RX13 - 5 ABM Trends from 2025 Shaping the Future of B2B Marketing in 2026 | Davis Potter

In this week's episode of the Revenue Xchange, host Davis Potter kicks off 2026 with a solo deep-dive into the five biggest trends that shaped ABM and B2B marketing in 2025 and why they'll continue to dominate this year.

Key Takeaways:

1. The ABM Team Inversion: Large, mature organizations are reintegrating standalone ABM teams into demand gen, while smaller companies are spinning up dedicated ABM teams for the first time. This fascinating inverse trend is driven by ABM principles becoming foundational across all marketing functions.
2. Account-Based Principles Are Now Table Stakes: For any non-transactional B2B sale, ABM principles (targeting, segmentation, cross-functional alignment) have become the underlying foundation for effective go-to-market strategy.
3. The MQL Era Is Officially Over: The conversation has shifted from "do MQLs work?" to "how do we transition off of them?" Simply swapping to MQAs isn't the answer.
4. Buying Groups Take Center Stage: The focus is moving beyond individual leads (MQLs) and whole accounts (MQAs) to buying group constellations, the people who actually make purchase decisions together.
5. AI Moves from Isolated Tests to Integrated Workflows: AI adoption in ABM hit 91% in early 2025, and we're now seeing cross-functional AI workflows between marketing, sales, and CS teams.

Closing Note: Davis delivers a sharp, data-backed overview of where B2B marketing stands heading into 2026. For GTM leaders looking to stay ahead, this episode provides a clear-eyed assessment of the shifts reshaping account-based strategy, plus a teaser for Part 2 featuring 10 predictions for the year ahead.

Transcript

0:05

Welcome to the Revenue Exchange with your host Davis Potter. I'm so excited for this episode finally back from break. I hope everyone had a great new year as we're able to spend it with friends, family, and actually relax and recharge. We're back. This is our first episode of 2026. Have a two-part series to this. The first I wanna talk about, I wanna talk about the top five trends that we saw across 2025. Some of these bleed over. Into 2026. I have 10 future predictions on what is coming in the new year. This is one of my favorite studios. This is our Sarasota Florida Studio. Quick life update for me. Uh, I moved to 2025. I moved from Sarasota back to Austin, Texas. I was there for about six months. Then I moved back from Austin to Sarasota. Couldn't get away from the family, missed my parents. My brother is down here, my sister is down here to all within the Sarasota area, so Forge X headquarters. We are now repositioning once again, but the beaches down here are beautiful. Boating is incredible. If, if, if you have been to one of our events or. Have been tuning in regularly. Uh, boating is by far my favorite pastime, so psyched to get back here because the beaches are world class. So if you are in the Tampa area, if you travel to the Tampa area, you have to let me know because we'll, we'll go get a coffee and then see if we can, we can take a boat out, but let's get into it because. I have a lot that I want to chat through. I'm gonna try and keep this episode to around 25 to 30 minutes. Historically, last year we've been running an hour and some of the feedback that we heard was an hour is amazing. These guests are incredible. Can you get it down to 30 minutes so I can listen to it on my walk, uh, instead of two walks? So that's what we're gonna focus on today. Let's start this off with the top five trends of 2025. Now. We've loved Demandbase. They are one of our top partners by a mile. A huge shout out to Stephanie MacArthur over on their team. Hannah Jordan, Shayla, so many others, and specifically Steph MacArthur. We, last year we did over 10, both live and well all live, but 10 in person. As well as some virtual certifications across account based go to market, and we did some from 25 people in the room to over a hundred. So we were able to get a, a really great perspective around what questions they were asking. Each was, uh, easily over two hours long. We went in depth. Around one, how ABM has modernized some of our four J'S deployment models For account-based marketing, we were talking about measurement reporting. Shout out to Almo Marketing, who joined the majority of all certifications. Uh, Karen, her team are incredible when it comes to measurement reporting, so make sure that you check them out and hit up there. almo.ai, which is actually a really cool forecasting calculator for an account based strategy. So check it out. Uh, but why I bring that up is one. Had such an incredible time meeting all of our four X community members in person about damn time for so many, especially the ones in Boston, getting back to Austin, back to San Francisco. We have a lot of executive council members that, uh, we were able to, to spend some time with, which is incredible too. I say this because. Gaining the wide scale perspective across regions. We did the majority in AM mayor, but we did some over in London as well. So hearing the questions, hearing the trends, hearing where everybody is in terms of account-based maturity was really insightful. And so we had a great perspective. Not only from that, but a lot of the research that we conducted last year, uh, I mean for X were a market research and advisory firm, so. When it comes to being on the pulse of what's happening across B2B marketing teams and how they're structuring, especially when it comes to ABM, we have some really interesting trends. So let's chat through them all. The first thing that I wanted to bring up is this inverse of ABM deployment. So what we're seeing. Across teams is this really weird shift, and we had a great conversation behind this in our executive council member meeting. The last one of 2025 was you are seeing some of the large, deeply mature organizations who had standalone ABM teams. These teams were deploying one-to-one ABM, one to few ABM, getting incredibly depth. Incredibly granular in the way in which they were deploying their account investment strategy. Essentially one-to-one being one to eight accounts covered per practitioner. If that's the only ABM deployment model they were leveraging, or one to four clusters of 25 accounts or less in a one to few ABM deployment. We were seeing those organizations, they had full dedicated. ABM teams, they are actually taking those ABM, the standalone ABM teams, essentially bringing them under either their integrated campaigns team or demand gen teams. And that was a really interesting trend because we're seeing in these large, deeply mature orgs, this reintegration of the ABM teams, but. What's happening within their integrated campaigns, teams or the demand gen teams, they are adopting ABM principles. Now, stick with me on this because I wanna talk on the inverse quickly before we really dive in to this whole, what does, what does it mean to actually adopt ABM principles across your integrated campaigns team? What we're seeing on the inverse, our data shows this, and even just conversations that we're having and our clients, this maps up so perfectly well, so you, this probably will resonate with you. Also, smaller organizations who are initially starting ABM for the first time, they are leaning heavier. Towards having standalone ABM teams to initially begin the pilot of an account-based strategy, build the structure, set the foundation. But what's unique here is that historically in these really large organizations, the ones that are reintegrating ABM into their integrated campaigns, teams, what's happening, or what historically happened was you had a more traditional style demand gen. Strategy that integrated campaigns or or demand gen, you know, we'll, we'll talk about that. That it's almost that demand gen or the broader scaled coverage. They were so deeply focused on top of funnel in generating MQ l's, historically leveraging the 2012 version of Serious Decisions Demand Waterfall, which. Was an incredible model when it came out and the wide scale effectiveness and adoption was massive, but we are now in 2026. It is no longer the best nor dominant model that should be adopted. So many organizations have woken up to this fact. This is actually number three on my list here to talk about, but. Staying on this line, what we used to see is these organizations would have these standalone ABM teams, which were adopting ABM best practices and principles, all in this standalone state where their traditional integrated campaigns teams were still leveraging that historical way of running a more demand gen function now in 2025, uh, and. Definitely moving forwards into 2026, we are seeing the standalone ABM teams get reintegrated because holistically integrated campaigns teams are now adopting ABM principles and building a true account-based go-to-market strategy. Now, on the smaller organizations, what's also unique is we are seeing. The same exact thing happened in their integrated campaigns teams or their demand gen teams, where they are from the get go, really adopting a lot of account based principles, but they are also breaking out and still holding standalone ABM teams that are usually deploying some form of one to many, but only to a really targeted subset of accounts. And they're, they're tiering their target account list. They are still acting in an ABM manner. There's, there's nothing weird going on there, but it's just really unique and it's an interesting trend as you see these really large and mature organizations that had these relatively large ABM teams reintegrate into integrated campaigns, teams or demand gen. Yet these teams that are adopting ABM for the first time are still housing standalone ABM teams that run alongside their demand gen or integrated campaigns teams. And the reason why is because a lot of ABM principles that can't necessarily initially be adopted across demand gen integrated campaigns. Having that standalone team under a pilot phase gives a lot of cover to be able to test, iterate, try, optimize, take those learnings and lessons, and then reintegrate those into demand gen. So that is the first trend, which is very interesting. Did not see that coming and that that's the fun in this. So. Next trend, account-based principles are now the underlying foundation for B2B marketing. If you are selling a non-transactional product, meaning you can't take a credit card, it's not, uh, a$500 product where you could take a credit card and just go buy it, we're talking$25,000 deals, a hundred thousand dollars deals, multimillion dollar if not billion dollar deals. Building a ABM or account-based go-to-market strategy. Is the best way to deploy your resources, budget, and teams capacity by a mile. The data undoubtedly, over the past, ABM was launched in 2004 over the past, what are we in now? 22 years? 2004. 2003. Uh, those dates are, are, can be a little conflicting, but when you look at ABM, it's been around for over 20 years. The data is there. It's crystal clear. Organizations are now adopting the principles, and when we think about principles, we think about targeting and segmentation, getting really crisp and clear in terms of your account investment strategy. So where are the segments? What are the industries that are going to yield the highest revenue potential? How do we align across sales, marketing, and customer success to make sure that we understand the segments. Are pulling our target accounts from the segments that are gonna yield the highest revenue potential for the business. And there are a lot of inputs that go into revenue potential. We're not gonna cover them all on this podcast, but the, the, the overwhelming consensus from our data and from wide scale data in the market as well, is the effectiveness of placing your. Resources in investing in a specific subset of target accounts that have the highest revenue potential will yield stronger results. Not only that, but getting off of M qls as being the sole form of attribution and leveraging a more account based approach, which is not merely moving to MQ ls. Or merely moving to MQs, by the way, we're gonna touch on that next. But targeting and segmentation, the way campaigns are created, ABM or account-based principles, are not just having some segmented or siloed target account list that you created through merely buying some third party intent data, grabbed a few accounts from it, slapped on. Some AI slop generated copy for personalization, created ads that have logos of the accounts on them. Shipped it out to that target account list, and you're swapping that target account list every two weeks based off of this new intent taking those. And then when you generate some form of signal from it, throwing it over to sales or just rinse and repeating on this. Ever revolving door of a target account list that is not ABM. Those are not account-based principles. That's just a targeted tactic and a sloppy tactic and a poor tactic. But account-based principles are actually targeting and segmentation. It is multi-threaded across the buy-in group. Campaigns from a marketing perspective, multi-channel, it's holistic. It's a partnership between marketing, sales, and customer success in a way that is not just marketing, generating m qls, throwing them over to the sales team and saying, Hey, sales. Check this contact out. How come you're not actioning on it? Or how come you're, you're, we're giving you this massive volume. Why are you not actually converting these into open opportunities? Well, spoiler, m qls do not represent a buying opportunity, buying groups do, which is why we're transitioning to a more buying group centric approach when it comes to measurement and reporting. Not merely just switching from M QLS to MQs. And actually I do want to transition now into our next one, but the, the overarching concept here is that account-based principles when it comes to measurement and reporting, campaign deployment, targeting and segmentation, cross-functional partnerships across the organization, it is a stronger approach. It is the way in which the leading organizations. Doing it in your organization. If you're not there, you need to start thinking about how you can slowly begin to change the culture and your strategy. Next, I wanna talk about M. Qls touched on it when speaking about this whole concept of mq, but I wanna make sure that we give enough time to specifically dedicate it towards this one. MQs are. No longer questioned. In the market around, oh, this is still the best way to do it. Just about every marketing leader that you talk to, whether it's the CMO, all the way down to the ABM specialist, the demand gen specialist, the campaign specialist, the campaign manager, everybody undoubtedly says the same thing. M QLS don't work, they're ineffective. We're just trying to get this mass volume of leads. We can gamify the system so we can increase that number. We're gonna take those leads. Pass them over to sales and we're just gonna keep rolling, rinsing and repeating on the same broken cycle. They know it doesn't work. Sales knows it doesn't work. And so what we are now seeing in market, one of the massive trends is that the conversation isn't do M QLS work? Or why do we need to transition off of, but it is now, how do we effectively transition off of M qls? This is what usually leads companies down this rabbit hole of, okay, if we're getting off of M qls, we're just gonna entirely move to an MQA model, or a marketing qualified account model, or a six QA model, seven QA model, eight QA model, whatever you want to call it. But these qualified accounts of which you are generating engagement signals across contacts, layering in third party. Intent data. So you're, you're using predictive analytics to identify when an account is and predict when an account is most likely to buy. Taking those mqa and then just passing them over to sales, we're seeing the same exact habits. The bad habits that were happening with MQL happened with MQ, and it's entirely missing the point. Mql, were so focused on individual. People, individual contacts, mqa, are so focused on entire total accounts. What's missing is the in between, which is buying groups. IT people buy your product or your service, and people do not buy it alone unless it's a incredibly transactional purchase, and they can do it on a credit card even then. Sometimes it you, you need a buying group, but for B2B deals, you need to uncover the constellations of buying groups that live across a target account or across an account. Because that is who will buy. You could have in really large accounts that you're pursuing multiple buying groups. Some, and the reason why we call them buying group constellations is because some people can sit across multiple buying groups for a specific product, even for different products that your organization might offer. Or applicable into this organization that you're trying to sell to. You could have a buying group member sit across two buying groups of which are buying different solutions. So you have to map out the buying group constellations in order to effectively one market to them to sell to them, partner with your other sales and cross-functional teams, as well as customer success if it's an expansion opportunity. But you have to map out the buying group constellations. It sits in between both the entire account, which is not incredibly helpful for sales when you're just throwing over a full account their way, or individual leads or individual MQ ls, which don't represent a buying opportunity'cause one person doesn't buy. It's a group. That is the buying group. And you have to find those constellations. You have to map'em out. You have to track the engagement of the buying groups, and you have to partner with sales to uncover and identify who makes up those buying groups and focus your energy and effort on those people. So that goes to number four, which I think we covered pretty well, but buying groups as a whole. This is now a front running conversation. There are the leading, leading edge organizations, the largest in the world, even the smaller hyper-growth companies. Who all understand and universally agree, buying groups is the right way to approach your measurement and reporting to approach your sales process, your marketing targeting. But the question then becomes, how do I actually implement it? Now, what also I found really interesting. Was, I thought a lot of the conversations that we were going to be having around this would fall across how do we implement it using our existing infrastructure when it comes to a tech perspective, and how do we build a culture and process to implement a buying group strategy? But the first question that happened so often was. How do I even find out who is part of the buying group? How do I actually uncover his through historical data? Who makes up my buying groups? Because again, when you think about it buying groups, it's not clean, simple, and easy. Different products have different buying groups. Different industries have different titles for the people who make up the buying groups. Buying groups have different roles, responsibilities. Each member. Has a different role and responsibility. So you have to think about all of these different components as well as layering in where in my existing systems and knowledge base, and by knowledge base, I'm also talking about sales and customer success partners and product marketing partners. Where do you go find quantitatively and qualitatively? All of that insight in order to effectively say this is most likely who makes up our buying groups and who we should prioritize in terms of our marketing and our selling efforts. And so it even goes back to the very first step, the complete basics of how do I actually know that? How do I know who makes up the buying groups? That I thought was really interesting because I thought the conversation was gonna be more geared towards how do I actually implement this using my systems? What processes do I need? But it was very focused on how do I actually identify buying groups and. This was massive trend from the back half of 2025 and something everyone is trying to figure out, especially when it comes to implement, uh, implementing it in your systems when you get there. How do you do that effectively? This is a huge, uh, rev ops, marketing ops, sales ops conversation that we've been having along with the marketing leader. We have a lot more coming on this from a Forge X perspective. We actually have our, uh, a framework that we will be releasing very soon all around this. But at the end of the day, if you are listening to this or you're seeing this on LinkedIn and you're thinking, am I behind? You're not. Every organization is trying to figure this out. Even the ones that are more mature in this are still trying to figure that out, and I can promise you that because that's who we're talking to. So do not, do not worry. Now the fifth trend from 2025, and I just realized I am, I am running out of time here, so we're probably gonna have to do a separate podcast just on the future predictions. I will do that either release it the week that this podcast comes out, or the part two will be coming out next week. So hang with me here. Now. The fifth trend from 2025 AI is generating excitement and buzz. Small tests were operated and the initial rollout wide scale has started. When we go back and we look at some of the data from early 2025, you can see it, 91% of ABM programs had adopted AI in some capacity. My bet hope and hope is that when we look at the data and we refresh it as we are currently doing now. We're gonna see that number go up and IT and Hope and, and I hope it's gonna be at a hundred percent. AI was something that, there's a lot of hype behind it. A lot of vendors are working to integrate it into their platforms. It's almost at the point now where if you don't have some form of ai. In your product roadmap, you're already behind because your competitors do. The large organizations when it comes to, uh, ABM technology, the large. More traditional or the companies that have been around for a really long time, they are moving at lightning speed to work and compete with the AI native companies because they feel the pressure that AI native companies, they are, they might not be at the size and scale of these larger companies that have been around for a while, but they are feeling the pressure because they can see. That there's a lot of investment going into those companies, and they know that if they do not reposition, they will eventually fall behind, especially at the pace of AI innovation. But what we're seeing inside of organizations from a use case perspective is we're still in that initial beginning phase where a lot of companies had initially tested AI across workflows. In their role or across their functional team. So copywriting research, you're taking tasks and workflows that you historically were doing more in a more manual process from an ABM leader, and now you are actually using AI to augment it, do it faster, do it stronger, and taking pieces off of your plate. Especially when it comes to personalization, copywriting, those were some of the, the biggest pieces that. From a use case perspective, we're being deployed as well as analyzing buying signals too. That's another huge piece that AI can, can do effectively. But just at the end of 2025, we were starting to see initial cases of AI embedding across marketing and sales teams. In workflows where marketing and sales we're now combining these workflows and leveraging them together. So an example being the. ABM leader and the SDR team partnering where the ABM team is cre running deep research on the accounts. They are infusing additional signals. The SDR teams are then using all of the signals that the ABM team and the research that the ABM team is creating. The ABM team is creating these, uh, one conversation. It was a. Clickup or monday.com, I believe it was clickup in terms of the tool, but they were actually using that as the brain, so to speak. So they were plugging all their research, even their copy guidelines into this tool. And the SDR teams were leveraging that and creating their email. Copy out of it. The ABM lead was leveraging this to create their assets, like personalized landing pages and ad copy off of this. And so it was really interesting because this is a trend that we absolutely see for 2026 where it's not just these isolated use cases within. Functional teams as in within marketing or within sales, but actually sales, marketing, customer success, other teams having integrated workflows, leveraging ai. Across both teams. So I'm all outta time for today. I have talk about, talk about a teaser. We have our forging forward 10 future predictions for what's Coming in 2026. I'm gonna drop that in the next podcast because I completely ranted and ran out of time. But. So psyched to, to have you all back on our revenue exchange in 2026. We have a massive year coming for, for J. We have some huge what a massive, the biggest product release that we've ever had in for J's. History is gonna be dropping in Q1, and then we have another certification course with one of our favorite partners that we will be dropping. Early Q2, so hang tight. We have massive, massive things on the way. I cannot wait to share. Thank you all for your support. If you're not part of our community, go join. Would love to have you in the conversation and we need you in the conversation. Thanks all for tuning in, and I will catch you on our next one for these 10 future predictions.