How to run your first ABM pilot with HubSpot and Demandbase

In this article, we’ll guide you through the key steps to successfully launch your first ABM pilot using these two powerful platforms.

Your marketing teams are working hard to generate inbound leads and net new logos. Meanwhile, your sales team is reaching out to a specific list of target accounts, trying to engage key decision-makers and move deals forward. You’re even running paid media at these accounts to get in front of the right people.

The challenge? You don’t know which of these companies are actively in-market to buy right now.

Here’s where the 95/5 rule comes in: 95% of your total addressable market (TAM) likely isn’t in-market right now. So, how do you pinpoint the crucial 5% of accounts that are actively seeking solutions like yours?

Enterprise ABM, powered by tools like Demandbase, helps you do just that. By giving you real-time insights into in-market accounts, ABM ensures you focus only on the accounts that are ready to engage—stopping wasted time on unqualified leads.

Traditional lead-based marketing often casts too wide a net, misaligning marketing and sales teams and wasting resources. According to ITSMA, ABM campaigns generate 208% more revenue than traditional methods—a clear testament to the power of targeting the right accounts at the right time.

But how do you launch an ABM pilot effectively, and how can HubSpot and Demandbase help streamline your efforts?

ABM vs traditional marketing

How ABM differs from traditional marketing

Unlike traditional lead-based marketing, which focuses on capturing as many leads as possible, ABM is highly strategic and aligned with sales. It prioritizes engagement with decision-makers in key accounts rather than just individual leads.

With ABM you can:

• Focus on the accounts most likely to convert:
  ABM focuses on identifying and targeting high-value accounts that align with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). For your marketing team, this means less time wasted on unqualified leads and more time engaging with decision-makers at accounts that matter most. For your sales team, it’s an opportunity to focus their efforts on accounts with the highest likelihood of closing—driving a higher conversion rate and more efficient use of resources.
  
  
• Deliver tailored messaging that resonates with key stakeholders:
  ABM allows your marketing and sales teams to craft highly personalized experiences that speak directly to the needs and pain points of key decision-makers at target accounts. Your marketing team will create content and campaigns designed to engage specific stakeholders in those accounts, while sales will be ready to follow up with tailored, contextual messaging.
  
  
• Drive larger deal sizes and faster sales cycles:
  One of the most compelling reasons organizations adopt ABM is its improved ROI. Because ABM focuses on the accounts that matter most, your teams will see a higher deal size and a faster sales cycle compared to traditional marketing. For your marketing team, this means creating fewer, but more effective, campaigns that deliver quantifiable value. For your sales team, it means engaging with prospects who are already primed and aligned with your solution, reducing the time and effort required to move them through the funnel.
  
  

The value of ABM lies in its ability to align marketing and sales around a shared set of high-value accounts, resulting in not just higher revenue, but a more focused, efficient, and collaborative approach to B2B marketing.

Why HubSpot + Demandbase?

Many marketing leaders understand the benefits of ABM but struggle with execution. HubSpot and Demandbase help solve this challenge.

We work with clients to help them leverage HubSpot, a powerful, unified platform that centralizes customer data, automates marketing processes, and facilitates coordination across global teams. HubSpot ensures alignment between sales and marketing, offering real-time visibility into account engagement and enhancing communication. By creating a single source of truth for customer data, HubSpot enables consistent and efficient workflows, no matter where your teams are located.

Demandbase adds a critical layer with its AI-driven intent data and account insights. By tracking real-time buyer signals across multiple channels, it enables teams to identify intent accounts, those actively showing interest in solutions like yours, and tailor campaigns at the right time.

For sales teams, this means engaging with the right stakeholders at the right stage of the buyer’s journey, ensuring they focus on accounts that are ready to convert.

When combined, HubSpot and Demandbase create a cohesive ABM strategy that ensures the right message reaches the right accounts.

This integration ensures campaigns are not only personalized but scalable, supporting regional needs and segmented accounts. Marketing can deliver tailored content based on Demandbase insights, while sales can continue nurturing these accounts through HubSpot’s CRM, creating a unified pipeline. The result is faster decision-making, more efficient resource allocation, and ultimately, better business outcomes.

Now that we’ve covered the fundamentals, let’s dive into how to prepare for your first ABM pilot.

Preparing for your first ABM pilot: key steps

Running a successful ABM pilot requires careful planning. The right foundation ensures your team targets the right accounts, sets measurable goals, and aligns marketing with sales.

Here’s how to get started.

Step 1: Build ideal customer profiles (ICPs)

Building a well-defined ideal customer profile (ICP) is crucial as the first step in ABM. It ensures your team focuses resources on the accounts with the highest potential, setting the foundation for a targeted, efficient strategy.

• Define key attributes such as company size, industry, revenue, and buying signals: By clearly outlining these attributes, your team can avoid the trap of vague or overly broad targeting. Larger teams with diverse skill sets can use this information to create specific, tailored campaigns that resonate with decision-makers in the most valuable industries and sectors.
  
  
• Use Demandbase’s AI-powered insights to refine ICPs with real-time behavioral data: Demandbase’s AI helps supplement your existing ICP by providing behavioral signals and intent data that show which accounts are actively in-market. This allows your teams to zero in on high-priority targets, especially in complex, large organizations with multiple stakeholders and departments.
  
  
• Identify common characteristics of past high-value customers to shape your target list: By analyzing past customers, your team can uncover trends and patterns that highlight the most profitable accounts. This exercise is especially beneficial when collaborating across multiple regions or offices, ensuring consistency in targeting criteria across the organization.
  
  

Step 2: Set clear objectives

An ABM pilot should have well-defined, measurable goals. Your objectives should directly impact business outcomes and create alignment across marketing and sales. Common objectives include:

• Reduce sales cycle length by accelerating high-value accounts through the pipeline: ABM enables teams to prioritize engaged, high-intent accounts, ensuring faster movement through the funnel and more efficient follow-ups.
  
  
• Increase revenue by securing larger deal sizes and improving conversion rates: By focusing on high-value accounts with a strong ICP fit, ABM helps drive higher contract values and ensures marketing resources are spent on prospects with the greatest potential.
  
  
• Deepen engagement with key decision-makers at target accounts: ABM strategies personalize interactions based on account needs, leading to stronger relationships and improved account penetration over time.
  
  
• Ensure alignment between sales and marketing: A successful ABM pilot requires both teams to work toward shared goals, leveraging data and insights to create a coordinated approach that prevents pipeline friction and enhances collaboration.
  
  

Step 3: Identify and segment target accounts

Once you have your ICP and objectives, use Demandbase and HubSpot to build your target account list.

• Use Demandbase’s intent data to identify high-potential accounts: Demandbase’s intent data provides insights into which accounts are actively looking for solutions similar to yours. This allows your teams to prioritize the accounts that are already showing buying intent, reducing the need for broader outreach and focusing your efforts on prospects more likely to convert.
  
  
• Segment audiences based on different signals, including:
  • Existing accounts already in your pipeline: These are accounts that have already engaged with your brand but might need further nurturing. By identifying accounts that are already in play, marketing and sales can develop strategies to accelerate their progression in the funnel, reducing the time spent on unqualified leads.
  • Leads that fit your ICP but haven’t engaged deeply yet: These accounts are still on the radar but haven’t shown strong buying intent. For larger teams, this means nurturing these leads with relevant, personalized content to bring them closer to making a decision.
  • Accounts showing strong intent signals that were previously unknown: Demandbase’s ability to surface intent data from unknown sources means you can identify high-potential accounts that you may have missed otherwise. This is critical for large teams working in multi-location setups, as it helps them uncover new opportunities in real-time, which can be leveraged by regional teams.
    
    
• Refine the list using HubSpot’s CRM data: HubSpot’s CRM gives your marketing team additional insights that can fine-tune your targeting, ensuring that your segmented accounts are not only high potential but also fit well with your broader marketing and sales strategy. By syncing data across platforms, large teams can ensure that all locations are operating with the same data set and targeting strategy.

With a well-defined target list and clear objectives, you are ready to build and launch your first ABM campaign. The next step is setting up your platforms and connecting the right tools.

Setting up your ABM campaign in HubSpot and Demandbase

With your target accounts identified, it’s time to set up your ABM campaign.

This step is critical—not just for execution, but for ensuring your platforms, data, and teams are fully aligned. Large organizations with multiple marketing and sales teams often struggle with fragmented data and inconsistent processes.

A structured setup will prevent these challenges and set the stage for scalable ABM success.

Step 1: Syncing data and integrating platforms

For ABM to work, marketing and sales need a single source of truth for account activity, engagement, and intent data. Without proper integration, teams risk working with incomplete or inconsistent information, leading to missed opportunities and wasted ad spend.

• Connect Demandbase to HubSpot: This ensures that account-level insights, such as intent signals and engagement metrics, flow between platforms. An integration allows sales teams to act on engagement data in real time while marketing refines targeting strategies based on live account activity.
  
  
• Ensure consistent data across platforms: Many companies struggle with disconnected or misaligned CRM data. Mapping key fields like company names, lifecycle stages, and engagement scores between HubSpot and Demandbase is crucial for avoiding duplication, misclassification, or lost accounts in the funnel. A well-structured data strategy ensures both marketing and sales have access to the same, up-to-date insights.
  
  
• Sync audiences across LinkedIn and other ad platforms: ABM relies on delivering the right message to the right people at the right time. By syncing audiences across paid channels, you can ensure ad targeting aligns with your ABM strategy, reinforcing messaging at every stage of the buyer’s journey. This also allows for consistent retargeting and nurturing, even as accounts move through different engagement levels.
  
  

Step 2: Configuring Demandbase 

Before launching campaigns, Demandbase needs to be configured to track engagement, prioritize accounts, and define clear handoff points between marketing and sales. Many companies fail to set up these workflows correctly, leading to poor tracking, inefficient follow-ups, and disjointed sales motions.

Here’s how to avoid those pitfalls:

• Define journey stages: Align Demandbase’s journey stages with HubSpot’s lifecycle stages and lead statuses to ensure that every account is categorized consistently. Without this alignment, teams will struggle to determine when an account is ready for sales engagement. We help companies map out this framework to ensure every stage has a clear purpose and ownership.
  
  
• Set up intent tracking: Demandbase allows you to track specific keywords and topics that indicate buying interest. This helps marketing teams identify which accounts are actively researching relevant solutions. However, choosing the right intent signals is critical—too broad, and you’ll get false positives; too narrow, and you’ll miss valuable opportunities. We work with teams to refine their intent keyword strategy to ensure meaningful insights drive decision-making.
  
  
• Establish engagement scoring: Demandbase’s engagement minutes measure how deeply an account interacts with your brand, from website visits to ad clicks and content downloads. By aligning this scoring model with HubSpot’s lead scoring, you create a cohesive system that reflects true buying intent. This ensures that sales teams don’t just get handed accounts with superficial interest—but ones that are genuinely progressing toward a decision.
  
  
• Map out triggers and handoffs: One of the biggest challenges in ABM is defining when an account moves between stages, who owns it, and how engagement levels influence outreach. Without clear handoff rules, marketing can push leads to sales too early (causing wasted effort) or too late (missing prime engagement windows). We work with teams to define precise triggers for handoffs, ensuring the right accounts get passed to the right teams at the right time.
  
  

Step 3: Sales and Marketing Alignment

Marketing and sales teams can often be spread across different locations, offices, or even regions, which can make alignment particularly challenging. If these teams aren’t fully synchronized, even the best tools and platforms can fall short of delivering results. As an ABM consultancy, our role is to bridge these gaps by creating clear workflows, shared insights, and a structured feedback loop that allows both teams to continuously refine their approach and collaborate effectively.

• Set clear handoff points: In a global setup, where marketing and sales may be in different locations, it’s essential to define specific engagement thresholds that trigger when an account should be passed from marketing to sales. This could be based on intent levels, engagement scores, or specific actions like website visits or content downloads. Without these clear thresholds, sales teams may receive leads prematurely or too late, resulting in missed opportunities and ineffective outreach.
  
  
• Leverage HubSpot’s ABM dashboard: HubSpot’s ABM tools offer real-time visibility into account activity, engagement trends, and sales interactions, but setting them up correctly is crucial. Many businesses fail to create the custom dashboards that deliver the insights they truly need. We work with teams to build tailored reporting views that focus on the most important engagement signals, enabling both marketing and sales teams—whether in different locations or offices—to make better, more informed decisions.
  
  
• Implement regular check-ins: ABM is not a one-time strategy. In large organizations with multiple teams, regular alignment meetings are vital for refining messaging, optimizing campaign performance, and addressing any process gaps. We help companies establish a consistent feedback loop between marketing and sales, ensuring that both teams remain aligned and are always improving their strategies, rather than waiting until the end of a campaign to address issues.

With your platforms fully set up and your teams aligned, you’re ready to launch your ABM campaign. But the real value of ABM comes from continuous measurement and optimization, ensuring your efforts drive long-term success.

Measuring and optimizing your ABM pilot

Key ABM metrics to track

Unlike traditional demand generation, ABM isn’t about capturing as many leads as possible—it’s about deeply engaging the right accounts and guiding them toward revenue. Your team needs to track account-level engagement rather than just individual lead metrics.

• Account reach and engagement: Are your target accounts actually interacting with your brand? Tracking ad impressions, website visits, and content interactions at the account level ensures that your marketing efforts are reaching the right stakeholders. Many teams struggle with low engagement because they fail to align content and messaging with the specific needs of their target accounts—this is where Huble can help optimize audience targeting and personalization.
  
  
• Ad engagement rates: Are your ads resonating with decision-makers within your target accounts? Low engagement rates may indicate that your messaging isn’t compelling enough, your audience segmentation is too broad, or your creative assets need refining. We help teams analyze engagement trends and A/B test messaging, formats, and channels to drive higher engagement.
  
  
• Pipeline influence: How many of your ABM-targeted accounts are moving through the sales funnel? ABM isn’t just about engagement—it needs to drive real pipeline movement. Tracking how many ABM accounts reach key deal stages helps teams justify ABM investments and refine strategies to accelerate progression.
  
  
• Sales velocity: Are ABM-engaged accounts moving faster through the pipeline compared to non-ABM accounts? If accounts engaged through ABM aren’t closing faster, it may signal issues with sales follow-ups, content alignment, or the timing of marketing-to-sales handoffs. This is where we step in to diagnose process gaps and optimize engagement workflows.
  
  

HubSpot and Demandbase reporting best practices

ABM success requires a full-funnel view of account activity across platforms. Many teams struggle with disconnected data, making it hard to track how accounts move from awareness to closed deals. We ensure your reporting is structured to deliver clear, actionable insights for both marketing and sales.

• Custom HubSpot reports for ABM performance: HubSpot’s reporting tools allow you to track account engagement, ad performance, and sales conversions. We help teams build custom dashboards that provide real-time insights into high-intent accounts, ensuring marketing and sales can quickly act on engagement signals.
  
  
• Demandbase analytics for deeper insights: Demandbase offers powerful account-level analytics, including intent surges, engagement scores, and ad effectiveness. However, without the right setup, many teams fail to extract meaningful insights from this data. We work with clients to interpret engagement trends, refine intent models, and adjust campaign strategies accordingly.
  
  
• Aligning reporting across platforms: Many teams face data silos, with HubSpot and Demandbase metrics tracked separately. This results in inconsistent insights and a lack of clarity on ABM performance. We help organizations integrate data sources to create a unified view of how ABM accounts move through the funnel, from initial touchpoints to closed deals.

ABM optimization strategies for continuous improvement

ABM isn’t a one-time campaign but an ongoing strategy that requires constant refinement. Using real-time data insights, we help teams make informed adjustments to improve performance and drive better outcomes.

1. Refining audience targeting: Not all accounts will engage as expected. By analyzing which accounts show real buying intent versus those that don’t, we help teams remove low-performing accounts and replace them with higher-fit, higher-intent prospects. This ensures that marketing efforts stay focused on the most promising opportunities.
   
   
2. Enhancing messaging and content strategy: If engagement is low, it’s a sign that messaging isn’t connecting. We analyze which content formats, value propositions, and creative assets perform best within key accounts. Whether it’s adjusting ad copy, creating more relevant content offers, or personalizing outreach, we work closely with teams to continuously test and optimize their approach.
   
   
3. Improving sales handoff timing: One of the most common ABM challenges is misalignment between marketing and sales on when to engage an account. If accounts aren’t converting, it may indicate that sales outreach is happening too early (before true intent is established) or too late (after interest has cooled). We help organizations fine-tune their engagement triggers and lead handoff criteria to ensure timely follow-ups that maximize conversion potential.
   
   

By tracking key metrics, aligning reporting across platforms, and making data-driven adjustments, your ABM strategy can move from pilot phase to a scalable, high-impact initiative.

If your team needs expert guidance on implementing, measuring, and refining ABM campaigns in HubSpot and Demandbase, Huble can help you build a highly effective, data-driven ABM strategy that delivers real results.

Turn your ABM Pilot into scalable growth 

Running your first ABM pilot with HubSpot and Demandbase is a critical step toward a more strategic, high-impact marketing approach. By focusing on the right accounts, aligning sales and marketing, and leveraging AI-driven insights, you can drive stronger engagement and higher revenue.

Success comes from continuous optimization based on real-time engagement data. Marketing and sales alignment is essential, with clear handoffs and shared metrics ensuring your ABM efforts translate into actual business outcomes. Once your pilot proves successful, you can scale your efforts by automating outreach, refining segmentation, and integrating additional data sources.

HubSpot and Demandbase provide a powerful foundation for ABM, but execution is key. If you need expert guidance on setting up, optimizing, or scaling your ABM strategy, Huble is here to help.

Get in touch with our team to ensure your ABM pilot is set up for success—from strategy and execution to measurement and optimization.