B2B ≠ ABM: Why the Future Demands a Broader Playbook

We Built the Best ABM Stack in B2B - But That’s Not the Whole Story

I’m pausing for a moment of reflection as 2025 continues on its whistle-stop journey, somehow now into August. We have seen a lot of ABM/X this year, and it makes me wonder why ABM has become B2B advertising, but ABM isn’t ‘the strategy’ it is a natural output of one done right.

B2B marketing today suffers from an identity crisis. ABM has become the buzzword of choice, a convenient label retrofitted onto decks, campaigns, and roadmaps - whether it belongs there or not.

Account-based marketing. ABX. AB-whatever. It’s everywhere. And it’s seldom done well.

That’s not a swipe at the tactic — when deployed correctly, ABM can be a growth engine. But most brands haven’t earned the right to run it.

They skip the groundwork: branding, identity resolution, multi-signal data strategy, activation orchestration, and behavioural segmentation. They confuse targeting named accounts with earning account engagement.

I’ve spent nearly two decades in the world of addressable advertising, building platforms, architecting signal graphs, and helping enterprise marketers navigate the collapse of traditional funnels. ABM is part of the answer — but it’s not the playbook.

Let’s tell the truth: B2B advertising is not becoming ABM.
It’s becoming multi-signal, multi-tactic, and radically more complex.

And that’s where the opportunity lies.

The Funnel Fallacy: B2B Doesn’t Flow, It Fragments

“Only 5% of your market is in buying mode at any given time.”
— LinkedIn B2B Institute

For years, marketers have obsessed over funnels. Awareness leads to interest, which leads to consideration, which leads to a form fill and — magically — a deal.

That’s not how modern B2B buying works. The journey is not linear. It’s episodic, anonymous, and often invisible.

Google research shows that B2B buyers average 27 interactions across 6 channels before converting. And the majority of that happens before they ever fill out a form.

Yet ABM is still treated like a top-down strategy.

But ABM is inherently bottom-of-funnel. It requires:

• A known account

• Demonstrated intent

• Measurable engagement

• A reason to personalise

Most of your market isn’t there yet.

They haven’t seen your ads. They haven’t read your content. They’re not in your CRM.
If ABM is the scalpel, you still need a net — one that sparks curiosity, builds familiarity, and earns trust long before the account gets “named.”

In other words, there’s a slew of tactics that you need to run to build the foundations to run true ABM.

The real funnel is inverted.
It starts wide, stays agile, and gets precise only when the signals demand it.

Brand campaigns. Behavioural nurture. Contextual placement.
These upstream plays are what make ABM work — not the other way around.

Signal Loss Is Real — And Accelerating

“We are approaching a consent-constrained, signal-fragmented era in digital marketing.”
— Forrester, 2024 CMO Predictions

The traditional B2B data stack is collapsing.

• Third-party cookies? Crumbling under Chrome’s phaseout and global privacy regulation.

• MAIDs (Mobile Ad IDs)? Functionally useless in iOS environments post-App Tracking Transparency.

• Email pixels? Blocked by default in Gmail and Apple Mail - you’re flying blind.

• LinkedIn reach? Shrinking and priced like a luxury good - $70 CPMs with limited scale and often over-priced to performance

Meanwhile, walled gardens are tightening.

Buyers self-educate in dark social, Slack groups, Reddit, Gartner, and LLMs, far beyond the reach of pixels or platforms.

And yet... most B2B strategies still cling to deterministic signals like it's 2017.

This is not sustainable.

The average B2B buying committee involves 6–10 decision-makers, according to Gartner, with anonymous, asynchronous journeys that often span 3–6 months. If you’re waiting for a named match before engaging, you’ve already lost. And these stats probably under-play it when it comes to enterprise tech - we frequently see committee sizes that are more like 20+, touch points in the 60+ range and buying cycles taking 11+ months.

The modern marketer must pivot:

• From attribution modeling to signal mapping.

• From certainty-seeking to probability-calibrated systems.

• From lead scoring to engagement sequencing.

This is the age of signal-based marketing - and those that master its complexity will define the next chapter of B2B.

What Winning B2B Looks Like Now

Here’s what we’re seeing on the frontlines - from the teams that are winning in this new era. These tactics scratch the surface, and it would behest me to give away all our secrets, but these give a glimpse:

Location + Device Graph Bridging

Heathrow billboard impressions → MAID exposure → IP to MAID visit mapping
Result: Clickless attribution from out-of-home to site engagement using probabilistic signal fusion.

CTV with Contextual + ID Graph Layers

Not just "target the VP of IT." deep contextual web research → custom algorithm to understand the nuanced contexts in a brands world view → signal mapping → omnichannel triggers across CTV, audio, web and video
Run mid-funnel brand narratives across connected TV, layered with inferred intent and modeled company-level behaviours.

CRM-Agnostic Nurture Loops

Stop waiting for a form fill.
Trigger sequential content syndication and media reactivation based on onsite first-party behavioural signals — scroll depth, repeat visits, and research behvaiour on the upper funnel; purchase intent signals, other inferred signals like security and integratability mapping behaviours as the funnel matures

ICP-Derived TAM Expansion

Build top-funnel reach using AI-modeled firmographic twins.
Run awareness and educational content into a scaled, modeled audience, not just your static TAL.

Measurement? Account-Level, Not Click-Level

Clicks are noise. Accounts are truth.
Use longitudinal engagement analysis — visits, dwell, conversions, re-engagement — all rolled up at the account level with decision-weighted scoring.

These aren’t fringe tactics.
They’re the playbook of the most progressive B2B marketers in the world.

They’ve stopped chasing individual attribution and started engineering closed-loop signal systems.

The Match Rate Myth (And Why You’re Being Lied To)

Let’s talk about the elephant in the martech stack when it comes to ABM: match-rate theatre.

Vendors tout “95% match to your TAL” like it’s a badge of honour.
Here’s the truth:

• Matched to what? Email? Cookie? IP? MAID? Device cluster? Do you know?

• Matched how? Deterministically? Probabilistically? Inferred by lookalike logic?

• Matched where? Your target markets — or just US-based noise?

• Matched when? B2B email TTL (Time to Live) is less than 120 days. That “match” from Q1 might now be unemployed.

The worst part? Many “matches” never translate into usable media signals.
They’re unactionable ghost IDs.

Real match rates - the ones that power effective activation - often sit between 30–60%, depending on inputs, region, and channel.

That’s not failure. That’s reality.
And your job isn’t to fake the number - it’s to improve the inputs and build systems that still perform at 40% coverage.

We’d rather run a true 45% match across interoperable IDs than a fictional 95% that breaks the moment it hits a DSP.

The future isn’t “match everything.”
It’s: understand what can be matched, and make the most of what can’t.

Where ABM Still Wins

Let’s be clear: ABM is not dead. It’s just over-applied and understood too narrowly.

When deployed correctly, it’s one of the most powerful tools in the B2B arsenal. But that precision comes with a price: you need the right conditions.

ABM excels when:

• Your ICP is sharply defined and shows clear in-market intent

• You have progressive profiling or high-value website actions indicating buying stage

• Sales is aligned and can act on warm, pre-qualified accounts

• Personalisation is tied to deal stage, not vanity segmentation

• There’s a real-time, bidirectional CRM<>media sync with full-funnel visibility

That’s not a general B2B plan. That’s the endgame of a great system.

But here’s the overlooked truth:

ABM-like tactics — the use of firmographic targeting, company-level metrics, and engagement scoring — can be deployed much earlier in the journey, too.

What most vendors call ABM today? It’s actually Account-Based Activation (ABA) — and it’s incredibly valuable in brand campaigns, mid-funnel content strategies, and anonymous engagement modeling.

At FunnelFuel, we've used data-driven brand segmentation to scale awareness without sacrificing strategic precision. Think:

• Modeling TAM expansion using IP, geo, firmo and lookalike logic - which often dramatically out-performs the average ‘large-TAL’

• Deconstructing company-level awareness and attention metrics: dwell time, scroll depth, viewability, content sequencing

• Deploying firmographic filters on CTV and Digital OOH to deliver upper-funnel messaging to high-fit accounts

• Measuring brand success with reveal-to-engagement pathways, not CPM or CTR

This is brand - but done with ABM-grade discipline.

The difference is in how you report.
Instead of attribution or last-click wins, you track lift:

• Did your priority companies increase engagement over time?

• Are awareness signals turning into site behavior and intent spikes?

• Are you earning the right to deploy ABM, rather than just declaring it?

• Are your target accounts cascading into higher value actions on site, and moving through content flywheels to indiscate progression?

Branding and demand gen don’t have to sit in silos anymore.
When orchestrated through a signal-based approach, they feed the ABM engine — not just fill the top of a funnel, but accelerate its velocity.

Rethinking Resolution: Why Not Every Signal Needs a Name

In a privacy-first world, obsessing over resolving every visitor or ad impression to a company is a strategic dead-end.

Not every signal will resolve.
Not every signal should.

“The average B2B buyer is 57% through their decision process before engaging with sales.”
— CEB/Gartner

That means most of your influence happens when the buyer is anonymous, lurking, and self-educating.

This is where the high value actions on site, and tracking the metrics that matter coms into its own - and ensuring you have a pipeline to media buying (the DSP layer) which doesn’t require CRM. Segments in analytics need to pipe to activation, activation driven traffic needs to be measured on meaningful actions or meaningful engagements (video views, attention etc) and the system needs to flywheel off the 360 degree feedback loop that comes off this - which gives you signals upstream of CRM

Instead of forcing attribution, smart B2B marketers:

• Score anonymous sessions based on depth, frequency, and behavior

• Segment intent into tiers — e.g., return visit velocity, high-intent page triggers, and content completion

• Nurture into identity with omnichannel reinforcement, not just retargeting

For example, we’ve seen consistent lift in account-level engagement (up to 34% improvement MoM) when we build media loops around anonymous behaviors — not resolved leads.

The mindset shift?
Treat every visit like a thread in a larger behavioral fabric.
Identity will emerge — when it matters.

The Future of B2B Isn’t ABM - It’s Signal-Based Marketing

ABM is not the new normal.
Signal-based marketing is.

And the difference is profound.

Old model:

• Target list > campaign brief > lead capture > sales handoff

• Wait for attribution

New model:

• Detect signals across anonymous and named states

• Use behavioral + contextual data to drive reactive media

• Score and segment accounts based on their journey state, not just firmographic fit

• Deploy ABM only when signals say: “Go.”

Signal-based marketing isn’t a channel.
It’s an operating system.

It demands:

• A unified data spine (IP, cookie, HEMS, MAID, CRM, web behavior)

• Flexible activation across branding and performance channels

• Measurement that maps engagement, not just clicks

• Systems that learn, adapt, and orchestrate - not just trigger ads

The brands that build this now — across DSPs, CRMs, CDPs, curation, and clean rooms - won’t just survive the next decade of privacy change. They’ll define it.

TL;DR: What Elite B2B Leaders Need to Know

ABM is not the strategy.
It's the final, precision activation layer of a well-engineered signal stack.

Brand, awareness, and education campaigns can — and should — use ABM-like data tactics at scale.
We call that Account-Based Activation — ABA.
Use it to guide early-stage engagement before the account is ready for ABM.

Traditional attribution is collapsing. Signal-based journey mapping is the future.

Not every visitor needs to be named. Nurture anonymous signals with intent modeling, attention metrics, and smart sequencing.

Don’t fake your match rate. Build a system that works — even at 45%.

If you want to win in modern B2B:

• Think in signals

• Build interoperable systems

• Orchestrate media across every stage

• And use ABM as the exclamation point — not the headline.

We’ve seen it work.
We’ve helped build the infrastructure.
And we’re here to lead the shift again.

🚪 You’ve Reached the Edge of the Free Version — Upgrade to Go Deeper

The rest of this post is for paid subscribers only, and it’s where we move from big thinking to real implementation.

Here’s what you’ll unlock below the fold:

All of this sets the stage — but if you want the playbook, not just the theory, that’s what’s next.

Below the fold, I’ll walk through the exact components of a modern signal-based system, the metrics that matter, and three activation recipes you can copy into your own strategy today.