पाठशाला Pathshala · वृद्धि Vṛddhi, Growth · Lesson 27 · Scale

Account-based marketing and the enterprise pipeline

Enterprise revenue comes from a few hundred named companies, each bought by a committee. Build the target list, reach several people in every account and work the quarter back to the coverage it needs.

Pathshala, The Founder Library · 11 October 2026 · 7 min read

An aerial view of Gurugram’s towers and roads with green land beyond. — Photograph: Shantum Singh · Pexels

An enterprise software company in Pune has a marketing team that produces two thousand leads a quarter and a sales team that closes eight deals from people it found itself. Both teams are working hard. They are working on different lists.

When the customer is a large company and the deal is worth tens of lakhs a year, the funnel that works for small customers breaks. There are not thousands of buyers, there are a few hundred companies that could buy, and each of them buys through a committee. Account-based marketing is the discipline of treating each of those companies as a market of one: choosing them by name, reaching the people inside who decide, and measuring progress account by account rather than lead by lead. This lesson builds the list, the tiers, the multi-threaded outreach and the arithmetic of coverage that tells you whether the quarter is already lost.

When the motion fits

Use it when three things are true. The average deal is large enough to justify weeks of work on one company, typically from the mid-teens of lakhs a year upwards, and certainly when the [sales motion](/library/sales-motions-self-serve-inside-field) is field or inside sales to enterprises. The number of companies that could buy is countable, in hundreds or low thousands rather than millions. And more than one person decides. For a product sold by card to individuals none of this applies, and a [funnel](/library/sales-funnel-and-conversion-rates-to-expect) is the right model.

The reason it works is how enterprises now buy. 6sense’s 2024 buyer experience report found that buyers initiate first contact more than 80 per cent of the time, are nearly 70 per cent through their process before they engage sellers, and in 81 per cent of cases already have a preferred vendor at that first contact. The average buying group it found was 11 people. A vendor who waits for a form to be filled is usually the second choice in a decision already shaped. The work has to start before the buyer is in the market, with the people who will shape it.

Building the target account list

Start from the customers you have, not from a database. Take the [ideal customer profile](/library/ideal-customer-profile-on-one-page) and list the attributes your ten best customers share: industry, revenue or headcount band, the systems they run, the regulation they answer to, the trigger that made them buy. Then find every company in your reachable market that matches. For Indian enterprises the public sources are good: annual reports and filings on the MCA portal, stock exchange disclosures for listed companies, sector regulators’ lists of licensed entities, tender portals and industry association membership lists.

Lit office towers in Gurugram reflected in still water at night. — Each lit floor is a buying group of its own. The list names the company and the map names the people inside it. Photograph: Yogendra Singh · Pexels

Add a reason to act now, because fit without timing is a list of companies that will buy one day. The signals worth tracking are concrete: a new chief information officer or head of the function, a funding round or a capital expenditure plan in the annual report, an acquisition, a new plant or office, a regulatory deadline, a job posting for the role your product replaces, a competitor’s contract coming up for renewal. Record the signal and its date against the account. A list of three hundred companies with a dated reason against each is worth more than three thousand without.

Tiers: one, few and many

Not every account deserves the same effort. A common structure has three tiers. Tier one, perhaps ten to twenty-five accounts, gets a plan of its own: a named account owner, research on the organisation chart and its priorities, content written for that company, executive outreach from your founders, events or dinners built around its people. Tier two, perhaps fifty to a hundred, is worked in clusters of companies that share an industry or a problem, with content and campaigns written for the cluster and outreach personalised by role. Tier three, a few hundred, gets programmes: targeted advertising to the named companies, industry content, webinars and outbound sequences that stay relevant to the segment.

Move accounts between tiers on evidence. An account in tier three that shows a buying signal and engages two people moves up; a tier-one account that has not responded in two quarters moves down and frees the effort for one that will. Review the tiers quarterly, with sales and marketing in the room.

Multi-threading the buying group

A deal held by one person is lost when that person changes jobs, goes on leave or loses an argument in a meeting you never see. Gong’s analysis of more than 10 million sales conversations and 500,000 sales emails, published in 2019, found that winning deals averaged at least three people from the buyer’s side across the sales cycle while losing deals often struggled to get more than one, and that closed-won opportunities averaged 8.22 unique prospect participants on email against 3.38 for closed-lost. Whatever the exact numbers in your market, the direction is consistent: reach more of the committee.

For each tier-one and tier-two account, map the roles before outreach begins. In an Indian enterprise that usually means the user who feels the problem, the head of the function who owns the budget, the technology or security team who can veto, procurement and finance who set terms, and often a senior sponsor who decides whether this is a priority this year. Write a message for each role about what that role cares about, from the same underlying case. Sales owns the relationships; marketing makes sure every person in the map has seen something useful from you before the first meeting. The [enterprise selling lesson](/library/selling-to-indian-enterprises) covers what happens once a deal is in procurement.

The arithmetic of coverage

Pipeline coverage is the qualified pipeline divided by the quarter’s target. Sales leaders often repeat a rule of thumb of three times; the right number is one divided by your win rate on qualified opportunities, and most teams that miss a quarter missed it because they used the rule instead of their own rate. Work it backwards. A target of ₹3 crore of new annual contract value with an average deal of ₹30 lakh needs ten deals. At a 25 per cent win rate that is forty qualified opportunities and ₹12 crore of pipeline, four times the target. If one in five engaged accounts becomes a qualified opportunity in a quarter, you need two hundred engaged accounts. If you can engage two in five of the accounts on your list in a quarter, the list must hold five hundred. Change any number in the figure and see what the list must be.

Two cautions. Coverage is a timing problem as much as a volume one: if the sales cycle is six months, the opportunities that close this quarter had to be created two quarters ago, so a coverage shortfall today is a revenue shortfall in two quarters. And coverage counts only qualified opportunities, those that meet the exit criteria of your qualification stage, not every company that took a meeting. Inflated pipeline is the most common way a forecast lies.

If the list is two hundred accounts short today, the quarter after next is already missed. Fix the list, not the forecast.

Marketing and sales on one list

Account-based marketing fails when marketing measures leads and sales measures deals. Put both on the same target list and the same measures: accounts engaged, meaning at least one meeting or substantive conversation with someone in the buying group; people engaged per account; opportunities created from the list; pipeline value; win rate; and revenue. Marketing’s job becomes making sure the accounts on the list know you before they enter the market, which the 95:5 argument says is when most of them will be deciding whom to call. Sales’ job becomes turning engaged accounts into qualified opportunities and widening the thread in each.

Leads that arrive from outside the list are not discarded. Score them against the same profile; those that fit join the list, those that do not go to a lighter motion or none. A request for a demo from a company that matches tier two is a buying signal and should move it up the same day.

The weekly account review

Every week, forty-five minutes, the head of sales, the head of marketing and the account owners for tier one. Walk the tier-one accounts by name: people engaged, last meaningful contact, next step and its date, the single risk. For tiers two and three, look at the numbers only: accounts engaged this week, new opportunities created from the list, and the accounts that showed a buying signal. Then look at coverage for the next two quarters against the figure’s arithmetic, using your own win rate and cycle length. If coverage two quarters out is below one over the win rate, the action is on the list and the outreach this week, not on the forecast. Once a quarter, re-tier the list and recompute the win rate and the conversion rates from the CRM.

The rupee figures are illustrations; use your own win rate, deal size and cycle. Build the tier-one maps this week.