The team gathered in the sleek, glass-walled boardroom, eyes on Jane, the marketing director. She pulled up the latest ABM campaign results, confidence radiating from her.

“We targeted the top 50 accounts and personalized every touchpoint—emails, workflows, ads, calls, even gifts! This is going to be big,” she said, grinning as the first slide flashed on the screen.

But then the numbers came up.

Silence fell. Her grin faded.

Not one of the accounts responded. The campaign, which had eaten up half their marketing budget, was a black hole.

“What went wrong?” someone finally muttered. Jane’s face turned pale as she clicked through the data—wrong job titles, misinterpreted pain points, automated messages that felt soulless instead of personal. 

Worse, their most valuable prospect had publicly tweeted about the “lazy spam” from the company, damaging their reputation.

The sales team had given them data that conflicted with the analytics from their ABM platform, and sales prevailed (who could argue – they closed the deals?). Then, to add to the growing sense of impending doom, the team began to lose faith.

Not only that, but installing & integrating the latest 2.0 iteration of the ABM platform had sucked valuable time, energy, resources and finally morale, from the entire team. 

Ultimately, they had to hire a marketing operations manager specifically for that job. The project had gone well over time (three times longer than planned) and budget (an additional $80,000, 45% over). 

The new Marketing Operations Manager gave his notice one week after the much-anticipated roll-out day. He wouldn’t be around to oversee his work. And no one else had the complete picture of how this software worked.

Carnage!

Blood-curdling screams could be heard (or was that my imagination) in the background of video calls rapidly losing bandwidth (‘Sorry, I’m gonna have to turn off my camera – my connection is bad’).

Employees would disappear for days – childcare issues, family emergencies, illness, even the dreaded return of Covid (we thought it was gone forever…..). The team was disintegrating before our very eyes. What remnants remained looked exhausted, shrunken-headed and ghoulish. 

One poor lady went on a ‘mental health’ walk in the middle of a team meeting – and was not seen again for two weeks. Her spouse finally called in to say she was ‘incapacitated’ and would provide a doctor’s note.

Then there was the dreaded sales kick-off, when one of the team got drunk and told the CEO ‘what he really thought about how marketing was being managed at our company‘.

Later that evening, Barry, head of enterprise sales, got into a punch-up 🥊 with a bystander—this time, it wasn’t just HR that was needed 😬👀👮‍♂️.

Technology and analytics (and even Revops) professionals soldiered on, long past the point of no return, fighting bravely as hope dwindled. At times, it felt like the fall of the Roman Empire—the barbarians were at the gates, baying for blood. 

Where was the support? It was never coming! We were like lone wolves howling at night, with only a full moon’s light guiding us.

Marketing had acted boldly, but the precision they prided themselves on was just an illusion. They had over-personalized to the point of irrelevance.

The CEO stood slowly, his voice cutting through the tension: “Let’s fix this. But remember, not every act of marketing ends in glory.”

The team nodded, but deep down, they knew. Marketing had acted… and the outcome was bad 👹👹

Happy Halloween!

If you haven’t noticed, ‘Marketing Acts, Bad Outcome’ is an anagram of ‘Account-based marketing’.

I’ve been at the epicentre of a few great ABM horror shows. 

Did you know that according to the latest CMO Survey, 56% of marketing technology is never, or barely, utilized? That’s at least $100 billion of wasted value, in the US alone. 

Horrorshow! 

Read my guide for ideas on how to escape an Account-Based Marketing nightmare and ensure you buy the right software for the job.

Fortunately, in addition to the nightmares, I’ve also had a twenty-year track record of success penetrating large enterprise accounts – details are included.

This guide contains the collective wisdom of ten senior Demand Generation leaders and CMOs from a range of midsized SaaS businesses (Cybersecurity, Fintech, Martech, and more), as well as a founder and a Venture Capital Investor.