mode here is quiet and expensive. Marketing runs a well-built campaign about a specific migration problem, the prospect books a call, and the sales deck opens with a company overview and a feature matrix instead of continuing the thread with the kind of tailored material that helps engage target accounts across the customer journey. The account concludes the campaign was a wrapper.
Effective personalised campaigns draw on the account’s target audience, industry trends, and current context.
Closing that gap is Sales Enablement work, and it runs in parallel with ABM rather than after it.
Activation: how it runs and what you measure
Channel selection should reflect where your committee actually is. For most B2B technology categories that means LinkedIn, targeted display, email and events, with marketing efforts weighted differently by role and direct mail where a cluster is hard to reach digitally. Practitioners and executives do not live in the same places.
CRM configuration makes account-level engagement visible to sales in real time, with customer relationship management set up to support a smoother sales process. When three people from a target account interact in the same week, the account owner should know that day. Aligned teams create consistent messaging across customer touchpoints, and account based marketing tools support that continuity instead of creating handoff gaps.
Reporting is built on the target list so ABM efforts can be measured clearly. Account engagement scoring, coverage of the buying committee, pipeline created inside the list, and how deal velocity compares to accounts outside it all give you a practical view of ABM success.
How we run an ABM programme
A first programme typically reaches activation around week eight. The sequence matters more than the speed.
1) Account selection and tiering (Weeks 1 - 2)
A working session with your marketing and sales leadership, which brings revenue teams into the decision early. We score candidate accounts against your ICP, apply available timing signals, and force a decision on tiering. The output is a signed account list with owners, not a spreadsheet of possibilities.
2) Buying committee and message mapping (Weeks 2 to 4)
Committee structure per cluster, role-level messaging, and the argument each role needs. This is where most of the programme value is created in account based marketing programmes, and where most agencies move too quickly.
3) Asset and experience build (Weeks 4 to 8)
Cluster landing pages, role-specific content, advertising creative, email sequences, and the sales-facing material that has to align with all of it. Each sales rep needs material that supports personalised outreach and faster account progression through the sales process.
4) Activation and orchestration (from week 8)
Campaigns go live across the selected channels, and coordinated marketing efforts support account activation. Customer relationship management (CRM) alerting is configured and tested. Sales receives account engagement notifications and knows what to do with them.
5) Review and reallocation (quarterly)
Accounts that have not moved after two quarters are retired or downgraded, and their budget moves to accounts showing engagement. Account-based marketing tools should make ABM efforts and ABM success visible against the target list. ABM programmes that never retire accounts quietly become expensive.
We run programmes on a retained basis because ABM does not produce a meaningful read inside a single campaign cycle.
The intent data question you cannot avoid
Many ABM strategies are influenced by intent data platform recommendations. The promise is that third-party intent data reveals which accounts are in market before they contact you.
Sometimes that is true and intent data provides advantageous outreach opportunities. For certain B2B tech products and services, intent data can be less effective.
Third-party intent works by observing research behaviour across a publisher network against a set of topic keywords. It needs volume. It needs your product or service category to have an established vocabulary that buyers actually search for.
If you sell B2B tech products and services, or sell in a channel, there can be the unique situation where there simply isn’t enough search to build a dataset from.
When third-party intent is viable, we will help you leverage it.
When it is not, we help you build timing signals from sources you already own (often called first-party signals), such as: contract renewal dates, product usage, support ticket patterns, partner registrations, hiring activity and technographic change.
That is not a stripped down version of ABM.
For ABM programmes in B2B tech, first-party signals are frequently the better input, because they describe your accounts specifically, rather than a modelled proxy of them.
Running ABM on the CRM you already own
ABM in HubSpot
Filament is a HubSpot Solutions Partner. Most mid-market technology companies already own everything an ABM programme needs, even though platform vendors often promise technology that makes account-based marketing easier, and buying a dedicated ABM platform before proving you can run the motion is a common and expensive mistake.
Inside HubSpot we configure:
- Target account designation and ICP tiering, so the account list lives in the CRM rather than a spreadsheet
- Company-level scoring that reflects buying committee engagement, not individual contact activity
- Workflow alerts that notify the account owner when multiple contacts from a target account show intent signals
- Advertising audience sync for account-level targeting
- Dashboards reporting pipeline and engagement against the target list specifically
In Salesforce and other CRMs
We have run ABM programmes in Salesforce, and the motion transfers cleanly. Target accounts become a marked segment, engagement rolls up to the account object rather than the contact record, and alerting routes to the account owner instead of a lead queue.
The same build works in most mainstream CRMs. We configure it wherever your revenue team already works, and tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator are often useful for account research alongside it. That is not proof that weak intent data can reliably reveal or prioritise potential customers.
The requirement is not a particular platform. It’s whether the system can report at account level, and whether your sales team will genuinely open it. A CRM that cannot roll engagement up from contact to company will cap the programme regardless of what else it does well.
Where ABM connects to the rest of your go-to-market
ABM is an allocation strategy. It depends on work that sits either side of it, and that work maps onto the same four pillars the programme runs on. These sit within Filament’s GTM Services.
1) Market, achieved with
GTM Playbook: Defines the ideal customer profile that account selection scores against. Without it, the account list is guesswork with a template. This is the one piece that has to exist before an ABM programme is worth starting.
2) Message, achieved with
Content Marketing: Produces the role-specific assets the programme runs on. ABM starves without content built for the committee rather than the persona.
Content Localisation: Adapts messaging for target accounts across Asia Pacific, where procurement norms and language requirements shift between markets and machine translation is not sufficient.
LinkedIn Thought Leadership: Builds the executive presence that makes peer-level engagement possible inside target accounts.
3) Experience, achieved with
Sales Enablement: Determines what happens after an account engages. Continuity between campaign and conversation is where programmes are won or lost.
CX Strategy: Shapes what an account experiences after it buys, which is where the expansion half of the programme is either earned or forfeited.
4) Activation, achieved with
Digital Advertising: Delivers the paid layer, including LinkedIn Ads for stakeholder-specific outreach, programmatic display, and direct mail when target accounts are hard to reach through digital channels alone.
Content Syndication: Places your assets in front of named accounts through third-party networks, which extends reach into accounts your own channels do not touch.
SEO and GEO: Ensure you appear when the account begins its own research, including in search engines and inside LLMs and AI assistants.
Targeting enterprise accounts with complex hierarchies?
If your target accounts have parent and subsidiary structures, regional business units, buying committees of twenty or more, and evaluation cycles running eighteen to twenty-four months, you need a different motion for high value customer accounts.
One-to-one, built around account hierarchy and a land-and-expand sequence rather than a single purchase decision, often supported by LinkedIn Ads and, in some programmes, direct mail for high-touch outreach.
ABM across Australia, Asia Pacific and North America
Australia and New Zealand (ANZ)
Small, concentrated markets where the addressable account list is often genuinely finite. That is an advantage. It also means your target accounts are being pursued by every competitor simultaneously, so message differentiation matters more than reach. Channel and reseller relationships frequently sit between you and the end customer, which changes who the buying committee actually contains.
Asia Pacific (APAC)
North America
Why work with Filament on ABM
We only work in B2B technology
No retail clients, no hospitality, no professional services. Every engagement is a technology company, a SaaS vendor, an MSP or a fintech. You do not spend the first month explaining your category to sales or marketing departments.
Vendor-side experience inside the team
Channel fluency
We work on the stack you own
Ready to start your ABM program?
The fastest way to know whether ABM suits your business is a conversation about the accounts you already want. Bring your target list, or the version of it your sales team keeps in their heads.
We will discuss with you whether ABM is the right allocation of your budget and and what would need to be implemented before it works.
Simply click below to book a strategy call or complete the form to submit an inquiry.
Account-Based Marketing Frequently Asked Questions
What is account-based marketing?
How is ABM different from inbound marketing?
How many accounts should be in an ABM programme?
Does account-based marketing work for MSPs?
What does an ABM agency actually do?
How long does ABM take to produce pipeline?
Do you need intent data to run ABM?
No. Third-party intent data is useful when your category has an established vocabulary, sufficient search volume, and a large body of comparison content for a publisher network to observe. Many B2B technology categories meet none of those conditions, particularly newer categories and channel-delivered products in smaller markets. In those cases the platform spend buys scores assembled from loosely related topics. First-party signals are usually stronger: renewal dates, product usage, support activity, partner registrations, hiring and technographic change. Filament assesses viability before recommending any platform investment.