Defining Decision-Makers and Personalising Account-Based Marketing Content

Account-Based Marketing Isn’t Just About the Account

B2B buying is a team sport. Even simple deals involve multiple stakeholders. They have different priorities, pain points, goals, and decision criteria. Some pull strings behind the scenes. Others have the final sign-off. But all of them hold sway in the decision, and success depends on getting everyone on board.

As such, ABM programs should be shaped for the account overall and the individuals within it – collectively called the “DMU” or “decision-making unit”. Treating an account like a single lead overlooks the complexity and human element of B2B purchase decisions. To drive real impact, you need to understand the DMU’s dynamics and create experiences that speak to the individuals.

DMUs – Who’s Who in B2B CXM?

What Is a DMU?

A DMU (decision-making unit) is a group of people involved in shaping, approving, or blocking a B2B buying decision. They’re the real people on the receiving end of your account-based marketing tactics.

Some members you’ll know from the start. Others you’ll uncover as engagement deepens. Some you may never see – but they’re still there.

Common DMU Roles

While every organisation is a little different, you’ll repeatedly run into the same personas if you’re in B2B CXM for long enough.

DMU Role	Who They Are	Typical Roles	What They Care About
Decision Makers	The people who hold the final say	CFOs, budget owners, department heads	Bottom line, budget, ROI
Influencers	Specialists who shape requirements and evaluate solutions.	Group managers, technical specialists, subject matter experts	Technical fit, compliance, long term viability
End users	The people whose day to day work will be impacted	Marketers, salespeople, IT engineers	Usability, features and functions, disruption

Of course, like everything in marketing, DMUs are rife with exceptions and grey areas. You might encounter blockers in the end user group, positive and negative influencers within the IT team, or a Decision Maker who’s also an Influencer (hopefully a positive one). It’s important to map these “champions” and “blockers” as you get to know your DMU. Understanding your allies and adversaries helps to create hyper-personalised messaging.

Why Mapping DMUs Matters

When you know who’s involved, you can tailor account-based marketing content to real business needs, user requirements, and pain points. You can design consistent and progressive journeys. And you can avoid wasting resources on contacts who’ll never influence the deal. This goes for marketing and sales alike.

Mapping buying groups is what makes ABM programs effective. With this level of insight into your ICPs, you can move from generic sales-driven interactions to personalised and meaningful engagements.

Scoring the group as a whole and the individuals within it also enables you to create a more granular scoring model. You can recognise more buying signals and act on them faster, increasing the chances of success.

How to Define Your Decision-Makers

Build Role-Based Personas

You probably won’t have named contacts for every role on day one. That’s okay. Start by mapping personas based on roles you typically see in your best-fit accounts.

Use what you know about your best customers to sketch out their goals, challenges, and motivations. As you engage, you’ll fill in the gaps with real names and faces, and tweak the personas to reflect real-world scenarios.

This is the basis of a lookalike strategy, which can be a great starting point if you’re new to account-based marketing strategies.

Layer Data to Get More Precise

Generic personas are a fine starting point. You might have more data already, or you might be starting with a sketch. Both work. Once you start interacting, flesh them out with data to get a clearer picture of who you’re talking to:

• Use intent data to see which companies and roles are actively researching topics related to your solution.
• Leverage your CRM and sales intelligence tools to find existing contacts, map relationships, and see who your sales team is already talking to.
• Incorporate technographics to understand what technologies, services, and solutions they’re already using, which can give you clues about their needs and challenges.
• Track behaviour signals to analyse who’s clicking, downloading, or visiting your site, and what content they’re engaging with.
• Align content to roles to understand what’s relevant for the whole group and what’s more niche, enabling the content team to adopt a more programmatic approach.

The more relevant the signals, the more lifelike your DMU becomes. This data is invaluable to determining the appropriate content for each role at each stage of their buying journey.

Personalising Messaging in ABM

Tailoring Narratives to Needs

Personalisation is more than just using a “Hi, {{First Name}}” in your next email blast. True personalisation is about relevance. It’s about showing you understand their role, priorities, and preferences, and tailoring your communication to fit.

Does every email need to be a handwritten masterpiece? No (or at least not yet)! When you’re still getting to know your DMU, it’s about finding the right balance between scale and specificity. Content aligned to roles or sectors is perfectly fine, especially if that’s all that the platform allows for. For example, LinkedIn ads can be tailored to job titles or industries. Your email campaigns can be adapted based on the persona you’re targeting.

At the pointy end (and for high-value accounts), account-based marketing content should be highly individualised with a level of effort that matches the potential value of the account. This is where you need the capability to create content at scale, given that you might engage a B2B buyer more than 25 times.

Our framework for personalisation at scale is built on four dimensions: offer, message, timing, and channel. Following this kind of structure enables you to use what you know to engage on a deeper level. Without needing to write 25+ individual messages for every person you’re engaging.

Using Intent Data to Get More Individualised

One glaring pitfall of buyer personas is that they overlook the rainbow of real personalities you’ll encounter. How someone engages with your account-based marketing tactics gives you much more specific clues about what they’re looking for.

For example:

• If someone from a target account downloads a high-level thought leadership report, they’re likely in the early stages of learning.
• If they’re looking at a case study or your pricing page, they’re further along.
• If a role you thought was a buyer is still in the early stages, pushing too hard might scare them off.
• If an influencer visited your website once and never came back, you might need to re-engage before going after others.

ABM is about meeting people where they are. Not where your persona playbook says they should be. Here’s where you add another dimension to your account-based marketing content matrix. Mapping buying stages against DMU roles (not forgetting whether they’re an influencer or detractor) enables you to create even more personalised content that anticipates their next move.

What Success Looks Like: Measuring ABM Engagement

Your dashboards in the early days of an ABM program might look a bit unfamiliar. You’re moving beyond traditional metrics like lead counts and MQLs to focus on account-level engagement. Individual engagement still matters, though the results are viewed via an Account lens, e,g, how many influencers from our top accounts attended last week’s event?

Early signs of success might look like:

• Multiple stakeholders from the same account engaging with your content.
• Progression from anonymous website visits to known contacts from the buying group.
• Seeing different personas engage with the content you specifically designed for them. This is a great sign that your messaging is a good fit.
• Group or individual scores increasing and the number of qualified prospects growing.

Metrics That Matter in the Early Stages

1. Coverage: Are you reaching all the target roles in your DMUs?
2. Awareness: Are they paying attention? Look at engagement rates with your ads, emails, and content.
3. Alignment: Are sales and marketing seeing the same signals from accounts, and working from the same playbook?

Aligning KPIs With Commercial Impact

Once your DMUs start engaging, you can start connecting the dots between account-based marketing activities and commercial outcomes. This is the next level of measurement. Tracking KPIs like pipeline influence, deal velocity, and the potential for future expansion within the account helps you shape the ABM program.

“The assumption here is that marketing and sales have goals that ladder up to business growth. All KPIs should eventually connect to commercial impact, which usually means customer impact, given that happy customers are good for business. If this is missing and you’re chasing vanity CX metrics, use the ABM program to reset your targets.”

Richard Austin, B2B Practice Lead

Tips for a Pilot ABM Program

This might seem like a lot to digest. You don’t need to attack everything at once, or even worry too much about what your account-based marketing activities look like when they reach maturity.

Wanting to roll out a perfectly formed program is the biggest hurdle. Scale back your expectations. Start with what’s realistic, manageable, and scalable.

Look At Your Best Customers

Who was involved in those deals? Use them as a model to identify typical DMUs and personas.

Talk To Your Sales Team

They are on the front lines and have invaluable insights. Work with them to validate and update your DMU maps.

Run a Pilot

Test personalisation strategies and account-based marketing content ideas with a small, manageable set of accounts.

Don’t Wait For Perfect Data

Start with what you have. You can iterate and improve as you learn. Similar to the way you’ll gather intent data about DMUs, your overall ABM program will be constantly optimising and never stagnant.

Curiosity is Key in Account-Based Marketing Activities

You’re not expected to know every decision-maker from the get-go. ABM is a learning process. The goal is progress, not perfection.

The more you learn about your target accounts, the more you can refine your approach and personalise account-based marketing content over time. The most important thing is to start with clear goals, collaboration between sales and marketing (even in principle), and the shape of a strategy for maturing your ABM approach.