What Is Account-Based Everything (ABE)? Definition and Origin
Account-based everything (ABE) is a B2B go-to-market strategy in which marketing, sales development, sales and customer success work from one list of target accounts and coordinate personalized outreach to the people at each one, from first contact through renewal and expansion, instead of each team running its own campaigns.
Account-based everything, usually shortened to ABE, takes the idea behind account-based marketing (pick a short list of companies worth winning and treat each one as its own market) and hands it to every team that touches a customer. Marketing, sales development reps, account executives and customer success managers agree on the same accounts, share what they know about them, and plan their touches as one sequence rather than four separate ones.
The word "everything" carries the meaning. Early account-based programs were often run by marketing alone, a gap the account-based marketing software company Demandbase's 2021 announcement names when it says early account-based efforts didn't involve sales enough. The broader name makes sales and post-sale teams co-owners of the result.
Where the term account-based everything comes from
Account-based everything grew out of account-based marketing, and both its origin and its spread are traceable to a handful of people in the mid-2010s. The phrase is often credited to Jon Miller, a Marketo co-founder, but a 2017 interview with him traces it to the research firm TOPO.
- 2003: Bev Burgess coins "account-based marketing" at ITSMA, the IT services marketing association, as Wikipedia's ABM entry records.
- May 2016: Jon Miller, by then running the startup Engagio, tells CMSWire he is extending account-based marketing to "account-based everything," a day after Engagio released its PlayMaker product for coordinating plays across sales and marketing (CMSWire, May 5, 2016).
- June 2016: Craig Rosenberg, co-founder and chief analyst of TOPO, presents a webinar titled "Account Based Everything," promoted on Microsoft's Dynamics 365 blog with the definition "the coordination of personalized marketing, sales development, and customer success efforts" at a targeted set of accounts.
- January 2017: The episode notes for sales author Andy Paul's interview with Jon Miller call Account Based Everything "a phrase borrowed from TOPO" and describe it as "human engagement, methodically orchestrated, assisted by data" (Andy Paul's episode notes).
No source settles who said it first, but the record points to TOPO for the name and to Engagio for spreading it. Both companies were later acquired: Gartner bought TOPO in October 2019, and Demandbase bought Engagio in June 2020, where Jon Miller became chief product officer. In March 2021 Demandbase began calling its approach ABX, account-based experience, which is why you'll see ABE and ABX used for overlapping ideas.
Account-based everything vs. account-based marketing
The difference between ABE and ABM is who runs the program and how long it lasts. ABM, in practice, is often a marketing program aimed at winning new accounts; ABE is a company-wide way of working with a target account list that continues after the contract is signed.
Account-based marketing (ABM) | Account-based everything (ABE) | |
|---|---|---|
Who owns it | Usually marketing, with sales support | Marketing, sales development, sales and customer success jointly |
Where it stops | Often at the opportunity or the closed deal | Runs through onboarding, renewal and expansion |
Typical touches | Targeted ads, personalized content, events | Those, plus rep emails and calls, executive outreach, success check-ins |
What gets measured | Account engagement, pipeline created | Pipeline, win rate, deal size, retention and expansion per account |
Common failure | Marketing warms accounts sales never works | Teams agree on a list but never schedule the touches together |
Good ABM already involves sales, so ABE is less a new method than a name that keeps the program from sitting in one department. If your ABM program has shared accounts, shared plans and post-sale involvement, it's ABE under another label.
What an account-based everything program looks like
An ABE program rests on four agreements between teams, made before anyone sends a message.
- One account list. Marketing and sales agree on the ideal customer profile and the named accounts, with tiers for how much effort each one gets. Customer success adds existing customers worth expanding.
- One view of each account. Everyone can see who at the account has been contacted, by whom, what they engaged with and what was said on calls. Without this, coordination is guesswork.
- One plan per account or tier, with owners. The plan names each touch, its channel, who sends it and when: ads warming the buying group, a rep's email to the economic buyer, an invitation to an event, a call from an executive.
- Shared numbers. The teams report against the same account-level goals, so marketing isn't paid for leads sales ignores and sales isn't chasing accounts marketing never warmed.
An example of account-based everything
Suppose you sell software to hospital finance departments and you've agreed on 40 target health systems for the quarter. Run by marketing alone, the 40 see ads and a gated report, and sales hears about them when someone fills in a form.
Under ABE, the same quarter looks different. Marketing runs ads to the finance and IT people at all 40. A sales development rep emails the CFO's team at the ten most engaged accounts, referring to the report they downloaded. An account executive invites two of them to a regional dinner the company is already hosting. At three accounts where you already serve one hospital in the system, the customer success manager introduces the account executive to the finance lead at a sister hospital. Every one of those touches is visible on the account record, so no one emails a contact who spoke to a colleague yesterday.
When account-based everything is worth it, and when it isn't
ABE pays off when each deal is large enough to justify several people's time on one account, buying decisions involve a committee, and the accounts you'd want are knowable in advance. It's a poor fit for low-priced products bought by one person, where volume and inbound demand do more.
Practitioners put the bar in different places. UserGems, a sales software company, for instance, suggests the approach suits deals above roughly $15,000 a year and recommends starting with 30 to 40 accounts a month before scaling. Treat figures like these as one team's experience rather than a rule.
Common mistakes with account-based everything
- Renaming ABM without changing ownership. If sales and success have no named touches in the plan, the program is still ABM.
- A list nobody believes in. If reps think the target accounts are wrong, they'll quietly work their own. Build the list with them.
- Too many accounts too soon. Personalization collapses when a team of five tries to run plays on 500 accounts at once.
- No shared record of touches. Duplicate emails to the same buyer from three people undo the effort of looking coordinated.
- Stopping at signature. Leaving customer success out removes the part of ABE that most clearly separates it from ABM: renewal and expansion.
Related terms
ABM orchestration is the day-to-day sequencing of touches across teams and channels, the working core of an ABE program. Sales acceleration, shortening the time good deals take to close, is one of the outcomes those programs report against.
Frequently asked questions
What does ABE stand for in sales?
ABE stands for account-based everything, a go-to-market strategy where marketing, sales development, sales and customer success coordinate personalized outreach to the same list of target accounts.
Who coined account-based everything?
Jon Miller of Engagio popularized the term in 2016, but the notes to a 2017 interview with him call it a phrase borrowed from TOPO, the sales and marketing research firm co-founded by Craig Rosenberg, which Gartner acquired in 2019.
Is account-based everything the same as ABX?
Not quite. ABX, account-based experience, is the name Demandbase adopted in 2021 after acquiring Engagio; it keeps the cross-team idea of ABE and adds an emphasis on engaging buyers when they show interest instead of targeting accounts regardless of timing.
Is ABE only for enterprise companies?
No. It suits any business with high-value deals and a buying committee, including mid-market sellers, but it's rarely worth the coordination cost for low-priced products bought by one person.