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If you’re new to the term, account-based marketing (ABM) means focusing your sales and marketing on the companies that matter most to your business. Instead of casting a wide net, you treat each of those companies and individual decision-makers as a market of one.

In our preview, we said the most valuable sessions would be frank, practical breakdowns rather than theoretical overviews. And that’s exactly what the day delivered. Here are the sessions that stood out for us and what we’re taking away from them.

ABM in Practice: Theory Got Real!

The ABM in Practice stage was the highlight of the day for us. Session after session, practitioners walked through real case studies and showed exactly how they put their ABM strategies into practice. Rather than talking about what ABM could do, they showed what they had actually done.

Below are two of the standouts from that stage, plus two sessions from other tracks that were just as practical.

Four Programmes, One Frameworks: Closing the Delivery Gap

HUT 3’s Andy Johnson (Founder and Head of Client Strategy) and Darryl Merkli (Head of AI Studio and Services) tackled a problem many ABM teams will recognise: being asked to cover more accounts without more people. According to HUT 3, around nine in ten ABM teams now use AI in some part of their programmes. Yet most still can’t cover more accounts at greater depth than they could two years ago. HUT 3 calls this the delivery gap.

In their session, Andy and Darryl walked through four very different programmes:

• an account-based demand programme with five platforms measuring accounts in five different ways, leaving no clear view of which accounts were progressing
• a one-to-few campaign aimed at a cluster of similar accounts, with AI handling both the creative and the orchestration
• a global account-based brand programme that needed to work in every region while still feeling specific to each
• a one-to-one campaign where automation was set aside so strategy and creative could lead

And the lesson is… Scattered pockets of AI don’t increase what a team can deliver. Orchestrating AI across the whole delivery process does, with human judgement kept in the loop where it matters.

Building ABM That Sales and Marketing Both Believe In

Susan Konings (Senior Channel Marketeer) and Eva Croonen (Senior Digital Marketeer) from VodafoneZiggo’s B2B Enterprise team took us behind the scenes of their ABM journey. In their session, they explained how they built, launched and scaled an integrated ABM programme. It now sits within the company’s commercial strategy for large enterprise customers.

The programme focuses on strategic and cluster ABM: tailored work for individual key accounts and for small groups of similar ones. What made the session so useful was its honesty. Susan and Eva covered how they brought sales and marketing together, how they won buy-in while ABM was still new internally, what worked and where things went wrong.

Their message was clear. ABM only works when sales and marketing own it together. That takes focus, trust, a real understanding of each account and a willingness to keep learning as you go.

Reaching the Whole Buying Group Without Multiplying the Work

Over on the AI & Data track, Graham Reed (Director and Chief Innovation Officer, Ice Blue Sky) and Robin Johnston (Director, UK&I Partner Organisation, Cisco) took on a problem that comes with ABM’s success. Teams now think about the whole buying group, meaning everyone involved in a purchase decision, rather than a single lead. But creating relevant experiences for every one of those people can quickly multiply the time, budget and effort involved.

In their session, Graham and Robin showed why marketing and sales have to operate as a single team throughout a campaign. Using examples from real client programmes, they shared a framework that pairs buyer intelligence with AI to:

• work out who’s in the buying group and which stakeholders matter most
• create content for each role at scale
• track engagement across the whole group rather than one person at a time
• uncover hidden influencers and buying signals sooner

The big takeaway: you can reach more of the buying group with relevant content without your workload growing at the same rate.

Personalisation That Works

If one theme ran through the whole day, it was definitely personalisation, which sits at the heart of ABM. Buyers now expect content that feels relevant to them. Delivering that consistently, for more than a handful of accounts, is where many B2B teams get stuck.

On the Accounts to Advocates track, Robert Norum (ABM and Demand Strategy Expert, Propolis from B2B Marketing) hosted a fireside chat with Laura Rafferty (Customer Marketing Lead, Fujitsu). Laura shared how Fujitsu moved away from one-off personalisation projects towards a repeatable, everyday way of working.

The focus was on the operating model rather than the technology. That means agreed frameworks and processes, content designed to be adapted from the start and clear governance to keep quality consistent.

A big part of it is getting more value from the content you already have. AI can speed things up, but only if it keeps the human touch that makes personalisation worth doing.

What We’re Taking Away

Three things stayed with us after the day:

1. Practical beats theoretical: The most useful sessions showed the working: real programmes, real frameworks and honest lessons about what didn’t go to plan.
2. ABM is a team effort: Both VodafoneZiggo and the Ice Blue Sky and Cisco session made the same point. ABM works best when sales and marketing own it together rather than leaving it to marketing alone.
3. Scale and personalisation can go together: HUT 3’s framework, Fujitsu’s operating model and Ice Blue Sky and Cisco’s buying-group approach all pointed the same way. With the right structure, teams can personalise for more accounts without the workload spiralling. AI helps, but people still make the important calls.

That last point hit home for us as a visual content agency. Personalising at scale is much easier with a library of strong visuals, video and graphics that can be adapted for each account. It beats starting from a blank page every time.

ABM Has Come of Age

What struck us most was how far ABM has come. The teams on stage weren’t debating whether it works. They were showing how they’ve made it work, at scale and with sales firmly on board.

If you’re planning your next ABM programme, there’s a lot to be excited about!

A big thank you to B2B Marketing, Celen Ebru Paytoncular, her team and to every speaker who showed us their programmes for the rest of us to learn from.