5 Reasons Your ABM Operating System Is Broken and How to Fix It
Most ABM efforts stumble not due to strategy but because of a broken operating system—fragmented data, disconnected tools, misaligned teams, and poor measurement. To unlock ABM’s true potential, organizations must overhaul their data governance, integrations, tech stack, messaging and execution processes. This blog reveals five critical pillars to diagnose and fix a dysfunctional ABM system, offering actionable insights to transform your stack into a powerful revenue engine. Don’t let overlooked operational flaws hold your growth back. Read on to elevate your ABM game.
- Ajith
While account-based marketing promises a bump in ROI, most B2B organizations are still seeing their ABM efforts create more frustration than pipeline. The numbers tell a compelling story: 72% of marketers recognize ABM’s value in delivering ROI, and companies using ABM report 81% higher returns than traditional marketing approaches. Yet only 52% of organizations can effectively measure that ROI, and most programs fail to deliver expected results.
The problem isn’t how they’re doing ABM. It’s the whole ABM operating system they’ve created, i.e, the way teams build, integrate, and operate their technology stacks. But that’s not all the operating system is; the way the ABM program is designed, the selection of channels and the identification of stage specific campaigns among other things are crucial to ABM success but often overlooked primarily for 2 reasons.
- Misconception about what ABM really is and what it achieves
- Lack of necessary rigor and skills to build an ABM operating system
- Lack of leadership to drive ABM program for long term
These factors clubbed with poor data quality to disconnected systems, from bloated tool sets to misaligned teams, the modern ABM stack has become a complex beast to navigate.
Here are 5 critical aspects of an ABM OS that typically break and stop a well meaning ABM program from achieving its full potential.
Data: The Core of Every ABM Program
Data is the foundation of every ABM program.
Yet 37% of organizations cite siloed data as their single biggest ABM challenge.
Having the right data is the first step to data sanity. Ensuring your database is complete with all the necessary at an account level and contact level data for your TAM as well as ensuring your buyer group is covered sufficiently can be a game changer.
If your data is in place but is part of disconnected systems – CRM, MAP, intent platforms, ad platforms, etc, you’re basically working on a disconnected ABM program that lacks visibility and synergy.
The results are dire. Marketing targets accounts based on outdated firmographic data while sales pursues entirely different prospects based on recent conversations. Intent signals never reach the team members who need them.
Personalization is not really personalized because nobody has a 360°view of account engagement. And when it’s time to prove ROI, attribution becomes a nightmare because data doesn’t flow consistently between systems.
Poor data quality compounds these problems. Duplicates, missing contact information, incomplete engagement histories, and outdated firmographic details all hinder targeting. With data quality being the primary roadblock for marketers running ABM programs, it’s not a surprise that ABM campaigns appear to be built on shaky ground.
The fix starts with data governance.
- Conduct regular audits to identify duplicates, missing fields, and outdated records. Implement enrichment tools that continuously update firmographic and technographic information.
- Ensure sufficient depth in your account/ contact/ buyer group data. Set up a process for data refresh which is backed by detailed SOP, agents or humans. In our experience across multiple ABM projects, typically, 12-13% of data needs a refresh every quarter.
- Create standardized data entry and enrichment processes across teams so information flows consistently into your systems.
- For organizations with data scattered across too many sources, a unified Customer Data Platform becomes essential, not optional.
Integration Hell and System Incompatibility
Even if you have good quality data, you must ensure that it moves to where it needs to go. Legacy CRMs weren’t designed to work with modern intent platforms. Marketing automation systems operate independently from ABM tools. Ad platforms, sales engagement tools, and analytics dashboards all maintain their own versions of the truth.
This integration failure creates operational chaos. Sales and marketing literally see different data in real-time, leading to conflicting priorities and wasted effort. Campaign performance can’t be tracked holistically because touchpoints live in separate systems. Lead handoffs become manual exercises prone to delays and errors. What should be a coordinated account engagement becomes a disjointed series of disconnected touches.
Middleware solutions like Zapier or Workato can bridge basic gaps, but they’re Band-Aids on a structural problem. The real fix requires prioritizing platforms with native CRM and marketing automation integrations from the start. Before selecting any new tool, document your data flow map and how information needs to move between systems then test integration depth thoroughly. Ask vendors specifically: “Does this sync bidirectionally with our CRM in real-time, or are we looking at batch updates and data delays?”
Assign clear ownership to a RevOps or Marketing Ops leader responsible for maintaining these integrations. Technology doesn’t manage itself, and broken connections are often discovered only when campaigns fail.
Furthermore, integration health needs to be checked regularly. It’s great to have notifications built in that inform ABM program owners, execution leads and ops teams that keep them in the know of integration health at all times.
Tech Stack vs Utilization
Here’s a common pattern: an ABM initiative launches with one platform. Then the team adds an intent data provider. Then an advertising tool. Then a sales engagement system. Then an analytics dashboard. Before long, you’re managing eight tools that overlap in functionality, cost far more than anticipated, and nobody fully understands.
Two-thirds of CFOs believe increased MarTech spending hasn’t lived up to expectations. The problem isn’t a lack of technology because the MarTech landscape now contains over 15,000 solutions. It’s using what you have effectively. When teams add tools without strategy, they create complexity that slows execution and dilutes results.
The fix requires ruthless prioritization.
Start with four main pillars: data and audience management, engagement and orchestration, analytics and attribution, and integration and automation. Audit your current stack and retire underused tools. Focus on depth of adoption rather than breadth of capabilities. A single well-implemented platform delivers more value than three partially adopted ones.
Before adding any new tool, ask whether you can optimize what you already own. Many organizations already have LinkedIn Campaign Manager, Salesforce, and HubSpot which is a foundation that can support sophisticated ABM without additional platforms. The goal is mastery, not accumulation.
Ask your team over and over what are the objectives you are driving and how the tech stack is meeting those objectives. Update your playbooks when to utilize tech stack features that meet your objectives. Set reporting that is aligned with these objectives. If you do not see reporting corresponding to certain playbooks and objectives the platforms are not getting used.
The Age Old Problem: Sales & Marketing Alignment
ABM’s fundamental premise is alignment: sales and marketing working as one team toward shared account goals. Yet 90% of sales and marketing professionals report misalignment in strategy, process, and culture. Only 17% of teams are fully aligned, and 47% cite separate funnels as the primary cause of disconnect.
The operational impact is devastating. Marketing generates “qualified leads” that sales ignores, 79% of marketing-qualified leads never convert due to lack of follow ups. Sales chases accounts outside marketing’s target list. Different teams use different success metrics: marketing measures leads, sales measures revenue. This creates incentive structures that work against collaboration rather than enabling it.
This misalignment leaks revenue. Organizations with poor sales and marketing coordination can lose up to 10% of potential revenue to inefficiency and missed opportunities. When targets are missed, teams resort to finger-pointing rather than problem-solving.
The fix demands structural change. Establish shared success metrics that both teams own: pipeline generated from target accounts, opportunities created, revenue closed. Co-define your Ideal Customer Profile and buying personas so everyone pursues the same accounts for the same reasons. Create a joint scorecard in a shared dashboard where both teams see identical real-time data.
Hold regular joint planning sessions to review target account progress. Develop shared content plans mapped to each buying stage. Most importantly, assign both a sales AND marketing owner to each strategic account, creating accountability on both sides. Alignment isn’t a workshop outcome, it’s an operational discipline that requires continuous reinforcement.
Measuring ROI the Right Way
The measurement challenge is compounded by ABM’s long time-to-value cycle. This can often take 12 to 18 months in enterprise B2B. Traditional lead-based metrics like MQLs and click-through rates don’t reflect ABM success. When disconnected systems prevent unified reporting, leadership sees cost without clarity on impact.
Programs that can’t demonstrate value get cut before they show results. This is perhaps the most insidious way ABM stacks break. Not through technical failure, but through an inability to tell the story of their success.
The fix requires reconceiving measurement. Shift from lead metrics to account-level indicators. Implement a three-horizon model: Horizon 1 (0-6 months) tracks engagement metrics, account coverage, and meeting rates. Horizon 2 (6-18 months) measures pipeline velocity and opportunity creation. Horizon 3 (18+ months) focuses on revenue impact, customer lifetime value, and retention.
Track the “3 Vs”: Volume of opportunities, Value per deal, and Velocity of the sales cycle.
These metrics connect ABM activities to business outcomes in ways that traditional marketing metrics cannot. Establish milestone-based attribution that recognizes the multiple touchpoints influencing long sales cycles, and create real-time account engagement scoring so teams know which accounts warrant immediate attention.
The Alternative: Managed ABM Solutions
For many organizations, the path from broken to optimized ABM stack feels overwhelming. Building internal expertise, managing vendor relationships, maintaining integrations, and driving adoption across teams requires significant resources and time. Resources that lean marketing teams often don’t have.
This is where end-to-end ABM solutions become strategically valuable. Rather than assembling and managing multiple point solutions, some organizations achieve faster time-to-value through comprehensive service models that combine platform capabilities with expert execution.
Getting campaigns live in 2-4 weeks instead of 3-6 months can be the difference between proving ABM value and abandoning it prematurely.
The benefit isn’t just speed, it’s accessing senior-level ABM expertise without the overhead of full-time hires. Experienced operators bring proven playbooks, avoiding the trial-and-error learning curve that drains budgets and delays results. For teams without dedicated ABM resources, this approach closes critical capability gaps in data management, campaign orchestration, and performance optimization.
When evaluating whether to build or partner, consider not just platform costs but total cost of ownership: implementation time, training requirements, ongoing management, and the opportunity cost of your team’s attention. For some organizations, comprehensive ABM services deliver better economics and faster results than managing a stack of point solutions internally.
From Broken to Best-in-Class
Your ABM stack isn’t broken because account-based marketing doesn’t work. It’s broken because fragmented data, disconnected systems, bloated tool sets, misaligned teams, and murky measurement create friction at every step. Organizations with mature ABM programs are 70% more likely to report significant revenue impact.
The path forward is clear: clean data, integrated systems, strategic tool selection, operational alignment, and proper measurement. Start small, prove impact in a defined segment, then scale what works. Whether you build internal capabilities or partner with specialized providers, the goal remains the same: turning your ABM stack from an expensive collection of tools into a revenue-generating engine that delivers the 208% revenue increase that effective ABM can provide.
