In the world of B2B Enterprise where we work, the use of Account Based Marketing (ABM) or Account Based Selling (ABS) as I prefer to call it has been going on for years, it's nothing new.

At my previous company, sales people in the larger accounts space would be given 30 accounts, of which they would focus on 5 and leave the other 25 fallow.

We had a number of people that always did not just 100% but 200% and we did an analysis on people that did 60% and the people that did 200%.  There were a number of differences.

One was focus and organisation.  The people that did 200% would focus on a few accounts but would know literally, 100 or 200 people, which was of course reflected in their LinkedIn accounts.  Where as the people that would get 60% knew a handful of people per account.  Now there were other differences but it got us thinking.

Then one sales leader, said, from the start of the new year you will only have 5 accounts.  There was nearly a riot, but giving people 12 months notice, meant people had time to decide which accounts they would keep, which accounts they would drop and of course it gave people time to leave the company should they see fit.

In the new world of social, internet and the mobile, it enables us to get great relationships quickly.

We stopped using the term Account Based Marketing as "sales" would say "well that's marketing then" and believe it wasn't anything to do with them.  We moved from product centric to vertical centric to account centric.  Deep er knowledge of our clients business issues as well as deeper knowledge of relationship enabled us to get more revenue.

In our new book "Smarketing - How to achieve competitive advantage through blended sales and marketing"  We have a chapter on ABM and how it can be used effectively by sales and marketing teams today.