Marketing teams are expected to do more with less. And the pressure is greater than ever.
Charged with generating pipeline, proving ROI, and building top-tier brands, marketing leaders must execute sophisticated marketing strategies — but do it with fewer resources, tighter budgets, and rising complexity in buyer behavior.
Add in fragmented tech stacks and static account-based marketing (ABM) platforms, and you’re left with sales and marketing misalignment that only gets worse. It’s little surprise that 93% of CMOs surveyed by PwC find it challenging to position marketing as a growth driver, and 75% say their budget is likely to be cut before other departments.
How can CMOs win in this environment? Those who adopt an intelligence-driven, AI-powered approach to ABM will come out ahead.
This guide outlines a smarter way forward: building a unified, AI-powered ABM solution grounded in real-time signals and the industry’s most complete data foundation.
What Traditional ABM Gets Wrong
Many marketing leaders are realizing that traditional ABM tools simply don’t live up to expectations. Legacy ABM platforms promised precision, but delivered fragmentation.
Their overreliance on limited signals and outdated datasets leaves marketers struggling to identify true in-market buyers, deliver personalized content at scale, and prove value to stakeholders.
You’ve probably experienced some of the effects yourself:
- Stale or third-party-only data means you find out about buyer intent after key decisions have already been made.
- Campaign insights and sales activities live in separate silos, making alignment nearly impossible.
- Incomplete or outdated firmographic data means not every account targeted is actually a good fit, leading to wasted time, money, and effort.
Platform Limitations
Most legacy ABM platforms simply repackage broad-based demand generation under the ABM label. What may look like ABM on the surface is really just more of the same “spray and pray” approach as you dig deeper — blasting lightly targeted messages to a list of accounts, all without any intelligence to inform timing, messaging, or next best actions.
Worse, these platforms give minimal visibility into what actually works. Engagement metrics are limited or siloed. Buyer behavior is inferred rather than observed. And when it comes time to hand leads over to sales, marketers are left scrambling to pull together actionable insights.
The Impact on CMOs
The stakes for CMOs, who are tasked with driving pipeline and proving ROI, are high. The consequences ripple across teams and revenue goals.
- Wasted budget: Marketing dollars get spent on accounts that never convert because marketing is too broad or mistimed.
- Low sales confidence: When sales teams receive leads without context or clear signs of buyer intent, they disengage, causing friction and losing momentum.
- Stalled scale: without reliable, real-time insights and full-funnel visibility, it’s almost impossible to identify what’s working and replicate it across campaigns.
For the modern CMO, this status quo is unsustainable.
The Smarter Path: Intelligence-First ABM
Intelligence-first ABM flips the traditional script.
Where traditional ABM is reactive, intelligence-first ABM is predictive. Static lists and lagging signals are replaced with a dynamic engine that surfaces real-time buyer activity and prioritizes action based on meaningful data.
This is ABM built for how buyers actually behave.
Rather than relying on gut instinct or outdated lists, it leverages live signals to continuously detect and prioritize accounts that are actively in-market.
Intelligence-first ABM is built on:
- AI-surfaced signals based on actual buying behavior, not guesswork
- Dynamic segmentation and scoring that adapts as your audience’s behavior changes
- A central, unified data foundation that connects sales and marketing activity
Benefits of Intelligence-First ABM
For CMOs under pressure to drive results with leaner teams and tighter budgets, intelligence-first ABM delivers:
- Hyper-targeted, relevant campaigns that reflect real-time activity, not stale personas
- Predictive prioritization of high-converting accounts, reducing wasted spend
- A continuous feedback loop across marketing and sales that keeps both teams aligned on pipeline, timing, and outcomes.
Think of it as not just a better way to do ABM, but as the new standard to win as a revenue team in a data-driven world.
The Evolution of ABM
Alignment Through Data: Bridging Sales & Marketing
ABM only works when sales and marketing work together. But for most CMOs, alignment is more aspiration than reality.
Without shared visibility, agreed-upon signals, or a common view of the buyer journey, your efforts become fragmented, and the impact of your ABM suffers.
The GTM Disconnect
Here’s the root of the problem: marketing and sales frequently operate in silos, with separate systems, different definitions of success, and poor visibility into each other’s priorities.
The disconnect leads to:
- Low sales confidence in marketing-generated leads
- Disjointed follow-up that erodes buyer trust
- Siloed reporting that makes ROI difficult to prove
It’s a recipe for inefficiency, underperformance, and stalled pipeline growth.
The Power of Connected Intelligence
Alignment between sales and marketing leads to agility. CMOs get marketing plans that stick, sales gets qualified pipeline, and the business grows. So how do you get that alignment? It starts with data unity, a core principle of intelligence-first ABM.
When sales and marketing work from the same source of truth, they drive:
- Faster handoffs
- Full-funnel visibility
- Shared metrics
Using a Go-to-Market Intelligence platform for ABM connects the dots, creating a shared, intelligence-driven foundation that keeps both teams aligned from day one. When sales and marketing are aimed at the same targets and working from the same signals, it’s easy to drive pipeline together.
ZoomInfo Marketing + Copilot in Action
Unlike most ABM tools that simply activate existing accounts, ZoomInfo helps you target the right buyers, at the right time, with the right message — maximizing conversions and eliminating waste.
Our GTM Data Universe gives you an end-to-end view of your market, enriched with real-time intent signals, AI-powered lead scoring, and deep buyer insights. This fuels dynamic audience development and precise segmentation so you can focus your spend where it matters most.
Pairing ZoomInfo Marketing with our AI-fueled Copilot creates a full-funnel growth engine. You can run advertising, marketing emails, and sales engagement campaigns in parallel, all driven by a single, unified dataset.
A Better Approach: AI-Driven ABM, Powered by the Best B2B Data
You already know you can trust ZoomInfo to deliver the industry’s most advanced GTM Intelligence: the fusion of highest-quality B2B data, dynamic buying signals, and AI-powered account insights.
With ZoomInfo Marketing and Copilot, you can turn intelligence into action:
- Real-Time Audience Development: Identify and segment in-market accounts before your competitors, using technographic, firmographic, and behavioral signals.
- Buying Committee Detection: Uncover and track the real decision-makers and influencers behind every opportunity
- AI-Powered Precision Targeting: Focus your budget on accounts that are ready to buy, with AI-generated recommendations that guide your teams on what to say and when
- Multisignal Orchestration: layer firmographic, technographic, behavioral, and intent data into a signal-coordinated strategy.
- Seamless Sales & Marketing Alignment: Execute campaigns and measure pipeline on a single platform that connects both teams.
- Unmatched Market Validation: ZoomInfo was named a Leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for ABM Platforms and the Forrester Wave for Intent Data and Marketing & Sales Data.
- Real Results: Marketers using ZoomInfo increased marketing pipeline ROI by 54%.
How It Works: From Signal to Sale
Here’s how it all flows together for a seamless ABM process.
ZoomInfo Marketing identifies and engages your highest-potential accounts — dynamically and across multiple advertising channels— to increase engagement signals and grow pipeline.
Copilot picks up those signals and translates them into action. It guides them with prioritized insights, recommended next steps, and outreach workflows, all based on shared intelligence.
ZoomInfo Marketing sparks engagement. Copilot activates the opportunity. You capture the win.
The result? You get a truly integrated system where creation, action, and conversion are all seamlessly connected.
The ABM Playbook for CMOs Who Win
Legacy ABM platforms weren’t built for today’s GTM complexity.
Smarter ABM starts with a smarter data foundation and shared intelligence across platforms. CMOs who prioritize real-time, signal-based intelligence, unified data and alignment, and AI-powered orchestration at scale will win bigger and faster.
It’s time to move beyond outdated ABM tools and embrace a smarter, intelligence-first approach. Maximize your ROI with ZoomInfo Marketing and Copilot. Learn more and schedule a demo today.