Your ABM Program Fails When Your Account Data Is Wrong

You built a target account list. Ran it through your ABM platform. Launched personalized campaigns. Spent real budget on ads, content, events. Six months later, pipeline from target accounts is barely higher than before ABM.

The exec team is skeptical. Marketing wonders if ABM is overhyped. Sales says the accounts weren't that good anyway.

But the problem isn't ABM as a strategy. The problem is you ran ABM on a database where:

• Half your "target accounts" don't actually match your ICP because the firmographic data was wrong
• Contacts aren't associated with accounts, so engagement is invisible at the account level
• Key accounts exist as 2-3 duplicate records, splitting activity and confusing everyone
• Your buying committee coverage is 1-2 contacts per account when you need 5-10

ABM is a data-intensive strategy. Run it on bad data and you get bad results.

The Account Data Problems That Break ABM

ABM depends on accurate data at every step: selecting accounts, reaching contacts, measuring engagement, coordinating sales. Each step has data dependencies that can fail.

Wrong Accounts on Your Target List

You built your target account list based on firmographic criteria. Companies with 500-5000 employees in financial services and healthcare. Makes sense.

But where did the firmographic data come from? Your CRM, which has:

• Employee count populated on 60% of accounts, blank on 40%
• Industry values that are three years old
• Company size data from when they were a startup (they've grown 10x since)
• Subsidiaries classified as standalone companies

Your "500-5000 employees in financial services" filter caught some right accounts, missed others that should qualify, and included companies that don't fit at all. The target list is wrong from the start.

Orphaned Contacts

ABM requires understanding engagement at the account level. Are people from Acme Corp visiting your site? Opening emails? Attending webinars?

But what if three people from Acme Corp visited your site, and none of them are associated with the Acme Corp account record in your CRM? Their activity exists but it's invisible at the account level.

This happens constantly. People fill out forms with personal email addresses. Imports lack association data. Auto-association fails for various technical reasons. The result: your ABM platform shows no engagement from Acme Corp, when actually three people are actively evaluating you.

For detailed fixes: Fixing HubSpot Associations

Duplicate Accounts

Acme Corp exists in your CRM three times. "Acme Corporation" was created by marketing. "Acme Corp" was created by sales. "ACME" was imported from an event list.

Each account has some contacts, some activity, some deal history. None of them has the complete picture. Your ABM platform sees three separate accounts with low engagement each, not one account with high engagement total.

Sales doesn't know which record to use. Reporting is fragmented. Account scores are split across duplicates. Nobody can see the full relationship.

Thin Contact Coverage

B2B buying decisions involve committees. Research says 6-10 people are involved in most enterprise purchases. If your target account has 2 contacts in your database, you're reaching 20-30% of the buying committee. The rest don't know you exist.

Worse: those 2 contacts might be the wrong people. An SDR from a cold outreach campaign and someone who downloaded an ebook two years ago. Neither is the economic buyer or the technical evaluator who actually makes decisions.

ABM with thin, wrong contact coverage is just very expensive spray-and-pray.

Stale Data

That VP of Marketing you're targeting? She left eight months ago. The contact record still exists, marked as VP of Marketing at Acme Corp, because nobody updated it.

B2B contact data decays at roughly 30% per year. People change jobs, get promoted, leave the industry. If your target account contacts haven't been verified recently, you're marketing to ghosts.

Diagnosing Your ABM Data Problems

Before investing more in ABM tactics, understand your data foundation.

Audit Your Target Account List

Take a sample of 50 target accounts. For each one:

• Verify the firmographic data (employee count, industry, revenue) against current sources (LinkedIn, company website)
• Check if duplicate records exist
• Count associated contacts
• Review contact quality (are they real people? still at the company? relevant roles?)

Calculate accuracy rates. If 30% of your target accounts have wrong firmographics, your targeting is 30% wrong.

Measure Contact Coverage

For your target accounts, pull average contacts per account. Then look at the distribution:

• What percentage have 0 contacts?
• What percentage have 1-2 contacts?
• What percentage have 5+ contacts?

If most target accounts have 0-2 contacts, your ABM campaigns are reaching almost nobody in those organizations.

Find Your Orphaned Contacts

Count contacts without account associations. Then specifically check: how many of those orphans have email domains matching your target accounts?

These are people from target accounts who are engaged with you but invisible to your ABM tracking. They might be your warmest leads, and you can't see them.

Identify Duplicate Accounts

Run duplicate detection on your account records. Check for:

• Similar company names (Acme vs. Acme Corp vs. Acme Inc.)
• Same website domain on different records
• Same address on different records

Any duplicate in your target account list is splitting your engagement data and confusing your team.

Fixing the Foundation

ABM on bad data wastes budget. Fix the data before scaling the program.

Clean Your Account Records

Merge duplicates. Consolidate duplicate account records so each company exists once with complete information. Preserve all contacts, activities, and deal history on the surviving record.

Update firmographics. Refresh employee count, industry, revenue for target accounts. Use enrichment services or manual verification for high-priority accounts. Stale data leads to wrong targeting.

Standardize company names. Normalize variations so reporting and deduplication work correctly. How to Normalize Company Names

Fix Contact Associations

Associate orphaned contacts with their accounts. For contacts with business email domains, this is straightforward: match domain to account website. For contacts with personal emails, you need additional data (company name field, enrichment, manual research).

Once contacts are properly associated, your account-level engagement data becomes real.

Build Contact Coverage

For target accounts with thin coverage, you need more contacts. Options:

Enrich from data providers. Tools like ZoomInfo, Cognism, or Apollo can provide contacts at specific accounts. Focus on roles relevant to your buyer committee.

Research high-priority accounts manually. For your top 50-100 accounts, have someone build contact lists from LinkedIn. Slower but more accurate.

Run contact-acquisition campaigns. Content offers, webinars, and events can capture new contacts. Target by company domain to build coverage at specific accounts.

Verify and Update Existing Contacts

Contacts decay. Before launching ABM campaigns, verify your existing contact data:

• Email validation to remove bounces
• Title/role verification (are they still there? same role?)
• Phone verification if you're doing outbound

Better to have 5 verified contacts than 15 stale ones.

Maintaining ABM Data Quality

Cleaning is a project. Staying clean is a process.

Ongoing Enrichment

Set up enrichment to run on new accounts as they're created. Don't let new records enter your system with blank firmographics.

Association Rules

Configure your CRM to auto-associate contacts with accounts based on email domain. This catches most associations automatically. Build processes to handle the exceptions.

Regular Verification

Target accounts should be re-verified quarterly. Firmographics change. People leave. New contacts join. Build this into your ABM operations rhythm.

Duplicate Prevention

Enforce duplicate detection rules so new account duplicates can't be created. Easier to prevent duplicates than to merge them later.

The ROI Equation

ABM is expensive. Personalized content, targeted ads, dedicated sales plays. That investment assumes your data is right.

If 30% of your target list doesn't actually fit your ICP, 30% of your ABM spend is wasted.

If half your contacts at target accounts are orphaned, you're measuring half the engagement and missing half the signals.

If key accounts are duplicated, sales can't see the full picture and marketing can't prove impact.

Fixing account data isn't a side project. It's the prerequisite for ABM working at all.

Common Questions

Related: Company Name Normalization | Fixing Associations | Data Enrichment Services