How to nail account based marketing segmentation (full guide)

What is account based marketing?

In brief, account based marketing (ABM) is the act of personalizing your marketing efforts for specific accounts.

Why? Not all accounts are equally valuable. That goes for both the accounts on your books already, and the ones you haven’t converted into paying customers yet.

Some of your accounts hold massive, untapped potential. Some are already very valuable – maybe they’re responsible for a large chunk of your MRR spend, or they’re heavily invested in providing valuable user feedback.

Some of the accounts you chase after might be very unlikely to convert or, if they do convert, unlikely to spend a great deal with you over the course of their entire customer lifetime.

But it’s not just about value. At its core, account based marketing comes down to effectively segmenting the different accounts on your books according to things they have in common. These attributes affect the way you’ll interact with them (your marketing efforts, for example).

What does ABM have to do with RevOps?

If it’s called “account-based marketing,” what does it have to do with RevOps?

The truth is, it’s not just your marketing team that’s responsible for account-based marketing. It’s all revenue teams.

That includes customer success, marketing, and sales (at a minimum). And when the entire revenue function is involved with something, RevOps is also involved.

Why should RevOps pros care?

But why should RevOps teams care about how the revenue function segments accounts, and how it interacts with different account segments?

Two words: Crazy ROI.

Segmenting by account allows you to target existing customers in ways that they like. This leads to shorter sales cycles, higher conversion rates, and lower marketing costs.

According to ITSMA, ABM campaigns generate 208% more revenue than all others.

That’s not a typo. 208%.

A number like that makes it a no-brainer for the entire revenue engine to be involved. And that includes RevOps. Your CS ops, MarOps, and sales operations all need to be flowing at the highest possible efficiency if you’re to make the most of the money-making machine that is ABM.

What is RevOps’ role in ABM?

When it comes to segmenting accounts, the RevOps team is uniquely well-placed. You guys have access to data across the entire revenue function, and can use that data to help other teams produce effective, hyper-targeted campaigns.

Here are some examples:

The (many) benefits of segmenting your accounts

No matter what part of the revenue function you work in as you’re reading this, know that if you’re not currently segmenting your accounts, your org is sleeping on a massive revenue win.

And you could be the one to own the initiative that gets it moving.

Let’s start with a rundown of some of the many benefits you’ll see soon after you begin segmenting your target accounts and targeting them with ABM:

1 - Alignment between revenue teams

Remember that stat from ITSMA we referenced earlier? ABM campaigns generate 208% more revenue than other types of campaigns.

Effectively report this jump in ROI to stakeholders, and you’ll likely hear a response like:

“Sounds like a no-brainer. Let’s give it a shot.”

Good ABM requires solid cross-collaboration between teams, but the rewards for doing it successfully are so huge that they can’t help but unify teams under a single common purpose.

(Hint: First, you'll need to be able attribute your results back to your ABM efforts.)

2 - Greater retention

Effective ABM segmentation (which we’ll teach you how to do in the next section) leads to greater retention.

You already know how much cheaper it is to retain existing customers than to win new ones, so we won’t beat around the bush with this one. Suffice it to say, lower churn helps your bottom line.

When you segment effectively, you can more effectively capture:

• Accounts at risk of churn, based on established patterns. (AI and predictive analytics can help here.)
• Leads with a high probability of converting, based on interaction data with lead magnets and warming campaigns.

There’s more besides this list, but once you know about these, you can intervene to make sure you save those accounts from churning, or touch base with your highest quality leads to maximize deals closed.

Even better, you can now use modern tech to help automate these interactions, and use machine learning to increase the personalization-levels of those interactions.

3 - Meet customer demands

Today’s customers are jaded. Brands have a bad habit of over-promising and under-delivering. And poor application of AI is making people more wary than ever.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t use modern technology to help you market effectively. Quite the opposite. You just have to choose the right applications of the technology for your audience.

Effective ABM segmentation solves this problem too.

You can use data to figure out how different account-types are likely to respond to different types of messaging. As discussed, you can deeply personalize your approach – something more and more customers are coming to demand.

Remember, business customers (yes, even them) are humans first. And effective segmentation will help you generate account-specific assets, not just generalized campaigns, to help you convert and retain them.

4 - Create a competitive advantage

The more data you have, the better.

If you have enough of it, it can constitute its own competitive advantage. But you have to put that data to work.

What better way to do that than to give target accounts the information, the messaging, and the resources that are most valuable to them? You’ll experience lower churn, higher retention, better conversions, and higher customer lifetime values when you get this right.

That means more dollars to put towards acquiring new customers (which, too will be cheaper), or for re-investment in any other part of the revenue engine.

5 - More efficient use of resources

Let’s say your marketing and community teams are struggling to engage your highest paying enterprise clients.

Some of these accounts are at risk of churning. They’re paying for your platform, but their reps aren’t using it. There’s an education problem, but you can’t get them to bite when you send them material.

You’re starting to worry.

Instead of your teams hammering them with newsletters they're not reading, divert those resources into putting on a monthly webinar with an industry expert.

This sounds great in practice, but before you can do this, you need to know how different groups of accounts are actually responding to your communication and your materials.

Better data, and intelligent segmentation, don’t just result in wins. They help prevent inefficient use of human resources. As a result, they can help reduce burnout and churn within your own organization. Yet more ROI unlocked!

How to do account based marketing segmentation

Okay - so how do you actually segment your accounts to experience all these benefits?

Crucially, this depends on whether you want to apply these principles to those who aren’t yet customers (acquisition) or those who are already customers (retention).

Both have value, and we’ll deal with each in turn.

Whichever one you want to incorporate, the end goal is to get your hands on a list of target accounts, segmented into different groups based on shared pain points. This allows you to start producing hyper-personalized campaigns that speak to these pain points and promise to solve them in the most effective way for each segment.

Aside: Why segment at all?

The best shortcut we know to figure out how and who to segment?

Ask yourself: “Why am I segmenting?”

We’ve already spoken about the benefits… You’ve heard it all before. “Supercharge your revenue growth blah blah blah…”

What are you actually aiming to achieve when you segment your accounts list?

One objective is to identify the messaging that is most likely to translate into conversions. We already spoke about this briefly, and how it’s likely to be different for different segments.

But let’s go deeper… How do you know what messaging translates into greater conversions, and for whom?

Let’s start by thinking through a short list of attributes you could segment accounts by:

• Company Revenue
• Employee Count
• Core Industry

Let’s take segmenting by company revenue and/or employee count. What does this tell you?

Something about the company’s rate of growth for starters (if you’ve tracked these data points over time). It might also tell you something about the maturity and growth stage of the businesses in question.

How about segmenting by core industry? Companies in different industries experience different challenges. This is the crux of segmentation.

You want to segment your accounts in ways that help you gain wizard-like understanding of their pain points and challenges. 

But there’s something else, a second element…

You also want to understand which types of accounts (by segment) hold the most value for your business.

This way, you know both which accounts to go after to maximize the probability of getting the best ROI, and your other teams can then craft high probability messaging strategies for extracting that value from those accounts.

We’ll say that again…

We segment to:

1. Understand the types of accounts that hold the most value.
2. To understand how to communicate with those accounts to extract that value.

Okay - you’ve waited long enough. Here’s how to do it.

Acquisition: Segmenting those who aren’t yet customers

The three basic steps are:

1. Identify your total addressable market (TAM)
2. Create an accounts list
3. Segment your accounts

1 - Identify your TAM

Start broad, work small. Starting broad in this context means starting with your total addressable market, or your “TAM”.

This ensures you’re not missing out on any valuable opportunities. It’s always valuable to do a quick refresh on what your TAM is, just in case industry shifts have begun to pull new players in, or legacy players out, of the total set of those you should be targeting.

2 - Create a universal accounts list

Now, you’ll want to use your TAM to create a list of accounts that most closely match with your ideal customer profile (ICP).

There are other attributes you can use to segment your accounts and determine their probable value. We’ll list these just after the next section. Here’s an anchor link in case you’d like to view them right away.

3 - Split the list by customer journey stage

At this stage, you’ll want to split your accounts list into two:

1. Those who aren’t yet ready to buy
2. Those who are ready to buy

How do you know which is which?

To answer this question, turn to your tools, and the data within them. Your CRM is a great place to start and, as mentioned before, leverage predictive analytics to help you determine which accounts are most likely to be ready to buy.

What to do with those who are ready to buy

When you find an account you suspect is ready to buy, you don’t need to waste time bucketing them for long-term campaigns. You can just go ahead and reach out. When you identify leads that you suspect to be this warm, do your sales team a favor and pass them over.

Why segment accounts in this way?

Segmenting your target accounts according to their stage in the buyer journey helps you allocate resources more efficiently. Those who are a long way off buying might only require a low priority, one-to-many approach. Those who are very close to buying might deserve one-to-one, 100% personalized messaging.

Most businesses adopt this approach in some form, whether they know it or not. Marketing teams develop campaigns aimed at those at the top and middle of the funnel, while those at the very bottom get passed on to sales for a more time-intensive, personalized approach to getting those accounts to buy.

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Retention: Segmenting existing customers

The process for segmenting those who already pay for your products and services is a little different.

Retention is one of the primary reasons you’d want to segment your existing customers. Some may be highly engaged, while others might not be. Successfully identifying those who are most likely to churn and intervening to prevent that is a hugely valuable action – no matter your industry.

Another reason to segment is that it helps you identify the common threads between the accounts that hold the most value for your business. You’ll be able to use this data to inform how you prioritize the accounts you try to win over in the future.

Here’s the basic process:

1. Identify your highest value accounts
2. Figure out what those accounts have in common
3. Create two new segment groups for existing accounts

1 - Identify your highest value accounts

This step should be easy. You find the accounts on your books that generate the most money for your business.

Should that be revenue, or profit?

We think it should be revenue. Some accounts are so demanding, and put such pressure on your teams, that they drain the ROI on the revenue they bring in. But this can be true of any account, whether they’re paying you a lot, or a little.

Plus, the next step is all about looking for patterns in those accounts that hold a lot of value for your business. Being more liberal with the list of accounts makes it less likely you’ll miss something big. Even if those patterns have to do with, for example, the types of accounts that bring in high revenue, but also drain that revenue by drawing on your resources.

2 - Figure out what those accounts have in common

Now you’ll look for patterns between your segmentation attributes and revenue.

Your approach here will be: “I have this list of valuable accounts. What do they have in common that might inform future prospecting strategies?”

Maybe all your most valuable accounts are at the enterprise level. Great, that’s good info. But what’s the ROI vs. the effort it takes to pursue and win an account of that size? The same amount of resource might win you three slightly less valuable accounts for smaller businesses, but in total, those accounts might add up to be more valuable than the single enterprise account.

As a RevOps professional, you have the data and the oversight to really help your organization’s revenue engine understand what types of accounts you should be targeting and where the ROI is.

3 - Create two new segment groups for existing accounts

Now, you’ll want to create two sets of segments that work in parallel.

One will inform your prospecting strategy, and inform the types of new accounts that you should go after, based on how valuable they’re likely to be. (The segments you’ve created via the steps in the Acquisition section will help you determine how to target those accounts, based on their probable pain points.)

The other will serve the same purpose as that aforementioned Acquisition segment group. You’ll group your existing accounts according to exactly the same segments, and use what you know of the associated pain points for each of those segments to inform communications to your existing customers.

This should help you and your teams to:

• Consistently deliver greater value to existing accounts than your competitors can.
• Do this by speaking directly to their most top-of-mind challenges and pain points. Deliver content relevant to those customers that helps them solve their problem.
• Once you’ve fed them enough value, suggest an upsell/cross-sell that solves the next stage of their problem.

Attributes to segment by

Here’s a list of the types of attributes to look for:

1. ICP fit score

• Why it matters: Prioritizes accounts that match your best customers.
• Based on: Industry, company size, use case, and deal history.
• Use it for: Tiering (or prioritizing) accounts and aligning go-to-market efforts.

2. Technographic profile

• Why it matters: Reveals compatibility with your product or GTM motion.
• Examples: CRM, marketing automation, competitors in stack.
• Use it for: Personalizing outreach, qualifying accounts early.

3. Intent signals

• Why it matters: Shows which accounts are actively researching or expressing interest.
• Examples: 3rd-party intent data, site visits, content engagement.
• Use it for: Timing outreach, prioritizing warm accounts.4. Buyer persona presence
• Why it matters: Ensures your sales team can actually connect with decision-makers.
• Examples: Presence of CRO, RevOps lead, CMO, or Director-level roles.
• Use it for: Segmenting outreach by persona and tailoring content.

5. Firmographics: Industry and company size

• Why it matters: Still foundational for segmenting messaging and tailoring offers.
• Use it for: Campaign themes, vertical-specific playbooks, capacity planning.

6. Account engagement

• Why it matters: Indicates whether ABM efforts are landing or if an account is warming up.
• Examples: Email opens, webinar attendance, content clicks.
• Use it for: Triggering sales follow-up or progression to next ABM stage.

7. Strategic value

• Why it matters: Some logos matter more. Big logos, partners, and category leaders offer massive social proof that can help break you into new markets or start winning bigger deals.
• Use it for: White-glove ABM plays, executive outreach, co-marketing potential.

What next?

Once you’ve gotten to this stage, it’s more than likely time to pass the baton to your marketing and sales teams. If you wish, you can go deeper on segmentation by continuing to:

• Measure and iterate
• Repeat the process for slightly lower-value accounts

Remember, account-based marketing is a complex activity that involves many departments, but has huge rewards. Leverage the data available to you, help those teams get it right, and unlock masses of new revenue for your business.