Account-based marketing (ABM) is a B2B go-to-market approach in which marketing and sales agree on a named list of target accounts and coordinate personalized campaigns at those companies, rather than generating individual leads from a broad audience and qualifying them one at a time.
Account-based marketing picks the list. The Demand Compass tells you what state each account on it is in. ABM is the guest list; the Compass reads the room. People ask whether the Compass is just ABM with an intent tool bolted on, and the answer is in what happens after the list exists. A named list of target accounts is a candidate set. It says nothing about whether any given company knows you, or whether something is moving inside it this quarter.
The Compass reads every account on two axes, brand awareness and readiness to buy, and the position tells you the one move. Cold accounts, low on both, need awareness built, not a pitch. In-Market accounts, ready but unaware, need sharp, signal-informed outreach fast, because the window closes. Nurture accounts know you but have no trigger yet, and pushing them toward a meeting burns the awareness you spent a year building. Only Sales-Ready accounts, high on both, deserve rapid human follow-up. An ABM program that runs the same play across its whole list treats those four positions as one.
The two share a premise, and it is the reason both work in B2B. A company whose entire addressable market is five hundred, or two thousand, accounts is not too small to measure. It is small enough to measure directly, account by account, by name, no sampling required. ABM uses that smallness to choose where to spend. The Compass uses it to instrument every account on the list, continuously, so the list stops being static and starts telling you where each account stands today.
From The Demand Compass, by David Moreira and Marcos Stubrin. All terms · The book
