ABM against a list your sales team actually agrees with

AED 15,000 to AED 60,000 per month covers most of what we are asked to build. The number moves on how many accounts and at what tier of personalisation, whether content production is included, and whether CRM closed-loop reporting needs building. Media spend is separate. Anything quoted before those are known is a guess. We scope first, then price, and the scope document is yours whether or not you proceed. These are market ranges rather than a fixed rate card — the proposal carries the real figure.

Choosing the specific companies you want as customers, then aiming marketing and sales at those companies rather than generating leads broadly and sorting them afterwards. The account is the unit of everything: targeting, content and measurement.

Direction. Ordinary marketing casts wide and filters down to good-fit buyers. ABM starts with the named companies and works outwards to the people inside them. That changes who you target, what you make, and what counts as success — if none of those three changed, what you have is not ABM.

It works when you have a small number of high-value accounts, a long sales cycle and a buying committee. It works badly when deals are small, volume is high, or your addressable market is large and undifferentiated. For a lot of Dubai businesses ordinary demand generation is the better spend and we will say so.

Fewer than you want. For genuine one-to-one treatment, tens. For a tiered programme with clusters, a few hundred at the outer tier. If the list is long enough that every account gets the same treatment, you have built segmentation and called it ABM.

LinkedIn is a channel; ABM is the strategy that might use it. Most ABM programmes lean heavily on LinkedIn because it can target named companies directly, but ABM also covers account selection, committee mapping, content tiering and sales coordination. Many clients start with the LinkedIn page and end up here.

Account engagement — how many people at each target account are interacting and whether that is growing — plus committee coverage and influenced pipeline. Lead count is deliberately not a measure, and agreeing that before starting prevents the argument in month four.

It follows your sales cycle, so six to twelve months for pipeline impact in most Dubai B2B. Earlier signals appear sooner: target accounts engaging, more people per account involved, sales reporting warmer first conversations.

A workshop with sales. The companies they want, the ones already in play, the ones to exclude. Then filtered for realistic fit. A list built by marketing alone from firmographic filters is the most reliable way to waste an ABM budget.

Tier it. One-to-one for the handful of accounts that justify genuinely bespoke work, one-to-few for clusters in the same sector with the same problem, one-to-many for the rest. Attempting one-to-one across a large list is how ABM programmes run out of budget in month three.

Yes, and we need to. ABM fails when marketing runs it alone. The minimum is a shared account list and shared visibility of who has touched which account.