The skills behind good CRM are essential to ABM

ABM, at its best, relies on a set of disciplines that CRM has been building for years.

They never really sat in the same box, or even adjacent boxes. ABM is associated with focus, targeting and tailored activity for high-value accounts, CRM is more the engine room… data, journeys, and managing the relationship once they’re ‘in’. They’ve been handled differently, by different teams and with different conversations.

But when you think about what makes ABM work well, the overlap is hard to ignore. Not just in theory either; in practice.

What happens once you've identified the right accounts? How are those accounts understood, prioritised and managed over time? And critically, does the business behave differently around them, or are they just added to a list that gets more attention?

It all starts to sound a bit like it could do with some CRM thinking. Segmentation that reflects real and potential value. Data you can actually use. Signals and triggers you can act on when something changes. Sales enablement that is really useful - and of course, the biggie: measurement that goes beyond activity.

When done well, ABM stops being just a layer of activity. It becomes a way for the business to behave around its most important accounts, guiding decision-making, effort allocation, and helping align teams.

None of this is new. But it’s certainly newer to ABM than it is to CRM.

So if your ABM isn’t quite delivering what you expected, it might not be the idea that’s the problem. It might be the skillset behind it.