Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a focused growth strategy where marketing and sales collaborate to create personalized buying experiences for a select set of high-value target accounts. Instead of casting a wide net, ABM concentrates resources on the specific companies most likely to become significant customers. This approach requires tight alignment between teams and a clear understanding of the target audience, their challenges, and the key individuals involved in the buying decision.
HubSpot provides a powerful suite of native ABM tools, primarily within its Marketing Hub and Sales Hub Professional and Enterprise tiers. These features are designed to help you identify and manage target accounts, understand the buying committee, coordinate outreach, and measure the impact of your efforts directly within the CRM. When set up correctly, these tools move ABM from a theoretical strategy to a practical, data-driven process that your entire revenue team can execute.
This guide walks through the entire process of setting up and using HubSpot's ABM functionality. We will cover activating the tools, defining your ideal customer profile, building your target account list, mapping buying roles, running targeted campaigns, and reporting on your success. Following these steps will ensure you have a solid foundation for running effective ABM plays that generate measurable pipeline from your most wanted accounts. For complex configurations, consider a consultation for your HubSpot CRM setup & automation.
Activating ABM Tools and Configuring Your Dashboard
Before you can begin targeting accounts, you must first activate the ABM features within your HubSpot portal. Navigate to your settings by clicking the gear icon in the main navigation bar. In the left sidebar menu, under 'Objects', select 'Accounts'. Here, you will find a toggle to turn on the ABM features. Once enabled, HubSpot automatically creates several new company properties, such as 'Target Account' and 'Ideal Customer Profile Tier', which are fundamental to the strategy.
Enabling these tools also grants you access to the Target Accounts home and the ABM analytics dashboard. The Target Accounts home, found under 'Sales' > 'Accounts', becomes your command center. It provides an at-a-glance view of your target companies, showing key data like the number of associated contacts, open deals, and missing buying roles. This centralized view is critical for both marketing and sales to maintain alignment and monitor progress against the target list.
Properly configuring your user permissions is a crucial part of the setup. You need to decide which users can view the ABM dashboard and who has the authority to mark a company as a Target Account. These permissions can be managed under 'Users & Teams' in your settings. Typically, sales leaders, marketing managers, and account executives are given edit access, while other team members might have view-only rights. Establishing these roles early prevents data inconsistencies and ensures your target account list remains clean and purposeful. HubStack often assists clients with this initial permission and data model setup.
Defining Your Ideal Customer Profile and Tiers
With the tools active, the next step is strategic: defining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). An ICP is a description of the perfect company for your product or service, based on firmographic data like industry, company size, revenue, and geographical location. Look at your best current customers—what do they have in common? Use this data to build a clear, objective definition of the companies you should be targeting. This definition will become the foundation for all your ABM efforts.
HubSpot allows you to translate your ICP into a 'Ideal Customer Profile Tier' property. This is a default company property with three options: Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3. Tier 1 represents your perfect-fit, highest-value accounts that deserve the most personalized attention. Tier 2 accounts are a strong fit but might have a slightly lower potential value, while Tier 3 accounts fit your basic criteria but are a lower priority. This tiered system helps you allocate resources effectively, ensuring your most intensive efforts are saved for the best opportunities.
You can automate the process of assigning ICP tiers using workflows. For example, you can create a company-based workflow that triggers when a company's 'Industry' is 'Manufacturing' and 'Annual Revenue' is greater than $50 million. The workflow action would be to set the 'Ideal Customer Profile Tier' property to 'Tier 1'. Automating this classification ensures consistency and saves significant manual effort, allowing your team to focus on strategy rather than data entry. If your automation needs are complex, you may need HubSpot support & maintenance.
Building and Managing Your Target Account List
Once your ICP is defined, you can begin building your list of Target Accounts. There are several ways to do this in HubSpot. The most direct method is to navigate to a company record and manually toggle the 'Target Account' property to 'True'. This is suitable for adding a few accounts at a time as they are identified by your sales team. However, for a larger-scale effort, this approach is inefficient.
A more scalable method is to create a list of companies based on your ICP criteria and then update them in bulk. For example, create an active list of all companies where 'Ideal Customer Profile Tier' is 'Tier 1'. From the list view, you can select all companies and use the 'Edit' function to change the 'Target Account' property to 'True' for all of them simultaneously. You can also import a spreadsheet of companies and map a column to the 'Target Account' property during the import process.
Maintaining the integrity of your Target Account list is an ongoing process. Your ABM strategy should include clear rules for when an account is added and, just as importantly, when it is removed. Accounts may be removed if they are unresponsive after a set period, are disqualified, or become a customer. Using HubSpot's automation, you can create tasks for account owners to review their target accounts quarterly, ensuring the list remains relevant and focused on active opportunities.
Mapping Buying Roles to Key Contacts
ABM succeeds by engaging the entire buying committee, not just a single lead. HubSpot facilitates this with the 'Buying Role' contact property. This property allows you to label contacts within a target account based on their role in the decision-making process. Identifying and tagging these individuals is a critical step that enables highly personalized and relevant outreach from your sales and marketing teams.
Sales and marketing teams should collaborate to identify the key personas involved in a typical purchase. These roles often include the Decision Maker, Champion, Influencer, Budget Holder, Blocker, and End User. Once defined, you can customize the 'Buying Role' property in HubSpot to include these specific labels. Sales representatives should be trained to actively seek out and assign these roles to contacts as they learn more about an account's organizational structure.
The Target Accounts home page includes a column that highlights 'Missing Buying Roles', making it easy to see where you have gaps in your understanding of the buying committee. For example, you might see that you have identified an Influencer and an End User at a key account, but you are missing a Decision Maker. This serves as a direct signal to the account owner that they need to conduct further research or outreach to identify that critical contact. This data-driven approach to relationship mapping is a core advantage of using HubSpot for ABM, and our team at HubStack can help you build reports to track this effectively.
| Buying Role | Description | Importance for ABM |
|---|---|---|
| Decision Maker | The individual with the final authority to say 'yes' or 'no' to a purchase. | Primary target for closing stages; content should focus on ROI and business impact. |
| Champion | An internal employee who advocates for your product or service. | Key ally; provide them with materials to help them make the case internally. |
| Influencer | Team members whose opinions are valued and who contribute to the decision. | Engage with educational content and product deep-dives. |
| Budget Holder | The person who controls the budget and signs the contract. | Engage with pricing, TCO, and financial justification content. See our guide on [/pricing](/pricing). |
| Blocker | Someone who can obstruct or stop the deal from moving forward. | Identify early and develop strategies to mitigate their concerns. |
| End User | The person or team who will actually use the product day-to-day. | Focus on usability, features, and how it makes their job easier. |
Executing ABM Campaigns and Sales Plays
With your target accounts identified and buying roles mapped, it is time to execute your ABM campaigns. HubSpot allows you to create highly targeted plays using a combination of its tools. One of the most effective methods is to use HubSpot's ads integration with platforms like LinkedIn. You can create a company list in HubSpot containing your Tier 1 target accounts and sync it with LinkedIn to run sponsored content campaigns exclusively for employees at those companies.
Personalized email outreach is another cornerstone of ABM. Instead of generic marketing blasts, create tailored sequences in Sales Hub for different buying roles. For example, a sequence targeting a 'Decision Maker' might focus on strategic business outcomes and ROI, while a sequence for an 'End User' might highlight specific features and usability benefits. Use personalization tokens for company name, industry, and the contact's role to make the outreach feel one-to-one.
Use workflows to create alerts for your sales team. For instance, you can build a workflow that sends an internal email notification to a BDR when a contact from a target account visits the pricing page or downloads a bottom-of-funnel piece of content. This real-time intelligence allows sales to follow up with a timely and relevant conversation. These automated 'sales plays' ensure that no opportunity for engagement is missed and keep the account top-of-mind for the assigned rep.
Measuring Success with ABM Reports and Dashboards
Measuring the effectiveness of your ABM strategy is crucial for demonstrating ROI and optimizing your approach. HubSpot provides a dedicated ABM dashboard with several pre-built reports. These reports help you visualize your progress against your target accounts, showing metrics like the number of contacts engaged, new deals created, and the overall deal pipeline associated with your target list. This dashboard should be the single source of truth for your ABM program.
Key reports on the default dashboard include 'Target Accounts Overview', which summarizes your entire list, and 'Account-Based Engagement', which shows how many contacts at target accounts have been reached or engaged. Another critical report is 'Deals Created', which tracks how many new deals have been opened within your target account list over a specific time frame. Regularly reviewing these reports in weekly sales and marketing meetings is essential for maintaining momentum.
For more granular insights, you can build custom reports. For example, you could create a report that compares the average deal size and sales cycle length for target accounts versus non-target accounts. This can powerfully demonstrate the business impact of a focused ABM strategy. You could also build a report to track the number of key buying roles identified per target account, helping you measure the progress of your account mapping efforts. If you need help building these, you can always /contact us.