Convert New Key Accounts with ABM
Converting new key accounts is both a challenge and an opportunity. These accounts often carry the potential for significant revenue, influence, and long-term partnerships, but they rarely respond to volume-based marketing. Account-Based Marketing gives you a structured way to earn their attention, engage the whole buying group, and turn interest into pipeline.
Account-Based Playbook: Understand, Engage and Retain the Modern B2B Consumer
Authored by Joana Inch, the best-selling author of Go To Market, this book provides a proven roadmap to help marketers understand, engage, and retain modern B2B buyers through tailored, impactful strategies.
Get the Account-Based Playbook
A practical roadmap for understanding, engaging, and retaining the modern B2B buyer.
Why New Key Accounts Need a Different Approach
A new key account isn't just a bigger lead. It's an organisation with a complex buying committee, established suppliers, internal politics, and long decision cycles. Nobody in that account owes you a meeting, and a generic nurture sequence won't change that.
That's where Account-Based Marketing earns its place. Instead of spreading effort thin across hundreds of contacts, ABM concentrates your marketing and sales resources on a defined set of high-value accounts, and on the specific people who influence buying decisions inside them.
Done well, ABM helps you:
- Open doors with accounts where you have no existing relationship
- Engage multiple stakeholders across the buying committee, not just one champion
- Shorten the path from first touch to first meeting to opportunity
- Give sales a clear, shared view of which accounts are warming up and why
How Do You Convert a New Key Account with ABM?
You convert a new key account with ABM by selecting accounts that match your ideal customer profile, mapping the buying committee inside each one, and then running coordinated, personalised engagement across marketing and sales until the account moves from aware to engaged to opportunity. Success is measured at the account level: engaged stakeholders, meetings booked, opportunities created, and accounts won.
What Makes New Key Accounts Hard to Win
No Existing Relationship
You're starting cold. Trust and credibility have to be built before anyone will commit time to a conversation.
Large Buying Committees
Decisions involve several stakeholders, each with different priorities, from the economic buyer to technical evaluators and end users.
Entrenched Incumbents
Most key accounts already have a supplier or an internal workaround. You need a compelling reason for them to change.
Long, Non-Linear Cycles
Buying journeys stall, restart and loop back. Without account-level visibility, momentum is easy to lose and hard to see.
Six Steps to Converting New Key Accounts
This is the framework we use with B2B SaaS and technology companies to move new target accounts from unaware to won. Each step builds on the last, and every step is shared between marketing and sales.
Define Your Ideal Customer Profile and Select Accounts
Start with the accounts that will matter most to your growth. Use firmographics, technographics, intent signals and fit with your best existing customers to build a focused target list, then tier it so effort matches opportunity.
Map the Buying Committee
Identify who's involved in the decision inside each account: the economic buyer, champions, technical evaluators, influencers and blockers. Understanding each role's priorities is what makes personalisation meaningful.
Build Account Insight
Research each account's strategy, challenges, recent news and triggers. The goal is to arrive with a point of view on their business, not a pitch about yours.
Create Personalised Content and Messaging
Develop messaging by account and by buying role, from thought-leadership content for awareness to tailored case studies and business cases for consideration. A message matrix keeps every touchpoint consistent across marketing and sales.
Orchestrate Multi-Channel Engagement
Coordinate LinkedIn advertising, social selling, sales outreach sequences, email, events and direct engagement so each account experiences one connected narrative rather than disconnected campaigns.
Measure Account Progression and Optimise
Track movement at the account level: engaged stakeholders, meetings booked, opportunity accounts and won accounts. Use what you learn to refine targeting, messaging and channel mix, and to decide where to double down.
See Our Full Account-Based Marketing Framework
Explore how Hat Media plans, runs and measures milestone-driven ABM programs for B2B SaaS.
Matching the ABM Tier to the Account
Not every new key account needs the same level of investment. Tiering lets you put the deepest personalisation where the stakes are highest, while still scaling engagement across a wider target list.
| Tier | Best For | Level of Personalisation |
|---|---|---|
| 1:1 (Strategic ABM) | A handful of high-value new accounts where a single win changes your year | Fully bespoke research, content and engagement for each account |
| 1:Few (ABM Lite) | Clusters of similar accounts sharing an industry, challenge or use case | Tailored by cluster, with account-specific touches |
| 1:Many (Programmatic ABM) | A larger list of best-fit accounts you want to warm up at scale | Personalised by segment and role, driven by data and automation |
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Hat Media sits on HubSpot's Partner Advisory Council — a select group of partners shaping the platform's roadmap, with a particular focus on AI-driven innovation for ABM and beyond.
Learn More Before You Launch
Cracking the ABM Code!
Watch the full webinar on making ABM measurable and repeatable.
6 Best Practices to Elevate Your Account-Based Marketing
A free guide to sharpening targeting, personalisation and measurement.
$66 Million via Account-Based Marketing for Lenovo
Tech Revolution stands as a trailblazing digital content platform created for Lenovo with Intel as a partner. It was curated for the mobile era, dedicated to furnishing IT decision-makers throughout the Asia-Pacific region with the latest tech insights.
Revenue influenced via ABM
To demonstrate tangible ROI
Of content marketing sites globally
Our milestones include:
- Demonstrating a tangible return on investment within a span of just 12 months.
- Earning the distinction of being recognised by LinkedIn's global content evangelist as one of the top 1% of content marketing sites globally.
- A nomination for the esteemed "Best Content Marketing & Collaboration" award, presented by mUmBRELLA Asia.
idoba: Uncovering and Engaging New Target Accounts
idoba is a technology-informed services company that partners with mining and resources businesses to drive value and sustainable change. Our work with idoba centres on Strategic Account-Based Marketing, built to uncover new accounts and help the sales team turn them into real opportunities.
- Target Account Development: Uncovering new accounts and mapping content and the buyer journey for each stage of the funnel.
- LinkedIn Outreach and Social Selling: Sales sequences built on our Message Matrix, plus profile and posting strategy for nominated sales leaders.
- Funnel-Based LinkedIn PPC and Video: Awareness and consideration content designed to engage the target accounts.
- Account-Level Reporting: A custom HubSpot dashboard tracking Engaged Stakeholders > Meetings Booked > Opportunity Accounts > Won Accounts, with ROI estimates v. actuals.
More on Account-Based Marketing
Converting New Key Accounts: Frequently Asked Questions
What is a new key account in B2B?
Why use ABM instead of lead generation to win new key accounts?
How many target accounts should we start with?
How long does it take to convert a new key account with ABM?
Which channels work best for engaging new key accounts?
How do we measure whether ABM is working?
Can Hat Media help us convert new key accounts?
Ready to Win Your Next Key Account?
Bring your target account list and we'll help you build the plan to engage, convert and grow it.
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