By Brandon Burkman

brandonburkman.com | linkedin.com/in/bburkman

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What this is: A reusable framework for building an ABM motion from the ground up — or fixing one that’s stalled. The goal is to move from “we have a list of target accounts” to a structured, tiered program that tells marketing what to do, tells sales what to expect, and tells leadership what it’s worth.

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Table of Contents

1 - The Problem with “We Have a Target Account List”

Most B2B marketing teams arrive at ABM the same way: sales leadership hands over a spreadsheet, calls it a target account list, and expects marketing to do something with it. The problem isn’t the list. The problem is that a list is not a motion.

A list tells you who. ABM requires you to know why each account is on it, what stage of awareness they’re in, what level of resource investment they deserve, what plays marketing will run, what sales will do in parallel, and how you’ll know if it’s working. Without architecture, the list sits in a spreadsheet and nothing happens — or worse, marketing sends everyone on the list the same generic email campaign and calls it ABM.

Three failure modes show up consistently:

• The flat list problem. Every account is treated the same. A 10,000-person enterprise gets the same touch as a 200-person mid-market company. Resources are spread thin, nothing breaks through.
• The missing accounts problem. The list reflects sales intuition and existing relationships, not market reality. High-intent accounts researching your category right now aren’t on it because nobody looked.
• The handoff problem. Marketing runs plays in isolation. Sales doesn’t know what accounts are being warmed, doesn’t use the intelligence being generated, and doesn’t trust the motion.

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AI Layer — Diagnosing the List

Before building the tier structure, use AI to audit the existing target account list:

• Feed firmographic data into a language model to identify clustering patterns and surface outliers
• Run the list against your historical closed-won data to score accounts by similarity to existing customers
• Use AI-summarized intent reports to flag which accounts on the list are actively in-market vs. dormant

This turns a static spreadsheet into a prioritized starting point before the first tier decision is made.

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2 - Tier Architecture

The tier model is the foundation of the entire motion. It determines how many resources each account gets, what plays run against it, how often sales engages, and how you measure success. The model below uses three tiers — not because three is a magic number, but because it maps cleanly to the three investment levels most B2B marketing teams can realistically sustain.

Tier 1 — Named / Whale Accounts

Tier 2 — Intent-Qualified Accounts