Every quarter, another ABM program gets launched with noble ambitions. Executive alignment. A shiny new tech stack. Target account lists. Personalized campaigns. LinkedIn ads with the CEO’s face on them.
Six months later, it’s dead.
Not officially dead—companies don’t announce ABM failure in all-hands meetings. But dead in how it matters: Sales isn’t using it. Accounts aren’t moving. The dashboard shows “engagement” but no pipeline. Marketing is running faster to produce the same nothing.
The post-mortem is always the same: “We need better content.” “Sales didn’t adopt it.” “Our ICP was wrong.” “We should have gone multi-channel sooner.”
All of that is wrong.
Your ABM program didn’t fail because of tactics. It failed because the foundation couldn’t support the strategy. You tried to build account-based orchestration on infrastructure designed for lead volume, and the whole thing collapsed under its own weight.
Dysfunctional Marketing Operations gets normalized
Your intent data says an account is surging, but nobody can tell you which contacts are active or what they’re researching. The signal sits on a dashboard that Sales checked once and never opened again.
Your account scores look scientific—firmographics, technographics, engagement, intent—but half your “high-priority” accounts are already customers, three are out of business, and two are your competitors. Nobody owns the data.
Your routing rules are supposed to send hot accounts to the right AE, but they’re broken in seven different places. Accounts get assigned to reps who have left the company. Or to nobody. Or to three different reps who all assume someone else will pick it up.
Your CRM is supposed to be the source of truth, but it’s a graveyard of duplicate records, orphaned contacts, and fields that nobody updates. The “last touch” attribution points to a bot click from 2021. Engagement history is split across multiple records that don’t match.
This isn’t an ABM problem. This is an infrastructure problem.
You can’t run account-based anything when your systems can’t reliably tell you who your accounts are, what they’re doing, or who’s supposed to act on it.
Why dysfunction became normal
The reason is structural. Most revenue organizations forget about architecture and optimize only for speed. Leadership wants the campaign launched now; meetings booked this quarter; and a new ABM platform live by the end of the month.
In this situation, MOPs gets forced into duct-taping requests together instead of building systems that work.
Infrastructure work is invisible, while campaigns are visible and get the credit. So teams keep layering more tactics onto unstable systems until everything breaks.
And most companies inherit years of tech debt—platforms bolted onto platforms, processes nobody remembers why they are in place to begin with.
It is common that several persons along the years built it and now they have left, leaving no documentation behind, and the new MOPs hire needs to start strongly.
This is how baseline dysfunction became normal, and why experiencing competence feels revolutionary.
What baseline looks like
We’re not talking about ABM unicorn maturity. This is the minimum viable foundation required to run account-based GTM.
But foundation isn’t one component. It’s an interlocking system. When one part fails, the others distort around it. And the next failure is usually silent.
Clean data governance means someone owns account records. Duplicates get caught before they poison reporting. Acquired companies get updated in your hierarchy instead of sitting as separate accounts. Without this, your ICP is fiction and your target list is wrong.
A unified account object means Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success work from the same definition and avoiding Marketing’s fuzzy matches or Sales’ off-platform spreadsheet. Without this, each team runs a separate GTM motion and end contradicting each other.
A working ICP means you can identify best-fit accounts using criteria that matter — timing, buying motion, capacity — that goes beyond industry and revenue band. And it syncs with your systems so your target list stays real, not aspirational.
Clean integration between CRM, automation, and ABM platforms means data flows the way strategy requires: signals reach owners, activity logs correctly, and scores update. Without this, your tech stack doesn’t connect.
Real accountability means there’s an owner with the authority to fix what’s broken and the mandate to protect the system. Without this, MOPs becomes a ticket queue blamed for failures caused by decisions they couldn’t influence.
This is the baseline that everyone wants.
Where ABM dies
Most ABM failures have nothing to do with content quality, channel mix, or personalization tactics. It dies because the infrastructure can’t execute the strategy.
Intent signals flow in but don’t trigger anything actionable because routing doesn’t work. Sales either gets the alert too late or ignores it because previous signals were unreliable.
Account scores look impressive on a slide but are built on mismatched data. Sales stops checking them because the scores don’t align with genuine opportunities.
Reporting becomes performance art. The dashboard shows impressive reach, but nobody can trace a single opportunity back to a real account motion. You’re measuring activity, not progress.
And this is the moment everything quietly breaks.
Sales builds workarounds—spreadsheets, personal notes, side channels. The moment this happens, you’ve lost operational trust, and no ABM program survives without trust.
This happens when you try to run ABM on lead-era infrastructure.
ABM Infrastructure readiness test
If you want to know whether your GTM infrastructure can support ABM, ask your revenue team these four questions. Each should be answerable in under sixty seconds without guessing:
1. Who are our target accounts right now? Specific accounts, by name, with accurate ownership and reachability, stay away from ICP theory to answer this question.
2. What are those accounts doing right now? Real signals: which contacts are active, what they’re researching, what’s changing on their side. Vanity metrics are not useful here.
3. Where is each account in its buying process, and what’s blocking them? If the system can’t tell you what stands between an account and a deal—budget, priority, internal politics, timing, competing vendors—you’re guessing in the dark instead of running ABM.
4. What’s the right next action, and who owns it? You need to know the action, owner, and timeline without ambiguity.
If your organization can’t answer these, your ABM program doesn’t have a foundation.
What happens if you can’t answer these questions
You don’t run ABM.
The tools, the dashboards, the playbooks, and the campaigns exist, but none of them connect to revenue motion because the infrastructure underneath can’t support the strategy.
And without the support of Sales and Marketing lost in noise, leadership sees no movement, and ABM gets deprioritized.
The real problem was never the strategy. It was trying to run it on a foundation designed for something else different.
Fix the foundation first. Everything else is noise.
ABM Infrastructure Takeaways
Many ABM programs fail because the underlying GTM infrastructure cannot support account-based motion. Companies try to run ABM on systems built for lead generation—broken data governance, routing failures, bad CRM hygiene, disconnected platforms, and scoring models built on outdated or mismatched data. The strategy isn’t the problem; the infrastructure is.
Clean data governance, a unified account object across all revenue teams, a workable ICP that syncs into systems, reliable integrations between CRM/automation/ABM tools, and a clear owner who maintains the system.
Engagement data splits across records, ICP matching becomes unreliable, account ownership becomes unclear, reporting becomes fiction, and ABM targeting collapses.