But let’s be real for a second: accounts don’t buy, people do.
At Inflowing, we’ve always been obsessed with the ‘Who’. Because if you don’t know who you’re talking to, you’re not marketing – you’re just making noise. And yet, for the last decade, the GTM tech stack has been moving in the opposite direction. We’ve built these massive, complex orchestration engines that, while perfectly valid for SMB organisations, fail to deliver for enterprise and upper mid market business. And that’s really a design flaw, simply because they’re built on a foundation of account-level data.
Let’s face it, when you roll signals up to the account level, there’s A LOT of guesswork.
Today, we need to talk about why the account era of ABM is failing, and why the future belongs to contact-level ABM.
The Four Horsemen of the account-level apocalypse
When signals get aggregated into an Account Score, the nuance that makes marketing actually work disappears. You end up with a dashboard that says “Company X is 85/100 Interested,” but your sales team is still flying blind.
Here is what happens when you ignore the person and focus on the logo:
1. Timing
In the world of account-level GTM, data is slow. By the time your intent provider flags an account, aggregates the spikes, updates your CRM, and triggers a “High Intent” task for a rep, the buyer has already finished their research. They’ve probably already had three calls with your competitor.
The modern, complex buyer’s journey is way more than a slow-moving glacier. It’s a series of lightning-fast clicks and questions. When you wait for account-level confirmation, you’re arriving at the party just as the lights are being turned off.
2. Detail
This is the biggest tragedy of modern GTM. An account score tells you that something happened, but it strips away the who + why.
In a mom and pop engineering business with 20 people, your educated guess on who you need to speak to will probably be right.
But in a world where you’re selling to Walmart, good luck trying to find the right person amongst their 2.3 million people.
3. Personalisation (kinda)
We’ve all been on the receiving end of ‘personalised’ ABM that feels incredibly robotic. “I saw [Company Name] was interested in [Broad Category]!”
This happens because the marketing team is orchestrating based on account-level signals. Since they don’t know which person did what, the next touch defaults to the lowest common denominator. It’s generic by design.
Was it the CTO looking for security documentation, or an intern doing a school project? Was it the champion looking for pricing, or the end-user looking for a tutorial? If you can’t answer that, you can’t decide what to do next. Without contact-level context, your orchestration is just a coin flip.
4. Attribution
Traditional journey reporting shows outcomes, but it rarely shows causes. Influence gets claimed by whichever tool was last in line. Because we report at the account level, we see a Closed Won Deal and a bunch of marketing activity, and we assume they are related.
But did that display ad actually move the needle for the Budget Holder? Or did the Budget Holder never see an ad, while the marketing team put pound after pound into showing banners to people who had no power to sign the check? Account-level attribution is a hall of mirrors.
People Make Decisions, Not Accounts
It’s time to stop pretending that the Account is our customer. Behind every single action is a person.
And before every single action is a decision.
In the field of marketing, and well marketing in general, we’ve always been in the field of influencing perception and behaviour change. That’s no different whether you’re working for a non-for-profit or the biggest most profitable company in the world.
People make decisions, not accounts. The VP of Sales at a Fortune 500 company doesn’t care that their Account is showing intent for a CRM. They care about why their team’s pipeline is shrinking. The Head of Ops cares about data integrity. These are two different people, with two different problems, requiring two different interventions.
This is why we are championing ABM that starts with people.
When you orchestrate ABM at the contact level, the entire GTM engine changes. You stop guessing and start responding. You move from orchestrated workflows (which is usually just code for sending more emails) to true orchestrated experiences. Experiences everywhere.
Contact-level clarity (know your people)
Your CRM is full of gold, but it’s often siloed. The new orchestration layer pulls in contact-level context from everywhere – form fills, webinar attendance, whitepaper downloads – and syncs it with your ad engagement and sales activity. It’s a single source of truth that lives at the human level. insights on each prospect
We’re moving beyond “they visited the site.” With intent-to-topic matching, you can map each individual buyer’s signals across every channel to the specific topics they actually care about. If Sarah is looking at Security Integration and Mark is looking at Pricing Plans, they shouldn’t get the same follow-up. We’re finally giving marketers the ability to see the Why behind the Who.
A direct line from marketing activity → sales action
No more ‘I think this worked’. We’re bringing full journey visibility directly into CRM. You can see the path an individual took – from the first ad they clicked to the last form they filled – all synced to the contact record. This is attribution that actually makes sense.
What about signals, are they dead?
No, not at all. We love signals. And as we said before, for those targeting SMB and lower mid market businesses, they do the trick. Your educated guesswork will get you through the race.
But if you’re targeting upper midmarket and enterprise. It’s all about the new wave of contact-level signals. Put simply, it’s a more rational approach to the irrational way humans actually buy, with contact-level signals such as:
- Content
- Search (including zero-click search)
- Ad Engagement
- Social
- Job Change
Multi-Channel Orchestration (The ‘What Next’ Engine)
This is where the magic happens. Once you have the who + why, you can finally determine the what next.
Did a specific lead engage with a high-value ad? Trigger a specific cadence for that lead.
Did they attend a webinar? Pivot their LinkedIn ad creative to a bottom-funnel case study.
Did they stop engaging? Scale back the sales outreach and move them into a nurture track.
All of this happens automatically, triggered by the individual, not the account.
The New Standard: Who + Why = What Next
The goal of GTM shouldn’t be to run a workflow. It should be about being useful to a potential buyer.
When you use contact-level orchestration, you are finally able to meet the buyer where they are. You aren’t guessing what the Account wants; you are responding to what the Person needs.
We’ve spent too long looking at our markets through a blurry lens. We’ve accepted Account-Level as the best we can do because the tech wasn’t there to do it better. But that excuse is gone.
If you want to win in a crowded market, you have to be the most relevant. You have to be the most timely. And you have to remember that on the other side of that Target Account is a human being looking for a solution.
It’s time to stop marketing to ghosts. It’s time for contact-level ABM.
If you need help assessing martech and getting the strategy and campaigns cooking on the contact level, get in touch with our team today.