Account-based marketing fails in most companies for a boring reason: marketing bought a platform, sales never agreed the account list, and both teams kept their old scoreboard. Girard Media does not install ABM software and leave. We run the motion with your sellers until named accounts actually move.
If you already have a playbook sitting unused, start with our ABM playbook for the language. This page is about the operating rhythm we staff.
ABM is a sales agreement, not a tool
ABM is a contract between sales and marketing about a finite set of accounts. Without that contract you have personalized spam. With it, every dollar and every hour has a name on it.
We will not start creative, ads, or sequences until three things are written down:
- The account list, with a named owner on the sales side for each row.
- The buying committee you can actually name (role, not persona cartoon).
- The offer you can defend in a first meeting, in one sentence.
If sales will not sign the list, we stop. Tools cannot fix a list nobody believes. That is the filter that saves a quarter of wasted production.
The first week is usually an argument about the list, and that argument is the work. Marketing wants coverage. Sales wants the ten logos they already like. We put both lists on one page and we keep only the overlap plus a small set of stretch names with an owner who will actually call. Accounts without an owner are deleted in the room. That deletion is the start of ABM.
Girard Media facilitates that agreement, then we operate against it. Your sellers stay in live deals. We do the research, the creative, the orchestration, and the reporting. We do not hand you a spreadsheet of "plays" and a login.
The 40-account operating rhythm
We cap a first wave around forty accounts. Larger lists turn back into demand gen with extra fields. Forty is enough to matter and small enough that a human at Girard Media can still know the story of each one.
Weekly, for each account in motion, we look at four facts:
- Did a real person at the account engage, or only a bot and a bounce?
- Did the seller attempt a live conversation, or only log a task?
- Did we send something a VP would forward, or a newsletter with their logo swapped?
- What is the next human action this week?
That review is a working meeting, not a dashboard tour. We kill plays that did not earn a reply. We double the ones that did. The list can shrink. It should.
Intent data is an input, not a strategy. A surge in "pricing" visits from an account we already care about is useful. A surge from an account nobody will call is trivia. We wire intent into the same forty, not into a new universe of names.
Creative a buying committee will forward
ABM creative that looks like a landing page with the company name mail-merged is why executives mute vendors. The piece has to survive being forwarded without you in the thread.
We produce a small set of assets per wave, written for the committee you named:
- A one-page point of view on a problem that account is already funding.
- A short working deck a champion can steal and present as their own.
- A proof item: a similar company, a similar constraint, a result you can stand behind without fake ratios.
- A direct note from a human at Girard Media or from your seller, not from a "success team."
Volume is the enemy. One forwarded memo beats twelve "personalized" ads. We will refuse to produce the twelve.
When paid is useful, we run it as account-bounded media, not as an open campaign that happens to mention ABM in the name. Reporting is by account, not by click-through vanity. We will not publish cost-per-anything figures in public articles. You get those in the private report, against the accounts you signed.
What Girard Media owns in the motion
We own: list hygiene against the signed forty, research, creative, orchestration, paid when it is in scope, and the weekly operating review.
You own: live conversations, the commercial offer, and the right to add or cut accounts.
Nobody owns a mystery platform in your name. If we run automation, it lives in our stack as a managed service. If you leave, the service stops. Your data is exportable. That line is how we run services, not a slogan.
ABM that "the team will pick up internally" is how the last two tools you bought died. If the motion matters, it needs operators who do this every week. That is the engagement. If you want a document and no operators, say so. We will not pretend a PDF is a program.
A note on scoring: we do not let a marketing automation grade replace a seller's last conversation. If the seller says the account went dark after a pricing fight, we do not keep nurturing it with "thought leadership" until someone admits the deal is dead. Dead accounts leave the forty. New names enter only when a seller takes the owner seat.
Bring the list you wish sales would work. We will tell you, in the first session, how many of those names are real accounts and how we would run the next ninety days against them.