It’s budget planning season. If you are newer to your role or newer to the budget process, let me share what we’ve learned over the last 10 years so you avoid making costly mistakes.
ABM budgeting can be tricky depending on your situation – how do you budget for it? We’re going to run on the assumption that you have a US headquartered company that may be reaching global companies. Of course, your mileage may vary, so use this as a directional guide rather than the absolute.
Most answers to that question start with a percentage. “Put 30% into ABM.” That is the wrong place to start.
A percentage tells you what mature programs spend. It does not tell you what your program has earned. And a large budget makes the mistake easier, not harder. You can afford the platform, the agency and the big account list on day one. So you buy all three before you know if the motion works.
My rule: the stage sets the spend, not the size of the wallet.
The framework
| Stage | How to size it | What you are buying | Gate to the next stage |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Prove | A fixed dollar amount | Evidence | Sales is working the accounts and engagement or pipeline moves against a baseline |
| 2. Scale | Per-account math by tier | Coverage | Results repeat across tiers and sales can absorb more accounts |
| 3. Mature | A portfolio of motions, checked against a share of budget | Efficiency | Annual rebalancing by account value |
Money moves to the next stage when the gate is passed. Not when the fiscal year turns over.
Stage 1: Prove
Size the pilot in dollars, not percent. Plan on a one time investment of approximately $25,000.
That buys one segment, a short account list, one or two plays and a measurement baseline. Rent your technology. Do not sign an annual platform contract to run a 90-day test. Consider an outsourced agency to augment internal expertise, baseline the starting point, and provide guidance around the roadmap.
Set the baseline before you start. If you cannot say what “better” looks like for these accounts, you cannot pass the gate.
One more thing. Give ABM its own budget line before the year starts. I watched one team bring a $90,000 ABM ask forward after the budget was already set. It came to roughly a quarter of their discretionary spend, under use-it-or-lose-it pressure. That is a hard way to fund anything.
Stage 2: Scale
Now the math changes. You stop asking “how much for ABM?” and start asking “how much per account, by tier?”
Tier your accounts. Fund the top tier heavily and the bottom tier lightly. One practitioner rule of thumb puts 50–60% of ABM spend on Tier 1, 30–35% on Tier 2 and 10–15% on Tier 3. One team I spoke with carves out a further 15% for a handful of “whale” accounts above Tier 1.
The business case has to cover people and skills, content, implementation and ongoing effort. Platform fees are the smallest part of what scaling costs.
As you scale, ABM typically grows toward 15–20% of the marketing budget. Inflexion Group’s 2026 benchmark of large enterprises found an average of 17% of budget and 14% of marketing headcount dedicated to ABM.
Stage 3: Mature
A mature program runs several motions at once. Each has its own price.
Bev Burgess shared these benchmarks on our Account Based Marketing show recently. Her sample was very mature programs at very large companies, so treat them as a ceiling, not a starting point.
| Motion | Typical annual spend | Reported range |
|---|---|---|
| 1:1 strategic | About $38,000 per account | $10,000–$93,000 |
| Scenario-based | About $28,000 per account | $2,000–$75,000 |
| Cluster (1:few) | About £95,000 per segment of roughly 10 accounts | |
| Programmatic (1:many) | About $36,000 per 500 accounts | |
| Pursuit marketing | About $50,000 per deal | $1,000–$348,000 |
Build the budget bottom-up from those per-account numbers. Then check it against share of budget. Momentum ITSMA’s practitioner surveys put ABM at 28% of marketing budget in 2022 and 30% in 2023. 6sense’s 2025 data shows roughly 30%, level with inbound and outbound.
If your bottom-up number lands far above 30%, your account list is too long for your tiers.
Where the money goes
There is no rigorous benchmark for how to split an ABM budget by category. Vendor guidance contradicts itself. So here is my view, by stage.
| Stage | People and agency | Content | Programs and media | Tech and data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Prove | 50% | 25% | 15% | 10% |
| Scale | 40% | 20% | 20% | 20% |
| Mature | 35% | 15% | 30% | 20% |
The pattern: people first, technology last.
The broader data points the same way. Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey shows martech falling to 19.4% of marketing budgets, a five-year low, while labor rose to 24.5%. CMOs are learning that tools do not run themselves.
Three rules
- Size the pilot in dollars. Percentages are for programs that have proven something.
- Cap tech and data at about a quarter of ABM spend. At every stage. A big budget tends to go to platforms first. Resist it.
- Hold the rest in reserve. Release it when a gate is passed.
A bigger budget is a good problem. It is still a problem. Spend it in the order the program earns it.
Sources
- Inflexion Group, 2026 ABM Benchmarking Study
- Momentum ITSMA and 6sense budget share figures, as compiled by Market Intelligence Tools and Milan Novotny
- Gartner 2026 CMO Spend Survey, as reported by Chief Marketer
- Tier split rule of thumb, Demand Loops
- Bev Burgess, “Global ABM evolution & benchmarks” episode, October 2025