For years, marketers have been told that more leads mean more sales. But if that were true, why do so many companies struggle with low conversion rates and sales and marketing alignment? The problem isn’t lead volume—it’s lead quality and segmentation.
That’s exactly what account-based marketing (ABM) is designed to fix. Rather than chasing quantity through homogenous lead generation, ABM focuses on identifying and engaging high-value accounts that actually match your ideal customer profile (ICP). By aligning teams around quality from the start—through better segmentation, intent data, and personalized engagement with your target audience—ABM helps ensure that every lead passed to sales is worth the follow-up.
If you’re tired of low engagement, wasted budget, and unqualified leads clogging your funnel, it’s time to rethink your lead strategy. In this article, we’ll break down:
- Why the “more leads = better results” mindset is holding marketers back
- How lead segmentation in ABM improves conversion rates
- Actionable strategies to target, personalize, and nurture high-value leads
The Problem with Traditional Lead Generation
There’s a common misconception that more leads mean more conversions— but when marketers focus solely on lead volume over lead quality and fail to validate leads, there’s ample opportunities for unqualified or misaligned leads to enter the funnel.
Sales and marketing need to align on lead validation practices before and during any campaign. Sales teams become frustrated when they pursue prospects who end up not being the right product or market fit. This misalignment in lead quality from marketing to sales qualified leads doesn’t just frustrate sales—it also creates a ripple effect across the organization. Low conversion rates and missed targets can cause rising tension between marketing and sales teams. Meanwhile, the cost of acquiring those leads adds up. Every campaign, ad, and content asset targeting and engaging the wrong audience leads to wasted marketing spend, which affects proactive optimization and budget to run the campaigns toward the right buyers.
It’s clear that just filling the funnel isn’t enough. You need to focus on attracting and nurturing the right prospects: those who match your ICPs and are showing real buying intent. Targeting these in-market prospects in the first place pays off in higher-quality opportunities and better ROI for your marketing strategies. And lead segmentation makes all of this possible.
By organizing leads based on factors like buying stage, behavior, firmographics, and ABM engagement level, marketers can tailor outreach to match where each lead is in their journey. The result: smarter targeting, stronger sales alignment, enhanced customer experience, and better pipeline performance.
What Is Lead Segmentation?
Lead segmentation is the process of dividing your lead list based on data and account characteristics, enabling you to take a more personalized, targeted approach with your marketing campaigns. Lead segmentation results in marketing and sales teams focusing on the accounts that matter, versus the “spray and pray” methods that amplify messages that don’t resonate with the target audience.
If you don’t address the specific needs, challenges, and industry trends or changes that each account faces in your content, you risk losing them to a competitor who does. Targeting based on segmented target account lists also eliminates the need for one-to-one outreach—something that’s impractical with large B2B account lists—and increases your chances of making a lasting impression that leads to bigger deals and greater customer loyalty.
Lead Segmentation Types by Data
To move beyond generic outreach and focus your efforts where they matter most, segment leads using different types of data. Each segmentation type helps tailor messaging and engagement strategies based on what is most relevant to the lead or account. Here are some of the most common data-driven segmentation approaches:
- Firmographics: Segment accounts by industry, company size, or revenue to tailor outreach to their business profile.
- Behavioral Data: Use activities like site visits or content clicks to gauge interest and customize messaging based on what they engage with.
- Intent Signals: Leverage research behavior, keywords, or topics and competitor research to identify accounts actively exploring solutions like yours.
- Engagement History: Review past interactions and deal status to prioritize warm leads and adjust follow-up strategies accordingly.
- Demographic: Target by location, job title, or age to ensure relevance and increase the likelihood of key decision-maker engagement.
You can also segment leads by sales cycle stage—grouping them based on where they are in their decision-making journey, from awareness to consideration to decision. And you can segment by individual buyer persona needs, which means understanding each stakeholder’s specific pain points, goals, and role in the purchase process to deliver more personalized and persuasive messaging.
Lead Qualification Types by Activity
Lead segmentation helps sales and marketing categorize and align around the accounts and contacts that matter most. By categorizing leads based on how ready they are to move forward, teams can prioritize outreach, tailor messaging, and avoid wasting time on low-fit prospects. Here are three key lead types segmentation can help identify and activate:
- Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): A lead that has engaged with your marketing efforts—like downloading content or attending a webinar—and meets basic criteria indicating potential interest.
- Product Qualified Lead (PQL): A lead who has used or tested your product (typically in a free trial or freemium model) and demonstrated usage patterns that suggest strong potential to convert.
- Sales Qualified Lead (SQL): A lead vetted by the sales team, showing clear buying intent, fit, and readiness for a direct sales conversation.
The Power of Lead Segmentation in ABM
Effective lead segmentation is essential for the best ABM campaigns. Without it, you risk wasting resources, missing high-intent opportunities, and delivering the wrong message at the wrong time.
Not all accounts are at the same stage of the buying journey—some are just becoming aware of a problem, while others are actively evaluating solutions or ready to purchase. Treating them the same leads to poor engagement and lower conversion rates.
ABM requires a shift from focusing on individual leads to understanding the full buying group within a target account. As Forrester points out, we’re now in the “buying group era,” where B2B decisions are made collectively by 14 to 23 stakeholders, each with unique priorities, questions, and levels of readiness. This makes it critical to assess both account-wide engagement and individual stakeholder behavior.
B2B buyers love personalization. By segmenting leads and accounts by buying stage, engagement patterns, and intent, you can personalize outreach more effectively. High-intent stakeholders can move straight to sales conversations, mid-funnel prospects get educational content to nurture trust, and inactive leads enter re-engagement paths. Since buying committees rarely move coordinated, segmentation ensures you’re always meeting each buyer with timely and personalized content.
How to Build a Targeted Lead Strategy for ABM
Creating a targeted lead strategy for ABM starts with organizing your accounts to quickly spot high-value opportunities and tailor content for each member of the buying committee. Follow these four steps to define, segment, personalize, and measure the success of your strategy.
Step 1: Define High-Value Accounts
Identifying your ICP and using it as a filter on your current account list is the first step to defining your high-value accounts. An ICP has the characteristics of the company or account that would be the best fit for your brand and the solutions/services you offer. The ICP helps marketing and sales teams concentrate on the accounts that will show the highest impact from their ABM campaign and outreach efforts.
Use intent data to go beyond static firmographics and surface accounts actively researching solutions like yours. Intent data reveals what these accounts are looking for, which you can use to segment them by their interest in a product or what industry they want more information about. Intent data also reinforces that an account is prime to target because they’re already demonstrating interest in your product or issues that your solution solves.
Step 2: Segment Accounts for Personalization
Once you have your high-value account list filtered down by ICP criteria and the intent signals they show, segmenting strategically by engagement level, industry, or buying stage will help you deliver personalized content that progresses them through the buying journey and keeps them interested in your brand.
Try segmenting by:
- Engagement level: Identify accounts that have interacted with your content, attended webinars, or visited high-intent pages.
Example: Accounts that downloaded a pricing sheet might be ready for sales outreach, while those who viewed a blog post may need more nurturing. - Industry: Segment by vertical to deliver content that aligns with their unique challenges and regulations.
Example: A cybersecurity guide tailored for financial services vs. one built for retail. - Buying stage: Tailor messaging based on how far along they are in the decision process and the sales funnel.
Example: Early-stage accounts might get content that promotes thought leadership from company leaders, while late-stage accounts receive ROI calculators or customer proof points.
Depending on your first–party data and historical data collections (a.k.a. gathered customer data from web activities and forms), you may start out with account information like email and company name. You can collect more details like role, pain points, or what other technology solutions prospects use that can complement your solution through other gated content, web activities, or personalized follow-ups. Ideally, you want to keep forms short and work to improve lead quality without sacrificing user experience.
As users increasingly prioritize their privacy, you must consider the shift toward cookieless marketing. Respecting privacy and maintaining strong data security not only protects your brand from reputational damage but also helps avoid costly fines. Consumer behavior reflects this shift, with 18% of surveyed consumers opting out of cookies daily, and 70% taking additional steps like using VPNs or clearing their cache to protect their data. Maintaining strong data security not only protects your brand from reputational damage but also helps avoid costly fines.
Marketers must prepare for ongoing targeting and measurement challenges, regardless of whether cookies fully disappear or not. Review your ad-tech partners’ data practices now. Make sure their strategies align with your data governance policies and ask how they plan to adapt—whether through first-party data, anonymized data, or contextual targeting. Most importantly, confirm their commitment to data accuracy and privacy compliance.
Step 3: Personalize Outreach & Content
Once your accounts are segmented, personalization becomes far more effective—and scalable.
But true personalization doesn’t stop at the account level. In complex B2B sales, each account includes a buying committee made up of multiple stakeholders—each with distinct concerns, goals, and levels of influence. To close the consensus gap and accelerate the buying process, you need to tailor messaging not just to the account, but to the individual roles within it.
By segmenting contacts within an account based on stakeholder type—like IT decision-makers, finance leads, procurement, or operations—and by buyer persona,you can craft personalized content that addresses their unique objections and decision criteria. This targeted approach helps build trust across the buying committee, guides internal conversations, and makes it easier for stakeholders to reach agreement.
Segmentation also powers effective multi-channel ABM engagement. Whether it’s email marketing campaigns, display advertising, connected TV (CTV) ads, audio advertising, social media advertising, or sales outreach, you can align each channel with the type of content and messaging each buyer persona needs to move forward. And by aligning marketing and sales around these segments, you ensure coordinated, consistent messaging that supports both individual decision-makers and overall account progression through the funnel.
Step 4: Measure & Optimize for Better Results
Segmentation should be dynamic, not static. Buyer behavior, intent signals, and account readiness can shift quickly—especially in long B2B sales cycles. An account that wasn’t ready last quarter might now be actively evaluating vendors, while a once-engaged prospect may have stalled. Keeping your segmentation strategy up to date is essential to ensure your outreach remains timely, relevant, and effective.
Optimize with Strategic Insights
The following three ideas are opportunities to proactively optimize your campaigns so your account segments continuously receive messaging and content based on their actions. When you analyze campaign performance while the campaign is active, you can quickly adapt your segmentation based on insights from real-time engagement, A/B testing results, and account data from various sources.
Real-Time Engagement Data
Monitor real-time engagement data—such as email opens, page visits, or webinar attendance—to re-prioritize accounts showing increased buying intent. Behavioral triggers that show increased account activity can also help identify when it’s time to escalate outreach or shift messaging.
Engagement datasets include actions that signal increased interest or a change in buying stage—such as repeat visits to high-intent pages (e.g., pricing or case studies), time spent on product-related content, webinar attendance, content downloads, or interactions with LinkedIn posts or sales outreach. If a previously quiet account suddenly spikes in activity across your site or engages with multiple assets in a short period (a behavioral trigger), it may indicate buying group alignment or movement toward a decision. Continue to watch account activity because as it increase, it’ll help you determine the right time to increase touchpoints or tailor follow-up messages with more direct, solution-focused messaging.
A/B Tests
Run A/B tests on different account and persona segments and message variations to uncover which combinations resonate most. You can test how segmentation by industry, buying stage, or stakeholder type impacts engagement and conversion outcomes.
Account and Contact Data
Rely on third-party intent data platforms, customer relationship management (CRM) signals, and marketing automation tools to continuously refresh your account and contact data. This ensures that segmentation stays accurate and that you’re not targeting stale or irrelevant information.
Track these Key Metrics
Metrics reveal how effective your marketing campaigns and content are in progressing accounts and buying group members through the buying journey and closer to a purchase decision. While paying attention to surface-level metrics like clicks, downloads, interactions on social media, and attendance to events are good indicators of buying interest and intent, you want to pay specific attention to the following ABM KPIs as well:
Engagement Rate
Your engagement considers the percentage of segmented accounts responding to your content and sales outreach. Are segmented accounts responding to your content and outreach? You can tell by the rate of surface-level engagement metrics like email opens and clicks, and likes and comments on social media.
Conversion Rate
Your conversion rate is the percentage of accounts that transition opportunity stages. Work with your sales teams to determine what makes an MQL an SQL and a marketing-qualified account (MQA) to a sales-qualified account (MQA). Transitioning from MQL to SQL means an individual lead has shown strong buying intent—typically through actions like visiting pricing pages, requesting a demo, hitting lead scoring thresholds, or returning to your site repeatedly.
In contrast, moving from MQA to SQA indicates the entire account is showing readiness. This is marked by engagement from multiple stakeholders, including decision-makers interacting with nurture content and frequent visits to high-value assets like solution pages. These signals suggest alignment within the buying committee and a higher likelihood of conversion.
Influenced Pipeline Creation and Pipeline Velocity
Influenced pipeline creation tracks the value of opportunities added to the pipeline as a result of ABM efforts. This KPI highlights the direct contribution of ABM to pipeline growth and shows how well your strategies are driving potential revenue. Pipeline velocity measures how quickly opportunities progress from creation to closed-won. It reflects the efficiency of your sales process and helps uncover any delays or bottlenecks that may be slowing down deal progression.
Use Lead Scoring & Intent Tracking for Continuous Improvement
Layering your lead scoring model and intent tracking onto your segmentation strategy helps prioritize outreach and refine messaging over time. Scoring models that incorporate firmographic fit, engagement signals, and intent data allow you to rank accounts based on readiness and potential impact. Over time, analyzing these scores alongside conversion metrics helps you refine both your segments and your go-to-market approach.
Identify Content Gaps and Fill Them
Segmentation not only helps target content more effectively but also uncovers content gaps, ensuring that all key buyer personas and stages of the journey are covered. If certain roles, industries, or stages lack tailored assets, consider:
- Leveraging customer and sales insights through feedback surveys and pulse checks to identify pain points and unmet content needs. Analyze competitors to see if they are addressing topics or pain points that you’re overlooking
- Refresh outdated content by updating statistics, messaging, and examples to stay aligned with current market trends
- Create journey-aligned assets for each stage—awareness, consideration, and decision—which ensures that you implement targeted content that guides buyers through their journey.
Why Targeted Leads Drive Sustainable Growth
Targeting the right leads and accounts is essential for driving sustainable growth with ABM. By focusing your efforts on high-quality accounts—those most likely to convert and deliver long-term value—you avoid wasting resources on low-fit prospects. This approach allows you to tailor messaging and outreach to each account’s specific needs, priorities, and buying stage. The result is more relevant engagement, stronger relationships with key buying committee members, and a more efficient path to revenue.
To truly move the needle with segmentation, however, marketing teams need to collaborate closely with sales to identify the shared characteristics of their highest-value clients—whether that’s specific engagement patterns, firmographics, buying committee behaviors, or content consumption trends. This alignment helps marketing replicate what works and segment more effectively, ensuring that content and outreach are tailored to progress real buying groups through the journey—not just broadcast to everyone equally.
How Madison Logic Helps with Lead Segmentation with a Multi-Channel ABM Approach
Ready to drive better results through a smarter lead segmentation strategy and deeper sales-marketing alignment? Download our latest eBook, Mastering B2B Nurturing: Best Practices & Strategies for Converting Leads into Loyal Customers, a comprehensive guide to nurturing in ABM. From breaking down lead segmentation and scoring to best practices you can use to bolster your nurture strategy, you’ll have an asset that guides your marketing motions toward more consistent engagement from your target accounts, no matter where they are in the buying journey.
The ML Platform is a key ABM tool that connects your CRM and marketing automation platform to real-time buyer insights and account activity. Real-time, multi-channel engagement tracked by the ML Platform enhances lead and account scoring so you can execute better segmentation and move accounts through the buying journey faster. Request a demo for the ML Platform to understand how we can help you push your ABM strategy further.
