In the early 2010s, Account-Based Marketing (ABM) took over almost every B2B go-to-market strategy. ABM flipped the funnel to focus on specific companies, aligning sales and marketing around target accounts, often yielding better sales-marketing collaboration and efficient use of resources.
The term “ABM” was coined in 2004, but the approach didn’t gain momentum until the 2010s when new digital tools allowed for more precise account targeting. By treating each target company as a “market of one,” ABM promised personalized marketing at the account level and was seen as the antidote to generic mass marketing.
However, ABM has a fundamental flaw: it targets accounts, not people. To drive revenue in 2025, marketers need to go beyond account-centric thinking and instead utilize Person-Based Marketing (PBM): a bold new approach that puts individual buyers at the center of your strategy.
Let’s explore person-based marketing, why ABM is losing relevance for B2B sales and marketers, and why PBM is the next-generation strategy that fixes ABM’s blind spots.
ABM’s Rise and Its Biggest Blind Spot
ABM emerged as a popular strategy as it recognized that not all leads are equal and that you should give VIP treatment to the accounts that matter most. It made sense as a solution to long B2B sales cycles and complex deals. Marketing and sales teams rallied around a curated list of target companies, coordinating their efforts to engage those accounts with tailored content and outreach. This alignment did yield benefits as companies saw higher ROI by focusing on high-value accounts, and sales felt marketing was finally delivering quality over quantity.
But, again, there was a fundamental flaw: the account is not signing the contract; the person is. Each account is made up of individual stakeholders with different roles, interests, and influence on the purchase. By focusing solely on the account and not the person, ABM can easily misfire by aiming messaging at the wrong person or overlooking the true buying signals coming from specific individuals.
Consider the following scenarios:
Scenario A: Your ABM platform flags Acme Corp as “engaged” because someone from Acme downloaded a whitepaper. Sales gets excited and reaches out to their contacts at Acme. But the person who downloaded that whitepaper is an intern with no buying power. ABM did not and does not distinguish this nuance; it simply saw account activity and labeled the entire account as interested.
Scenario B: A senior decision-maker at a company not on your target list visits your pricing page and interacts with your chatbot. This person is showing intent to buy. ABM did not and does not notice because that company was not on the predefined list.
ABM’s account-centric strategy was built for an era when simply figuring out which company to pursue was the main goal. But now that we have the data and technology to get far more granular, sticking rigidly to account targeting is a liability in 2025. Marketers are finding that the traditional ABM approach is disconnected from how B2B buyers actually behave today. Let’s look at what’s changed.
Multiple Stakeholders per Deal
Buying decisions now involve an average of 6 to 10 decision-makers in a complex B2B sale. Those individuals each consume content and evaluate vendors on their own. ABM, which treats the account monolithically, might engage a couple of obvious contacts but falsely assume the account is covered. In truth, you need to influence many people within that company, and you can’t do that with a one-size-fits-all account blast. If your ABM strategy only reaches a few contacts or one department, you’re missing others who also hold sway.
Digital, Self-Directed Buyer Journeys
Today’s B2B buyers do extensive independent research. 67% of the buyer’s journey is now done digitally before a prospect ever speaks to a salesperson. Buyers read blogs, watch webinars, and compare reviews, leaving behind a trail of intent signals as individuals. ABM platforms that rely on firmographic fit and account-level web visits struggle to capture these person-level signals. An account might appear “cold” simply because the key individuals are quietly researching on third-party sites or under personal email addresses. By the time the account shows up on the ABM radar, it’s likely too late, as a competitor using a PBM platform has already engaged with the person and won the deal.
Expectation of Personalization
Modern buyers demand to be treated as people, not accounts. 80% of business buyers are more likely to purchase from a company that provides personalized experiences. Generic marketing to “ACME Corp” won’t cut it if it doesn’t speak to the pain points of the specific person you’re contacting. True personalization happens when it speaks to the person, not the account, like addressing Bob’s role as a CTO or Sarah’s unique interest in improving cybersecurity. ABM is not granular enough to deliver that at scale.
Real-Time Signals vs. Static Lists
Traditional ABM operates off static target account lists and quarterly planning. But people’s roles and purchase intent are fluid: individuals change jobs, new stakeholders emerge, and priorities shift. By one estimate, B2B contact data decays at a rate of about 30% per year, which means if you built a target list last year (or even last quarter), a third of those contacts are likely outdated. Legacy ABM platforms often don’t refresh contact data fast enough to keep up with the rapidly changing market, leading to wasted effort marketing to people who have left, and missed opportunities with new people who have entered the scene.
All these things point to a fundamental truth: you don’t sell to companies; you sell to people. It’s people who read our content, people who show up to our webinars, and people who ultimately make purchase decisions. ABM has struggled to adapt to this people-centric reality.
It’s like trying to win a modern, digital-era battle with a strategy designed for an older war. The intent was right, but the target is off. To engage today’s buyers, you need to target people and their intent first and foremost. This is where Person-Based Marketing comes in.
From Accounts to Individuals: What is Person-Based Marketing?
Person-Based Marketing (PBM) is the evolution of ABM as it corrects ABM’s core weakness: its inability to distinguish person from account.
PBM is exactly what it sounds like: marketing based on the person, not marketing based on the account. PBM markets and sells to the specific people at your target accounts who show interest, rather than the account as a whole.
As the co-founder of one PBM platform put it, “Traditional marketing was talking to target audiences, ABM is talking to accounts, while PBM talks to the person.” In practice, that means every campaign, every message, every touchpoint starts with an actual human buyer in mind: their name, role, pain points, and engagement history. Person-Based Marketing acknowledges that within any given account, you might have a dozen different individuals interfacing with your brand, and each one needs a tailored approach.
Key principles that distinguish PBM from ABM
Individualized Targeting
Where ABM starts with a list of companies, PBM starts with a list of people. Yes, those people work at companies you care about (your ICP accounts aren’t irrelevant), but PBM drills one level deeper. For example, instead of “ACME Corp” as a target, PBM identifies which stakeholders at ACME should be targeted, e.g., Jane Doe, Director of Finance, who has been researching cost-management solutions. PBM doesn’t waste effort on ACME employees with zero influence on the deal; it concentrates on the real decision makers and influencers.
Person-Level Intent Data
PBM systems ingest and analyze signals at the contact level. This can include first-party data like a visitor’s email address captured on a web form, third-party intent data showing content consumption by specific people (via cookies tied to business emails, for instance), engagement on social media, webinar attendance, etc. PBM builds an intent profile for each individual by stitching these signals together. This way, when John Smith from XYZ Inc. compares solutions on review sites or likes multiple LinkedIn posts about a relevant topic, PBM platforms alert you, even if John never filled out a form on your site. The focus is on who is showing intent, not just which account.
Hyper-Personalized Messaging
Because PBM knows exactly which person it’s addressing, campaigns can be deeply personalized. This goes beyond inserting a first name in an email. It means tailoring content and outreach to that individual’s interests and stage in the journey. For example, if PBM identifies that Jane Doe from Finance just read a blog on “ROI of cloud so ware,” the follow-up can be an email from a sales rep highlighting a case study relevant to CFOs, or even an AI-driven ad that addresses financial ROI of your product—served directly to Jane across her devices.
This level of personalization at scale simply wasn’t feasible in older approaches. And it pays off: personalized outreach dramatically boosts engagement and conversion, which is no surprise given that relevance is what B2B buyers respond to. (Recall that 80% of buyers are more likely to buy from a company that personalizes the experience.)
Multi-Channel, One-to-One Engagement
ABM often relies heavily on broad tactics like display ads and email nurtures to all contacts at an account. PBM, on the other hand, enables true one-to-one engagement across channels. That could mean displaying ads only to a set list of individuals (a capability some ad platforms and vendors like Influ2 pioneered), sending tailored LinkedIn messages or connecting via social when a person engages with certain content, and even orchestrating direct mail or event invitations to specific people. The outreach is orchestrated to feel personal because it is personal, having been triggered by that person’s actions.
Essentially, PBM treats each important contact as its own “market of one,” which was the original spirit of ABM, now executed at the contact level.
Dynamic and Real-Time
Person-based marketing continuously updates who is a priority based on real-time behavior. Instead of static account tiers that sales and marketing agreed on months ago, PBM will constantly surface new hot leads because someone new at Company X started surging on intent signals just yesterday. It’s adaptive. It also means PBM can react the moment an individual takes an action.
For instance, if a target person visits your pricing page, a PBM system could automatically alert their account rep and even trigger an AI-created email to that person within minutes, addressing what they might be looking for. Speed matters—research from 6sense shows 91% of buyers come to a sales conversation already familiar with your brand. If you wait weeks to respond to signals at an account because you’re on a fixed ABM schedule, you’re missing the window when interest is highest.
In many ways, PBM can be seen as ABM 2.0 as it takes the best parts of account-based strategy (focus and alignment on high-value targets) and updates the tactics to be people-centric and data-driven. ABM said,
“Focus on the best-fit accounts.” PBM says, “Yes, and now within those, focus on the actual people driving the deal and give them an experience that feels tailored just for them.” It’s a crucial shift in mindset from account-first to person-first.
Legacy ABM Tools vs. the PBM Approach
Traditional ABM platforms like 6sense and Demandbase emerged by focusing heavily on accounts, reflecting a previous era in B2B marketing. While helpful, marketers frequently run into limitations with these tools. It's one thing to know that a particular account, say ABC Corp, is interested; it's another to identify precisely who within ABC Corp is showing intent. Likewise, important buyers from companies not previously targeted can remain invisible using the traditional ABM approach.
Even established ABM vendors are beginning to pivot. Demandbase recently partnered with Warmly, a pioneer in Person-Based Marketing (PBM), to enhance its platform with detailed, individual-level insights. This collaboration enables marketers to identify specific website visitors and their buying intent, effectively overcoming the anonymity barrier. Industry insiders noted this partnership has significantly improved Demandbase’s ability to surface high-quality leads, even surpassing competitors like 6sense.
Source: Warmly
However, despite these enhancements, platforms like 6sense and Demandbase still primarily revolve around account-level analytics. They’re excellent at identifying which companies fit the ideal customer profile or are actively shopping, but this remains a top-down process, starting with accounts and then drilling down to individuals. PBM reverses this model: it identifies engaged individuals first, then connects them back to their respective accounts.
To illustrate this difference clearly, traditional ABM tools provide a heatmap highlighting account-level intent, indicating something like “Acme Corp shows strong interest this week.” PBM tools, in contrast, provide a heatmap highlighting individual intent, pinpointing exactly who, like Jane Doe from Acme Corp, is actively researching solutions right now. The actionable value of person-level insights is clear.
Account-based models also struggle to keep pace with the rapid shifts in buyer activity. ABM platforms often rely on static account lists updated quarterly or annually, potentially missing key buying signals from accounts not previously identified as targets. PBM tools, however, continuously monitor and respond dynamically to signals from individuals, enabling marketers to identify and engage newly interested accounts immediately.
Moreover, traditional ABM tactics, such as broad account-based advertising, often waste budget by indiscriminately targeting large groups within an organization. PBM’s person-centric approach emphasizes precise targeting. Instead of delivering ads broadly to all company employees, PBM ensures tailored messaging reaches only the specific, relevant individuals. This approach boosts effectiveness, reduces wasteful spending, and minimizes the irritation caused by irrelevant advertising.
In summary, legacy ABM tools revolutionized B2B marketing when they emerged, but are now increasingly mismatched with modern buying behaviors. The industry faces a critical choice: persist with a rigid account-centric model or embrace the precise, dynamic, and person-centric approach that data favors.
Warmly and the Rise of Person-Based Marketing
Person-Based Marketing (PBM) isn't just theoretical; innovative platforms like Warmly are already implementing it. Warmly has positioned itself as a leader in PBM, leveraging modern technology and AI automation to address the limitations traditional ABM platforms face.
Here's how Warmly operationalizes person-based marketing.
AI Marketing Agents for Personal Outreach
Warmly uses AI-powered virtual sales assistants (AI SDRs) to engage directly with leads. These agents detect individual intent signals and automatically send personalized messages across channels like email, LinkedIn, or chat. For example, if a prospect views specific content on your website, Warmly’s AI can promptly reach out with a relevant message, ensuring timely and personalized interactions at scale. The AI undergoes strict quality checks, ensuring communications remain thoughtful, compliant, and on-brand.
“Waterfall” Data Validation & Enrichment
Source: Warmly
Warmly's Person360™ Waterfall Enrichment integrates data from numerous reputable sources (like Clearbit, Bombora, and Demandbase) to identify and enrich lead information. If one data source lacks details, Warmly seamlessly moves to the next source, significantly improving match rates.
Unlike traditional ABM—which might only identify that "someone from Acme Corp visited"—Warmly pinpoints the specific individual (e.g., "Jane Doe, CFO of Acme Corp visited your pricing page at 10:30 am"). This process ensures accurate, current, and actionable contact data, reducing wasted efforts on outdated leads.
Real-Time Person-Level Signals Tracking
Source: Warmly
Warmly tracks and de-anonymizes individual-level intent signals from website interactions and content engagement in real time. Rather than broadly increasing an account’s intent score over time, Warmly immediately identifies specific individuals demonstrating active interest, allowing sales teams to focus precisely on hot leads as opportunities arise. The platform essentially provides a continuously updated to-do list based on live buyer behavior.
CRM Integration and Workflow Automation
Warmly seamlessly integrates with CRMs and marketing automation tools such as Salesforce and HubSpot. It automatically pushes enriched data and intent signals directly into existing workflows, ensuring sales and marketing teams operate from the same, real-time data set. Warmly can trigger immediate follow-up actions, assign tasks, or initiate targeted outreach automatically, closing gaps between marketing signals and sales follow-up.
Privacy-Compliant Data Architecture
Since PBM involves personal data, Warmly has built compliance into its foundation. Warmly prioritizes compliance, ensuring data collection and enrichment adhere strictly to GDPR and CCPA regulations. It focuses exclusively on professional contact information, respects opt-out requests, and continuously updates contact records. This compliance-first approach allows marketers to confidently pursue personalized strategies ethically, respecting user privacy while providing relevant outreach.
Warmly’s rapid adoption highlights the growing industry demand for precise, person-level insights in B2B marketing. Its partnership with established ABM leaders like Demandbase further validates PBM's strategic importance, demonstrating an industry-wide shift towards personalized marketing tactics. Early adopters report improved lead capture, greater engagement effectiveness, and accelerated sales cycles, underscoring the transformative potential of Warmly’s person-based approach.
Conclusion: It’s Time to Put People First
ABM was a valuable step forward—it taught B2B marketers to prioritize quality over quantity and align closely with sales teams. But buyer behavior has evolved. It’s now more distributed, digital, and distinctly personal. Continuing to market solely at the account level is like reading only headlines while missing the critical details beneath. The future belongs to Person-Based Marketing.
Marketers who cling to outdated mindsets (“we target accounts, let sales worry about contacts”) will increasingly lose ground to competitors who engage buyers individually. The data clearly shows that buyers want and respond to personalization, they involve many colleagues in decisions, and they leave plenty of breadcrumbs when they’re interested. PBM is about picking up those breadcrumbs and acting on them person-by-person, rather than waiting for an account to hit some arbitrary score.
For marketing leaders—CMOs, VPs, Heads of Demand Gen—the message is clear: don’t just challenge the status quo, upend it. The tools and strategies available today make it possible to do what was once a marketer’s dream: talk to the right person at the right company at exactly the right time with a message that resonates. That’s the promise of person-based marketing. It’s not theory; it’s here now, and it’s working.
If ABM was about treating a big fish differently than a minnow, PBM is about recognizing which specific fish in the school is nibbling your line. It’s a more precise, surgical approach to B2B growth. It’s time to move beyond static account targeting and embrace this person-focused future. After all, marketers don’t sell to companies; they sell to people. When you market to people instead of logos, the companies (and revenue) will inevitably follow.
Looking to experience Warmly for yourself? Book a demo today.