Account-based marketing statistics at a glance
| Category | Statistic | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Adoption | 64% of B2B marketers report an ABM or target-account approach, from two pooled panels totalling 1,332 marketers | 6sense, March 2025 |
| Adoption | 6sense's own two panels split 43% and 82% on the same question, a 39 point gap | 6sense, January 2024 and March 2025 (computed) |
| Adoption | 71% of practitioners say they use an ABM strategy; 40% run it inside demand generation (no sample disclosed) | Demand Gen Report, October 2025 |
| Adoption | Nearly 20% of organisations have not defined what ABM means internally | Forrester 2024 State of ABM Survey, March 2025 |
| Budget | ABM takes roughly 30% of the marketing budget, about level with inbound and outbound | 6sense, March 2025 |
| Budget | 28% of the 2022 marketing budget went to ABM, from 279 ABM leaders (DATED) | Momentum ITSMA, March 2023 |
| ROI | 23% of global respondents put ABM ROI 51% to 200% above other marketing; the most common answer was 21% to 50% | Forrester, December 2024 |
| ROI | 47% name proving ROI as their top ABM challenge (no sample disclosed) | Demand Gen Report, October 2025 |
| Deal size | The famous 171% ACV uplift ($195,294 vs $71,941) traces to an undated TOPO study quoted by LinkedIn in 2020 and cannot be reproduced (UNDATED) | LinkedIn, July 2020 |
| Deal size | The average B2B sales opportunity is worth at most $73,282, from 655,000+ opportunities and $48bn of pipeline | Ebsta x Pavilion, 2025 (computed) |
| Deal size | Average deal value rose 54% year over year while 78% of sellers missed quota | Ebsta x Pavilion, April 2025 |
| Alignment | 56% of opportunities handed to sales fail to close | Forrester, January 2025 |
| Alignment | 43% name sales and marketing alignment as a top ABM challenge (no sample disclosed) | Demand Gen Report, October 2025 |
| Measurement | 82% say they run ABM, but a third or fewer measure account-centric metrics | 6sense, March 2025 |
| Buyers | Independent research before seller contact fell from about 7.7 months to 6.0, a 22% cut in one year | 6sense, November 2025 (computed) |
| Buyers | 94% of buying groups had ranked their preferred vendors before contacting any seller | 6sense, November 2025 |
How many B2B companies actually run account-based marketing?
Between 64% and 71% of B2B marketing teams say they run some form of account-based marketing in 2026, and the wider spread you see quoted comes from surveys that never agreed on what counts as a programme.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| 64% of marketers report an ABM or target-account approach, pooled from two panels totalling 1,332 marketers. | 6sense, March 2025 |
| 43% of marketers say they practise ABM, either alone or combined with other go-to-market motions, from 546 marketers surveyed in late 2023. 6sense's later pooled analysis counts 616 responses for the same survey. | 6sense, January 2024 |
| 82% of teams say they have adopted account-based marketing, from a 716-person practitioner panel. | 6sense, March 2025 |
| 71% of practitioners use an ABM strategy and 40% integrate it directly with demand generation. No sample disclosed on the public page. | Demand Gen Report, October 2025 |
| Nearly 20% of organisations have yet to define what ABM means inside their own company. Forrester does not publish the sample. | Forrester 2024 State of ABM Survey, reported March 2025 |
The Forrester finding explains all the others. If a fifth of companies cannot say what ABM is in their own organisation, an adoption question measures vocabulary, not behaviour. A team that keeps a target account list in a spreadsheet answers yes on one survey and no on another, and both answers are honest.
Every roundup quotes an adoption figure in the nineties and none can show you the survey. The defensible range for 2026 is roughly two thirds of B2B teams, and the useful question is not whether you have ABM but whether anything downstream of the account list changes because of it.
How much of the marketing budget goes to ABM?
ABM takes about 30% of the B2B marketing budget in 2026, which puts it level with inbound and outbound rather than ahead of either.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| Inbound, outbound and ABM each take roughly 30% of total marketing budget, from 1,332 marketers. | 6sense, March 2025 |
| 28% of the 2022 marketing budget was dedicated to ABM, from 279 ABM heads and practitioners worldwide (DATED). | Momentum ITSMA and the ABM Leadership Alliance, March 2023 |
| 71% of companies planned to increase ABM spend the following year, a 13.1% year-on-year rise (DATED). | Momentum ITSMA, March 2023 |
| Marketing budget averages 12.5% of company revenue, with 10% the most common answer, from 392 B2B marketers surveyed in late 2024. | 6sense, April 2025 |
| 35% of ABM leaders name insufficient budget as a top challenge, up from 22% in 2022. | Forrester 2024 State of ABM Survey, reported March 2025 |
Two independent reads three years apart land within two points of each other: 28% in 2022, about 30% in 2025. For a discipline sold for a decade as the future of B2B, that is a flat line. The share of leaders complaining about budget rose 13 points in the same window, which is what a plateau feels like from the inside.
Thirty percent of budget with no growth is the most honest number on this page. ABM did not eat B2B marketing; it became a third of it and stopped. If you are pitching an ABM budget increase in 2026, the benchmark will not carry the argument for you. Bring account-level pipeline instead.
Does account-based marketing actually deliver higher ROI?
The best-sourced answer is Forrester's: in its 2024 research, most respondents put ABM's return between 21% and 50% above other marketing, and 23% put it between 51% and 200% higher. Nobody credible publishes a single multiple.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| 23% of global respondents said ABM ROI was 51% to 200% higher than other marketing; the most frequent answer was a 21% to 50% advantage. The pattern held across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. | Forrester, December 2024 |
| 72% of marketers said ABM delivers higher ROI than other types of marketing, from 279 practitioners (DATED). | Momentum ITSMA, March 2023 |
| 84% of companies reported pipeline growth and 77% reported revenue growth from ABM, from nearly 300 ABM leaders (DATED). | Momentum ITSMA and the ABM Leadership Alliance, December 2022 |
| 47% of practitioners name proving ROI as their single biggest ABM challenge. No sample disclosed. | Demand Gen Report, October 2025 |
| 93% of B2B technology marketers called their ABM efforts extremely or very successful, up from 84% the year before, from 500 respondents (DATED). | Foundry, 2023 |
Now the number you came for. "97% of marketers achieve higher ROI with ABM than with any other marketing initiative" appears on hundreds of pages, usually credited to ITSMA. It is not an ITSMA number. The trail ends at Alterra Group in 2014, and no published Alterra Group report, sample size or method exists that I could find. ITSMA's own 2014 work on ABM and ROI is referenced second hand, but itsma.com no longer serves it: in September 2026 the www host failed to connect and the apex domain returned a 403. Twelve years on, with no retrievable source document, the 97% is folklore. It is logged in the research file as a myth row and excluded from the 44.
I have sat in ABM business cases built on that 97%. If your board ever asks where it came from, the honest answer is a 2014 vendor survey nobody can produce. Use Forrester's distribution instead: it is smaller, it is dated, and it will survive the follow-up question.
How much bigger are ABM deals, and do win rates improve?
There is no trustworthy answer, and that is the finding. The most quoted ABM deal-size claim is a 171% ACV uplift, and it comes from an undated TOPO study LinkedIn published in 2020 that is no longer available at source.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| CLAIM, NOT MEASUREMENT: ABM accounts carried an average contract value of $195,294 against $71,941 for non-ABM accounts, a 171% uplift, credited to TOPO and the ABM Leadership Alliance with no date, sample or retrievable report (UNDATED). | LinkedIn, July 2020 |
| CLAIM, NOT MEASUREMENT: 91% of ABM marketers said their ABM accounts had a bigger deal size, and a quarter reported deals at least 50% larger. LinkedIn gives no year and no sample, and the original SiriusDecisions study is not retrievable (UNDATED). | SiriusDecisions via LinkedIn, July 2020 |
| Average deal value rose 54% year over year, from $48bn of analysed pipeline and 2,000 or more CROs surveyed. | Ebsta and Pavilion, April 2025 |
| 78% of sellers missed quota in 2025, up from 69% in 2024, in the same dataset. | Ebsta and Pavilion, April 2025 |
| Getting decision makers involved early lifts win rates by 55%, across 655,000 opportunities. | Ebsta and Pavilion, 2025 |
Neither of the top two rows is a measurement. LinkedIn dates neither one and credits both to studies that are no longer published, and the SiriusDecisions "at least 50% larger" threshold has no year attached anywhere I could find it. Here is what the 171% would be worth if it were true, purely so you can see the size of the thing people are repeating. Divide Ebsta's $48bn of analysed pipeline by Pavilion's 655,000 opportunities and the average B2B opportunity comes to at most $73,282; apply 171% and an ABM deal would be worth $198,595, an extra $125,313 per win. That is arithmetic performed on folklore. It is not counted as a statistic here and it does not belong in a business case. The rows underneath have a dataset behind them: deal values up 54% year over year while 78% of sellers missed quota, which says prices went up and conversion did not.
Deal size is the weakest evidence base in ABM and the one every deck leads with. I went looking for a single matched-cohort deal-size study with a stated sample and a publication date, and there isn't one in the public record. Treat any specific uplift as a hypothesis to test on your own closed-won data, not a benchmark you inherit.
Does ABM fix sales and marketing alignment?
ABM improves alignment by most self-reported measures and does not fix the handoff: Forrester's 2024 survey found 56% of opportunities passed to sales never close.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| 56% of opportunities handed off to sales fail to close successfully, from Forrester's Demand, ABM and Customer Marketing Survey 2024. Forrester does not publish the sample. | Forrester, January 2025 |
| 43% of practitioners name sales and marketing alignment as a top ABM challenge, second only to proving ROI. No sample disclosed. | Demand Gen Report, October 2025 |
| 66% of companies said ABM significantly improves marketing and sales alignment, from 279 practitioners (DATED). | Momentum ITSMA, March 2023 |
| 82% of B2B marketers said ABM greatly improves alignment between marketing and sales (DATED, 2020). | LinkedIn, July 2020 |
| 18% of ABM leaders cite lack of sales buy-in as a challenge, up from 17% in 2022. | Forrester 2024 State of ABM Survey, reported March 2025 |
Read the alignment numbers next to the handoff number. Marketers say alignment improved; sales still loses more than half of what marketing hands over. Both can be true, because "alignment" in these surveys means shared account lists and shared meetings, not shared accountability for the close.
The alignment stat I would track is Forrester's 56%. It is the only one here a sales leader would recognise as a problem, and improving self-reported alignment while it sits above half is a governance win with no revenue attached.
What is blocking ABM programmes in 2026?
People and proof, in that order: 37% of ABM leaders name insufficient staff as their top constraint and 47% cannot prove ROI, while only a third measure anything account-shaped.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| 37% of ABM leaders cite insufficient staff, the new top challenge in the 2024 survey, ahead of budget at 35%. | Forrester 2024 State of ABM Survey, reported March 2025 |
| 82% of teams say they run ABM, but a third or fewer measure account-centric metrics. Marketers are doing one thing and measuring another. | 6sense, March 2025 |
| ABM teams track 5.2 metrics on average against 3.4 for non-ABM teams, and use three or more tracking tools against two. | 6sense, March 2025 |
| Only 17% of ABM programmes are fully embedded as a foundational pillar of go-to-market strategy; most are still exploring, experimenting or expanding (DATED). | Momentum ITSMA, March 2023 |
| 40% of practitioners name scaling programmes as a top challenge. No sample disclosed. | Demand Gen Report, October 2025 |
| Email (92%) and in-person events (72%) are the channels practitioners rate as delivering results. No sample disclosed. | Demand Gen Report, October 2025 |
| 45% of practitioners see AI's promise for personalisation, while nearly 70% find its current effectiveness limited. No sample disclosed. | Demand Gen Report, October 2025 |
| 61% of marketers say marketing is going through its biggest disruption in 20 years because of AI. No sample disclosed. | HubSpot, 2026 |
Put 6sense's two findings side by side and you get the cleanest diagnosis available. Roughly 30% of the budget runs account-based, 82% of teams claim the motion, and a third or fewer report on accounts. Divide the second pair: about 40 cents of every account-based dollar sits inside a team that measures accounts. The rest is spent on accounts and graded on leads.
This is why proving ROI tops the challenge list every year, and no vendor dashboard fixes it. Teams keep the lead-based funnel report because that is what leadership asked for last quarter, then wonder why the account programme cannot show a return.
What do B2B buyers do that makes ABM work at all?
They shortlist before they call you: 94% of buying groups had already ranked their preferred vendors before speaking to a single seller, according to 6sense's survey of more than 4,000 buyers in November 2025.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| 94% of buying groups had ranked their preferred vendors before first contact with any seller, from 4,000 or more buyers across North America, EMEA and APAC. | 6sense, November 2025 |
| 77% of buyers ended up purchasing from the vendor that was their preliminary favourite. | 6sense, November 2025 |
| The average buying cycle shortened to 10 months, from about 11 months in 2024. | 6sense, November 2025 |
| The journey shifted from a 70/30 to a 60/40 split between independent research and seller engagement. | 6sense, November 2025 |
| The vendor a buyer contacted first won the deal 84% of the time, and buyers initiated that first contact 83% of the time. | 6sense, January 2024 |
| ABM practitioners collect 8 to 9 buying-signal types out of 23, against 5 to 6 for non-ABM teams, and see a 4% form-fill rate against 3.4%. | 6sense, January 2024 |
| 91% of technology marketers use intent data to prioritise accounts, choose content and build target account lists, from 500 respondents (DATED). | Foundry, 2023 |
This is the strongest argument for account-based work on the page, and it comes from buyer research rather than from ABM marketing. If the shortlist is set before contact and the first vendor contacted wins five times out of six, everything that decides the deal happens before a lead exists, in the window a lead-based funnel cannot see. That window is also shrinking. Multiply the split by the cycle length and independent research ran about 7.7 months in 2024 and about 6.0 in 2025, so buyers took roughly 1.7 months, a fifth of the whole thing, off the table in a single year.
One caution: 6sense sells the software that reads those signals, so the incentive runs the same way as the finding. I still trust the shape of it, because the vendor's own surveys contradict each other on the flattering questions and agree on this one.
How we calculated the original numbers
Four figures on this page do not exist anywhere else. Here is the arithmetic, so you can check it or swap the inputs.
- 39 points: the gap inside one vendor's own research. 6sense's Buyer Identification Benchmark, published January 2024, reports that 43% of marketers practise ABM. Its 2024 B2B Marketing Attribution and Contribution Benchmark, published 17 March 2025 from a 716-person panel, reports 82%. The difference is 39 percentage points. The 2024 ABM Benchmark, published four days earlier, pools both panels (616 plus 716 = 1,332) and publishes 64%. Check it: (0.43 x 616 + 0.82 x 716) / 1,332 = 63.9%. One wrinkle: the Buyer Identification report states its own sample as 546, while the pooled analysis counts 616 for the same survey. 6sense does not explain the difference, and it moves the weighted average by about a point.
- $73,282: the ceiling on an average B2B sales opportunity. Ebsta's April 2025 release puts $48 billion of analysed pipeline behind the 2025 GTM Benchmarks. Pavilion's page for the same report puts 655,000 opportunities in it. $48,000,000,000 / 655,000 = $73,282. Both publishers write "over 655,000" or round it to 655K, so this is an upper bound, not a point estimate. It is an opportunity value rather than a closed-won value, and it is skewed by whichever companies contributed data.
- 1.7 months: research time buyers took off the table in a single year. 6sense's November 2025 Buyer Experience Report says the journey moved from a 70/30 split to 60/40 between independent research and seller engagement, and that the average cycle shortened from about 11 months to 10. Independent research therefore ran about 7.7 months in 2024 (0.70 x 11) and about 6.0 in 2025 (0.60 x 10), a 22% cut in the window where nobody is talking to you. Both inputs are rounded by the publisher, so read it as "roughly a fifth", not seven weeks to the day.
- 40 cents in the dollar: account-based spend that is measured on accounts. 6sense reports 82% of teams running ABM and 33% or fewer measuring account-centric metrics. 0.33 / 0.82 = 0.40. Since ABM takes roughly 30% of the marketing budget, about 12% of total marketing budget is both spent and graded account-based.
A fifth calculation sits in the deal-size section and is deliberately not counted: applying the unsourced 171% uplift to $73,282 gives $125,313. It shows how big an unverifiable claim gets once you multiply it out. It is not a finding.
What the 2026 numbers actually say
ABM stopped growing and nobody announced it. Budget share went from 28% in 2022 to about 30% in 2025, and adoption estimates from credible panels cluster in the sixties and low seventies, not the nineties the roundups quote. That is a mature line item, not a movement. Plan 2027 on the assumption that the ABM share of spend is fixed and the argument moves to what you do inside it.
The evidence base is thinner than the category's confidence. The two most repeated ABM statistics on the internet, the 97% ROI figure and the 171% deal-size uplift, both trace to sources nobody can retrieve: a 2014 vendor survey with no published report, and an undated study from a firm that no longer exists independently. The strongest recent numbers come from buyer research and sales datasets, not from ABM vendors describing ABM.
Measurement is the whole game now. A third of budget runs account-based and a third of teams measure accounts, so most ABM programmes are graded by a funnel that cannot see the thing they changed. Fixing that is unglamorous and it takes a quarter, and it is the only work on this page that reliably turns an ABM programme into a defended budget line.
FAQ
What percentage of B2B companies use account-based marketing?
Around 64% of B2B marketing teams report an ABM or target-account approach, from 1,332 marketers pooled in 6sense's ABM benchmark of March 2025, and Demand Gen Report's October 2025 survey puts it at 71%. Figures in the nineties circulate widely with no retrievable survey behind them. Forrester's 2024 research found nearly 20% of organisations have not defined ABM internally, which is why adoption estimates move so much between surveys.
Does ABM deliver higher ROI than other marketing?
Forrester's December 2024 research found the most common answer was a 21% to 50% ROI advantage over other marketing, with 23% of global respondents reporting 51% to 200% higher. Momentum ITSMA's 2022 survey of 279 practitioners put the share saying ABM beats other marketing at 72%, now dated. All of it is self-reported, and 47% of practitioners told Demand Gen Report in October 2025 that proving ROI is their biggest challenge.
Is the 97% higher ROI ABM statistic real?
The 97% figure traces to Alterra Group in 2014, not ITSMA as it is usually credited, and no published report, sample or method for it could be located in September 2026. Treat it as folklore and use Forrester's 2024 distribution instead.
How much bigger are deals under an ABM programme?
Nobody can tell you, because the number everyone quotes cannot be sourced. The 171% uplift ($195,294 against $71,941) comes from an undated TOPO study LinkedIn published in July 2020 and that is no longer available, and the SiriusDecisions claim that 91% of ABM marketers saw bigger deals carries no year or sample either. If the 171% were true, applied to the $73,282 average B2B opportunity computed from Ebsta and Pavilion's 2025 dataset it would imply $125,313 per deal, which shows how far an unverifiable claim travels once you multiply it out. Measure the uplift on your own closed-won data instead.
How much of the marketing budget should go to ABM?
About 30% is the current benchmark, level with inbound and outbound, from 6sense's 1,332-marketer panel published in March 2025. Momentum ITSMA measured 28% in 2022, so the share has barely moved. Marketing budgets average 12.5% of company revenue (6sense, April 2025), putting a typical ABM programme at roughly 3.7% of revenue.
Does ABM improve sales and marketing alignment?
66% of companies said ABM significantly improves marketing and sales alignment in Momentum ITSMA's 2022 survey of 279 practitioners, and 82% said the same in LinkedIn's 2020 data. Both are dated and self-reported. The counterweight is Forrester's 2024 finding that 56% of opportunities handed to sales still fail to close, so alignment improves the process well before it improves the outcome.
Sources
- 6sense, The 2024 Account-Based Marketing Benchmark (March 2025, n=1,332)
- 6sense, B2B Buyer Identification Benchmark (January 2024, n=546; 6sense's later pooled analysis counts 616)
- 6sense, 2024 B2B Marketing Attribution and Contribution Benchmark (March 2025, n=716)
- 6sense, 2025 Marketing Spend Report (April 2025, n=392)
- 6sense, 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report (November 2025, 4,000+ buyers)
- Forrester, Account-Based Marketing Delivers Higher ROI Across Regions (December 2024)
- Forrester, Revitalizing Deals That Detour With Adaptive Programs (Kelvin Gee, January 2025, citing the Demand, ABM and Customer Marketing Survey 2024)
- destinationCRM, ABM Grows, but Limits Persist (March 2025, reporting Forrester's 2024 State of ABM Survey)
- Demand Gen Report, 2025 Account-Based Marketing Benchmark Survey (17 October 2025, no sample published)
- Momentum ITSMA and the ABM Leadership Alliance, Elevating ABM (March 2023, n=279)
- Demandbase, Sixth Annual ABM Benchmark Report press release (December 2022, nearly 300 respondents)
- Foundry, 2023 ABM and Intent Benchmarking Study (September 2023, n=500)
- Ebsta, 2025 GTM Benchmarks Report (22 April 2025, $48bn of pipeline, 2,000+ CROs)
- Pavilion, 2025 GTM Benchmarks with Ebsta (2025, 655K opportunities)
- LinkedIn, Account-Based Marketing Stats Every Strategist Should Know (July 2020)
- HubSpot, 2026 State of Marketing Report (2026, no sample published)
Methodology. Numbers were collected in September 2026 and checked on the original publisher's page, never against another statistics roundup. ABM is a vendor-heavy category, so three filters were applied: a claim needed a stated year, a traceable publisher page, and a disclosed sample or dataset wherever the publisher had one. Vendor surveys are labelled as vendor surveys in the text, figures older than 24 months are marked DATED, and claims whose original study cannot be retrieved are marked UNDATED and flagged in the row itself. Three widely quoted claims were investigated and failed: the "97% higher ROI" figure, whose trail ends at Alterra Group in 2014 with no retrievable report; the "171% ACV uplift", which LinkedIn credits to an undated TOPO study; and the SiriusDecisions "deals at least 50% larger" threshold, which carries no year or sample on any page that repeats it. ITSMA's own 2014 ABM and ROI work could not be retrieved: www.itsma.com failed to connect and itsma.com returned a 403 in September 2026. Every figure was re-verified against the publisher on 8 September 2026. Last updated 8 September 2026.