Don't mistake hyper-personalization for effectiveness. Running hundreds of tiny, account-specific campaigns is inefficient and hard to measure. A more successful approach is to group accounts by industry or shared pain points and run fewer, larger campaigns for better data and stronger engagement.

Treating Account-Based Marketing (ABM) as a standalone strategy is a mistake. It must be integrated with broader brand awareness and lead nurturing for the 90% of the market not currently buying. Without top-of-funnel activities, even targeted sales efforts will fall short.

A more effective mental model than PLG vs. SLG is analyzing which activities create new demand versus which ones harvest existing demand. Both sales and product can serve either function. Creating demand is always the harder, more critical challenge for any revenue engine.

Instead of siloing brand and demand, view them as a unified function on a spectrum. The only difference is the scale of the audience, from mass market (brand) to a targeted market (demand). This reframes the relationship and encourages integrated thinking rather than creating separate camps.

A one-size-fits-all sales role fails in consumption models. Success requires segmenting the team into specialized roles—new business acquisition, customer onboarding, and account management—each with distinct incentives aligned to their specific function, from initial sign-up to value realization and expansion.

The conflict between brand building and demand generation is unproductive. The most effective approach treats them as a single, integrated outreach strategy. This ensures consistent, relevant messaging that builds trust over the long term, preventing user drop-off from disjointed experiences.

The first step in aligning brand and ABX is not tactical planning but narrative alignment. Bring sales, marketing, and brand leaders together and ask: 'If a buying group engages with us, will they hear one story or three?' Only when the answer is 'one story' are you ready to integrate efforts.

Many firms reduce Account-Based Marketing (ABM) to tactics like direct mail or targeted ads. True success requires treating ABM as a comprehensive go-to-market operating model. This means aligning the core sales process and strategy first, before implementing any technology or specific campaigns.

The primary challenge in implementing ABX is not technology or tactics, but achieving organizational balance. Sales teams often want immediate results, while true ABX is a long-term journey of building trust. Success requires joint goal-setting and flexible GTM strategies between marketing and sales leaders.