Account-based marketing

Account-based marketing inverts the usual model: instead of generating leads and finding out which accounts they came from, you choose the accounts and work them. It is a good fit for a narrow set of businesses and an expensive mistake for the rest.

Qualify the model before adopting it

It works when deal sizes are large enough to justify per-account effort, the addressable market is small enough to enumerate, buying groups have several people, and sales cycles are long enough for sustained effort to compound.

It does not work when the deal size cannot carry the cost, when the market is too large to name, or when marketing and sales will not actually coordinate. That last one is the usual failure: the tooling gets bought, the account list gets built, and the program becomes a more expensive way to run the same campaigns.