Editorial
The Gist
- Marketing budgets are under pressure. High interest rates and tighter capital mean marketers are prioritizing retention and efficiency over splashy campaigns.
- Account-based marketing gains traction. ABM treats each key account as a “market of one,” enabling more targeted messaging and better ROI.
- Customer advisory boards fuel ABM success. CABs help marketers understand customer profiles, buying processes, market influences, and validate campaigns while also creating advocates.
Thanks to today’s higher interest rates and lower capital availability, B2B marketing budgets seem under even more scrutiny these days. That means experimental methods or the wild ad campaigns of the past (think crazy Super Bowl commercials) have yielded to more pragmatic, cost-conscious approaches with a renewed focus on measured success.
As such, rather than undertaking the often-significant resources to reach new prospects, B2B marketers are focusing ever-scarce resources on existing prospects and/or fewer, often named accounts. After all, the established concept of it being cheaper to keep existing customers as than it is to acquire new ones has found new purpose and meaning in 2025.
Table of Contents
- Why Account-Based Marketing Is Gaining Traction
- Customer Advisory Boards as ABM Accelerators
- The Bottom Line for ABM Success
- Our Take: Why ABM in 2025 Is Smarter, Leaner and More Data-Driven
- ABM Gains Momentum
- The Role of AI and First-Party Data
- Efficiency and ROI at the Center
- Unified Martech Stacks Drive Smarter Targeting
- ABM Strategy: Smarter, Not Harder
- FAQ: CABs + ABM, Explained
Why Account-Based Marketing Is Gaining Traction
For B2B marketers promoting specialized products to a specific, concentrated group of typically larger, enterprise prospects, the concept of account-based marketing (ABM) is one that is generating new interest. ABM is a targeted approach in which marketers communicate with prospect accounts as individual markets in their own right – or as “markets of one.” This approach can lead to more relatable messaging, engaging earlier in the sales process and squeezing more value from ever-scarce marketing budgets.
Related Article: Strategies to Revitalize Your Account-Based Marketing Approach
Customer Advisory Boards as ABM Accelerators
When initiating or strengthening an ABM approach, savvy marketers are utilizing their customer advisory boards (CABs) as a key component driving such programs. Here are five ways they are doing so:
Examining Your Customer Base
Marketers should possess a solid understanding of who their existing customers are. Indeed even the exercise of getting a list of customers can be a challenge for some companies!
But, assuming this can be accomplished, some examination is in order: what kind of companies are they? What industries do they operate in? Where are they located geographically? Do you have many smaller companies as customers, or relatively fewer, concentrated larger ones? What departments use your solutions? What is the demographic profile of your buyers? (job titles, place within organizations, etc.)
Your CAB should have most of these answers already determined, which can serve as the foundation for a robust ABM initiative. If you don’t have one, CABs create an ideal environment to gather your best customers to better understand their businesses, their shared challenges and learn how to address unmet or future needs. But the mere exercise of understanding and getting your arms around your existing customer profile can determine the best marketing approach to go get new ones.
Understanding Buying Processes
Companies with larger customers know they often utilize a more complicated buying process for acquiring products and services. People involved can include not only product users, but also purchase influencers and financial or executive approvers. Tech vendors may be required to provide specific, detailed product demos, third party validation or reviews, ROI analysis and/or multiple customer references.
As such, marketers may have several audiences they need to reach or appease if they are to capture mindshare and numerous materials they need to provide in order to help sales make the deal.
Here, too, CABs are an excellent resource to learn the inner workings of enterprise customers and understand how to replicate successful sales and purchasing processes in other desired, named accounts. Your CAB membership may be made up of one of these influential buying groups; ideally the executives that generate the purchase requirements themselves.
In addition, understanding the influential “players” within your existing accounts can lead to understanding how to expand your product footprint within their companies, and cross- and up-selling your solutions and services within them.
Related Article: 5 Ways to Create the Best Customer Advisory Board Meeting Ever
Learning Market Influences
Marketers understand that there are usually numerous mediums and touchpoints prospects use to learn about your company, solutions and services. While these may include seeing your offerings in articles or other third-party publications, trade shows, online reviews or message boards, or search results, “word of mouth,” or personal recommendations are often the simplest, most direct medium.
CABs can help B2B marketers understand how companies receive information, how they heard about your company and what were the biggest influences in their buying journeys. In addition, they can convey the methods and materials that they found the most compelling that you provided along the way – your website content, customer list, testimonial quotes or videos, online webinars, published reports, helpful articles or blogs, etc.
Using Test Cases and Sounding Boards
Before initiating any marketing campaign, it is not only crucial for B2B marketers to understand their target audience and their pain points, but the mediums and messaging they plan to use to influence them. Marketers often know that, due to time, budget or other constraints, campaign testing is a luxury that often doesn’t happen at all. Indeed, campaign testing often involves simply showing campaigns to internal audiences who have their own pre-conceived perceptions of customers and, worse, differing interpretations of how marketing works or it’s role in communicating to customers in the first place.
Here is where CABs can play a huge role. Your CAB members can provide valuable feedback to your messaging and marketing campaigns – before you spend, place or send them out to the market. They can tell you what messaging would resonate with their people, and what offers would be likeliest to draw the most interest. Such feedback can be valuable to tweaking such messaging to generate more interest, and avoiding any disasters (which remain oddly common is this day and age). Just as importantly, CAB feedback can provide solid evidence of approval to your own, skeptical internal audiences.
Turning Customers Into Advocates
Enterprise customers are often risk averse, late adopters and desire to purchase established, proven technologies. The old phrase, “no one ever got fired for buying IBM” comes to mind and illustrates the mindset here. As such, third-party validation, detailed reviews, ROI-focused case studies, marquee customer lists and lauding client references will be even more influential and crucial to the sales process and part of successful ABM initiatives.
CAB members are ideal candidates to be references to your prospects. After all, they know your company and products, are typically long-time users who have been successful with them, know your product development roadmap and have been invested and helped influence your company’s direction. CAB members can and are often very willing to help promote your company in many ways, including participating in case studies, videos, webinars, speaking engagements, social media and, most importantly, sales references.
Related Article: Customer Advocacy Is the Growth Engine You're Ignoring
How Customer Advisory Boards Strengthen ABM
Five key ways CABs provide insights and impact for account-based marketing programs.
| Strategy | How CABs Help | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| Examining Your Customer Base | Provide a clear picture of customer industries, geographies, roles and demographics. | Enables marketers to target the right accounts and replicate success. |
| Understanding Buying Processes | Reveal how enterprise customers purchase and who influences decisions. | Helps craft messaging and materials that reach all decision-makers. |
| Learning Market Influences | Share which channels, content and recommendations shape buying journeys. | Focuses marketing on the most impactful touchpoints and formats. |
| Using Test Cases and Sounding Boards | Offer feedback on campaigns, messaging and offers before launch. | Improves campaign effectiveness and avoids costly missteps. |
| Turning Customers Into Advocates | Act as references, provide testimonials and join case studies or webinars. | Builds trust and credibility with risk-averse enterprise prospects. |
The Bottom Line for ABM Success
Account-based marketing is an approach that should yield great results for B2B marketers who implement and execute it successfully. But the first place to lay the ground work for a successful ABM program should be learning from a well-managed customer advisory board.
After all, CABs will greatly help with knowing and understanding your enterprise accounts, learning how to reach and influence them and getting them on your side to help gather and market – and sell – to new ones.
Our Take: Why ABM in 2025 Is Smarter, Leaner and More Data-Driven
Editor's note: What we're seeing at CMSWire over the past 18 months is a clear acceleration of account-based marketing. Rising interest rates and tighter budgets have pushed organizations to double down on precision, efficiency and ROI. ABM has emerged as the natural fit—fueled by AI, powered by first-party data and validated by cross-team alignment. Below we outline how ABM is taking shape in 2025.
ABM Gains Momentum
Account-based marketing (ABM) is gaining momentum in 2025 as organizations double down on targeting high-value prospects with precision.
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The Role of AI and First-Party Data
AI and first-party data are fueling a new era of personalization, enabling marketing teams to deliver relevant content to key decision-makers and orchestrate campaigns across multiple touchpoints. The decline of third-party cookies and stricter privacy regulations have made trust-based, data-driven relationships more important than ever—ABM is perfectly suited to this environment.
Efficiency and ROI at the Center
Efficiency and ROI are front and center. ABM’s focus on quality over quantity means teams can allocate resources more strategically and demonstrate clear business impact. The approach also unifies sales and marketing around shared goals, moving away from broad-based lead generation to coordinated, high-value outreach.
Unified Martech Stacks Drive Smarter Targeting
Unified martech stacks are making it easier to track engagement and measure success across the funnel. The combination of AI-powered insights and integrated data systems allows for smarter targeting and more effective campaigns.
ABM Strategy: Smarter, Not Harder
In short, ABM in 2025 is about working smarter, not harder—leveraging AI, data and cross-team collaboration to drive results that matter. And let’s face it, a little AI magic never hurt anyone. 😉
FAQ: CABs + ABM, Explained
Editor's note: Marketers are asking how account-based marketing and customer advisory boards intersect. Here are three quick answers that distill the core insights from this article.
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