With widespread economic uncertainty becoming the norm, due to a series of trade-policy shocks, geopolitical frictions, and market volatility, companies are facing serious headwinds to achieve their growth objectives. Yet, uncertainty everywhere equals opportunity somewhere.
While this challenging global landscape is going to affect every business, it will be the marketing leaders who rethink their strategy to keep pace with growth targets and pivot effectively who end up emerging on the other side of this economic wall not only intact, but ahead of the competition.
So how exactly would you go about this? How can CMOs, VPs of Demand Gen, and Heads of Digital Marketing adjust to these conditions and become the next GTM hero?
Chasing customer needles in a TAM haystack
In most companies today, marketers are tasked with understanding their total addressable market (TAM). Do you know who the company is trying to sell to? This is developing your ideal customer profile (ICP). What are the specific titles, personas, and verticals that you’re targeting? This is standard work that marketing teams tackle every day.
The inherent problem is that only the companies who are best at defining their ICP lower their cost of customer acquisition. This is not a feasible outcome for the majority of businesses looking to refine their ICP and decrease customer acquisition costs.
The issue with broader TAM is that organizations simply have too many potential customers that they’re pursuing. It becomes finding a rarified customer needle in the total market haystack. Marketers think that they can get the pipeline they need based on funnel efficiencies, but that is much easier pitched than perfected.
Leave the silo behind
The reality for any business or leader addressing these challenges is that the more companies you target, the less efficient GTM becomes. Sales, Marketing, Biz Dev, and other teams are all running different campaigns based on different data sets. It’s not cohesive given how pervasive data fragmentation is in an organization, especially within the enterprise.
A common and persistent problem is inefficient demand generation. Poor focus in this area often leads to “spray and pray” campaigns, which wastes time and resources chasing the wrong targets. Campaign response rates and click-throughs decrease when you are focused on the wrong customers.
Bigger companies tend to struggle with this wasting marketing dollars, exacerbating these issues. But what if marketers could see the bird’s eye view and knew exactly where to fish? The answer, staring at us through all the data and noise, is for marketing leaders to focus on your Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) instead of TAM.
Optimize your pipeline
The second significant problem that marketers need to solve is dealing with the repercussions of focusing on TAM or even your Sales Addressable Market (SAM). These consequences include higher cost of customer acquisition, experimentation costs, and building different GTM teams. One way this manifests itself for companies is with a low-value pipeline—targeting the wrong buyers means potential deals (and deals’ probability of closing) will be lower due to a value mismatch.
By fixating on TAM or SAM, deal size can be an issue as businesses take all opportunities, small, medium, and large. Unfortunately, this approach doesn’t lead to finding the highest value accounts.
Conversely, when companies hone in on SOM, the highest value accounts are targeted, and the average deal size improves. Your product is actually built for this audience and therefore will find value faster. This helps alleviate wasted effort and prevents teams from working on the wrong opportunities and essentially selling churn. A SOM-focused approach is essentially the opposite of marketers going the “spray and pray” route.
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A SOM-Focused Approach
The third problem arises with messaging, which is tied to low pipeline average. Messaging that is not specific to the target audience is ineffective. Let’s say a business works intently to refine its messaging though, investing time and resources to perfect it. If a buyer is not looking, the prospect won’t convert, no matter how much effort is made on messaging. The winning strategy for companies is to zero in on SOM in order to get more targeted to yield higher response rates, and more hand raises.
One of the many advantages of a SOM-focused approach is that it enables Sales and Marketing teams to hunt in a pack. Rather than any number of lone wolves all working individually to find prospects, this is a much more cohesive strategy. As a result, teams can show better value to the market, and the company will see that you need fewer resources to be more profitable.
For companies, the top line is staying on top of the pipeline and total revenue. The bottom line is that saving costs means more profitability.
The clear takeaway for marketers is this: focus on a SOM-based business model. High fidelity data is what informs your company, and a revenue growth-driven data set is what’s needed to deliver this crucial information. And this actionable data is provided by the revenue growth intelligence platform approach offered by HG Insights.
Every day, marketers are asking and trying to solve multiple questions: What are the success metrics? How does this change the cost of customer acquisition? What are the campaign conversion rates for multi-channel campaigns? These are complex queries requiring revenue growth data to answer effectively.
If marketing leaders can multiply their impact by improving KPIs and average deal size, they’ll quickly blow past pipeline targets. They can make the case to their bosses: The better I get with the companies we need to sell to, the better the customer lifetime value (LTV).
Evolving ABM to ABX for peak results
Account-Based Marketing (ABM), which brings personalized campaigns tailored to each account’s needs and stakeholders, is the solution for better targeting. Yet HG Insights is already focused on the next level—Account-Based Experience (ABX). Through ABX, account-based marketing is combined with account-based selling into the same dialogue.
What we’ve found is that a smaller set of accounts allows the emphasis to be on true ABM: How do I message separately to each persona? For campaigns targeted at a larger audience, it’s incumbent on marketers to properly target Above the Line (ATL) economic buyers, prime decision makers, and those people who actually write the checks.
Currently, most businesses are taking a scattered, inefficient approach marketing to too many people resulting in a lower yield, while ABM is the more efficient route. Even when companies invest heavily in marketing platforms and hire specialized teams, these investments often underperform when there’s inadequate data to identify and prioritize the right accounts. Without the targeting that the right data provides, the best tools and talent can’t deliver meaningful results, leading to wasted budget and resources.
Another common issue that marketers face is poor personalization. This could look like generic messaging or irrelevant content. It undermines the core value of ABX, which is to engage decision-makers with tailored, relevant experiences with marketing and sales efforts. When personalization falls short, response rates drop, and ABX efforts fail to build the requisite trust and engagement to move accounts through the funnel.
A new SOM paradigm
One way to view all this is as a basic fraction. The number of companies responding is the numerator, while the number of companies you’re marketing to is the denominator. And the odds may not be ever in your favor.
However, with a SOM-based model, there is a new paradigm to try in which the denominator is already constrained. With this approach, marketers have noticeably better odds based on touch points, geotargeting, and focusing on highly active, engaged accounts. Marketing multithreads within these accounts with sales and the ratio suddenly looks a whole lot better. Sales nurtures these opportunities, then comes back to marketing with presentations, meet ups, and more content, creating a closed loop for marketing.
Higher ABX ROI is derived from intentional platforms and well-executed campaigns that effectively yield more leads, prospects, and ultimately, customers. When marketing and sales are aligned and focused on high-value accounts, businesses can achieve greater efficiency and close deals faster, driving measurable growth.
Higher response rates stem from targeted ABX campaigns that are informed by buyer intent data and tailored to address specific pain points and buyer needs. When messaging aligns closely with what buyers actually care about, marketers can cut through the noise and drive meaningful engagement.
Effective ABX enables marketers to be laser focused on high-fit accounts with the greatest revenue potential, leading to more relevant outreach and higher-quality engagement. As a result, marketing teams commonly see improved campaign performance due to better alignment and lead quality.
Let’s consider deal progression as a KPI. Marketers are asking: How many touch points are needed? What is the duration of the sales cycle?
Traditional B2B sales often require myriad interactions across multiple stakeholders, which can slow down momentum for deals. ABX helps streamline this process by delivering highly relevant, personalized content at the right time, increasing engagement and reducing the number of touch points needed. As a result, ABX can improve KPIs by compressing the sales cycle and accelerating deal progression.
How ABX stats tell the story
The data we have about ABX clearly illustrates its effectiveness across key business metrics. The value of ABX for organizations is evidenced by:
An ABX approach offers double the impact by not only improving deal velocity but also increasing win rate to close more deals through personalized, consistent engagement.
To drive better outcomes with ABX, companies must adopt an integrated approach built on close alignment among GTM teams. These include sales, marketing, and customer success. When teams truly collaborate around shared goals, target the right accounts, and deliver coordinated, personalized engagement throughout the buyer journey, ABX is maximized as an incredibly powerful growth driver.
Best-in-class organizations are already embracing this ABX model and seeing measurable gains in deal velocity, win rates, and overall ROI. Marketing leaders now have all the proof they need to leverage ABX and succeed wildly with this winning approach that gives them a distinct competitive advantage.
