Fishing with spears, not nets. That was the original promise of account-based marketing.
Based on what we hear in the field, that promise hasn’t been kept.
Legacy ABM tools have become entrenched across GTM—and exacerbated sales and marketing misalignment in the process.
MQLs that don’t SQL. Sales quotas that go unmet. And lots of fingerpointing over missed SLAs and revenue targets.
But the tide is turning.
More and more teams are moving away from vague, anonymous, account-only intent in favor of precise, person-first, and truly actionable intent that serves both marketing and sales use cases.
We call it person-level ABM.
This is why the ABM status quo is changing—and how our customers are charting a new path forward for account-based pipegen.
“Common Room is a hit. We’re able to track intent signals at the account level, quickly connect them to real people at the contact level, and reach out fast with a personalized AI message tailored to the activity. All in one place built for our SDRs and AEs. 6sense is dead.”
Abhishek Agrawal
CEO
Failed patterns and fundamental flaws
Rewind the clock to when ABM platforms first gained serious traction.
The pitch was compelling: Stop wasting resources on unqualified accounts and focus your firepower on high-value target accounts.
Marketing and sales would finally speak the same language, reps could apply the Pareto Principle to their territories, and pipeline generation would become wonderfully predictable.
But nearly every GTM leader we speak to about their ABM program describes the same failed pattern:
Marketing deploys a traditional ABM tool that uses bidstream data and account-level web visits to identify intent and target accounts. When intent is identified, it bumps up a black box account score.
Marketing begins to blanket anyone who remotely matches an ideal persona at a high-scoring account with paid ads and passes the account to sales.
But the intent is anonymous beyond the account level, with zero context about who’s behind it or why.
Sales struggles to take action. Reps don’t know who to contact or what to say. They resort to spray-and-pray outreach and generic messaging—or they ignore the intent score altogether.
Pipeline suffers and the vicious cycle begins.
Marketing points to its 6QAs and blames sales for poor execution. Sales points to its missed pipe targets and blames marketing for passing over accounts they can’t really chase, let alone convert.
Meanwhile, the company is on the hook for a six-figure, multi-year contract for a glorified demand-side platform.
The fundamental flaw with legacy ABM tools is three-fold:
1. Ambiguous intent: Bidstream data reveals research and consumption events, but not the full spectrum of buying signals happening across channels.
2. Anonymous data: Offsite and onsite intent data stops at the account level, meaning sales is left to guess who they should get in touch with.
3. Black box scoring: Accounts are prioritized based on opaque scoring algorithms that sales teams simply don’t trust.
The result is a glut of unactionable “intent” and a growing divide across GTM.
Old ABM vs. new ABM
Our customers are building a new way to ABM—one that’s not restricted by legacy limitations.
| Traditional ABM | Person-level ABM |
|---|---|
Marketing-first, sales-second | Pipeline-first |
Inferred intent signals | Real buyer actions |
Account-level visibility | Person- and account-level visibility |
Black box scoring | Transparent, contextual scoring |
AI as an afterthought | AI-native |
This is how:
Offsite intent
Old way
Use offsite research and consumption events to identify accounts showing intent.
New way
Unify account-level research and consumption events happening off your website with every first-, second-, and third-party buying signal—as well as a proprietary, constantly refreshed database of more than 200 million B2B contacts and accounts—to identify high-intent, high-fit contacts at every organization.
Common Room’s embedded integration with Bombora gives you access to intent data from more than 4,000 business publishers, analysts, vendors, and content syndication providers—right alongside our comprehensive, person-level signal capture.
This enables marketing to surface account-level intent for ABM targeting and sales to identify the right contacts for outreach.
“Common Room’s partnership with Bombora offers the best of both worlds: offsite intent at the account level and intent signals bubbling up across channels at the contact level. It opens the door to something missing from legacy ABM tools: The ability to quickly target in-market accounts and reach out to the right buyer just as fast.”
Mario Moscatiello
Head of Growth
Onsite intent
Old way
Identify accounts visiting high-intent pages on your website.
New way
Identify the buying committee members visiting high-intent pages on your website with the industry-leading solution in website visitor identification.
Common Room’s out-of-the-box integration with Vector gives you up to 50% person-level visibility across US-based web traffic and the ability to action on it instantly.
This provides marketing and sales teams unparalleled person-level visibility across web visits and allows them to segment, score, and sync contacts with CRMs, marketing automation platforms, and sales execution platforms without ever switching screens.
“Our contact identification rate has more than doubled, helping us surface key target account engagements. By combining person-level identification with Common Room’s ability to connect web visits to other buying signals, our sales team has the context they need to engage more effectively.”
Jay Saling
Demand Generation Lead
Internal intent
Old way
Miss out on key account context locked up in your data warehouse, CRM, and Gong calls or spend hours trying to manually compile it for each account.
New way
Prioritize accounts using custom data objects tailored to your internal data sources and data model—as well as conversational insights pulled from Gong call recordings—automatically and at scale.
Common Room’s customer journey graph—as well as our integration with Gong—allows marketing and sales teams to unify any internal data and signals with external buying signals and automatically extract actionable insights via AI agents.
Granular insights in Snowflake and Salesforce, key persona and competitor mentions in Gong—they’re all available to score and prioritize accounts.
"With Common Room's Gong integration, we've transformed our call recordings from passive archives into active pipeline generators. AI agents automatically surface opportunities from conversations that we would have missed entirely."
Moritz Douglas
Sales Manager
Ecosystem intent
Old way
Stay blind to intent signals across digital channels or purchase multiple point solutions and try to stitch them together with legacy intent data.
New way
Capture every person-level intent signal across channels in one platform and automatically tie contacts to accounts via out-of-the-box identity resolution and waterfall enrichment.
Common Room’s 50-plus native integrations with popular digital channels, data warehouses, CRMs, SEPs, and more give marketing and sales teams complete visibility into the buyer universe across every channel, including owned data sources.
Product usage, social engagements, open-source activity, community interactions—every buying signal at the person and account level is served up on a silver platter.
“Common Room’s scope is a competitive differentiator. It has more integrations, more signals, more ways to see where prospects are engaging with us. I felt like I was buying an AI copilot, enrichment tool, product tracking tool, website tracking tool, social tracking tool, and job-change tracking tool all at the same time.”
Jason Klumpp
Director of Sales Development
Custom account intent
Old way
Try to hunt down relevant data using a third-party LLM and stitch it together with ABM intent data to assist with account prioritization and personalization.
New way
Let an AI agent proactively find, synthesize, and summarize any custom account insight you want from owned data sources and the public web based on your unique business needs and GTM motion.
Common Room’s suite of AI agents—RoomieAI™—allow marketing and sales to automatically surface custom account intelligence from both internal data sources and the open internet.
This empowers them to fully automate account research and generate personalized messaging for nurture or prospecting campaigns in real time based on any data point or signal.
“Common Room's AI agent is a major unlock for hyper-targeting at scale. Now we can filter down large account lists fast to build highly refined segments of companies showing intent that match our ICP—with none of the manual processes and generic data points that come with legacy ABM tools.”
Jay Saling
Demand Generation Lead
Contextual scoring
Old way
Trust black box algorithms to tell you which accounts to prioritize with limited explanation of why or how it should inform outreach.
New way
Score both leads and accounts using every data point and signal captured in Common Room based on your custom weighting and see exactly how each action and attribute influenced the score.
Common Room’s contextual, signal-based scoring delivers fully customizable, constantly refreshed, and completely transparent lead and account scores to marketing and sales teams using any combination of machine learning-enriched fit and behavioral data you want.
“Common Room has transformed our GTM operations by providing a flexible platform that seamlessly integrates with our proprietary ML data models while enhancing them with additional signals."
Jeff Bedford
Direct of Marketing Operations
Person-level ABM in action
Workvivo by Zoom is an ideal case study in what person-level ABM looks like.
The marketing team works closely with sales to deliver cross-channel, person-level visibility in Common Room.
“Common Room is a living, breathing dashboard with real-time insights about real individuals and real engagement signals rather than static visuals of an account,” said Global ABM Manager Joe Broome.
The GTM org uses a combination of HubSpot engagement data, web visits, LinkedIn interactions, job changes, job listings, and other signals to target accounts, identify prospects at the person level, and inform lead and account scoring.
Prospects and accounts are automatically tagged based on preset fit and behavioral criteria using automated workflows, such as companies that mention certain competitive technologies in their job postings.
If the team only has account-level visibility, it uses Common Room’s Prospector feature to find and enrich high-fit contacts.
Contacts and accounts are automatically scored, segmented, and surfaced in a prioritized view via AI and automated workflows so sales reps can work the best accounts first with full context.
Meanwhile, the marketing team is able to improve its nurture campaigns based on the same intelligence.
“Common Room is also helping us improve our nurture emails as well,” Joe said. “It's a free flowing of information between marketing and sales. Common Room is very much that connector.”
And both teams can use RoomieAI Capture to further assist with prioritization and personalization, like zeroing in on accounts based on their current tech stacks.
The result is a high-functioning, highly targeted pipegen engine powered by every available data point and signal at both the person and account level.
“We’re speaking to real buyers earlier in the buying cycle and engaging them with messaging that’s personalized based on all the data and signals in Common Room,” Joe said.
A better way to ABM
Every signal—onsite and off. At the account and person level. Deanonymized and fully enriched. Made actionable for marketing and sales via AI and automation.
It’s not the future. It’s what modern GTM teams are doing now, today.
Person-level ABM delivers on the promise legacy tools have failed to live up to: Fishing with spears, not nets.
As growth and efficiency expectations continue to rise, GTM orgs must be able to rapidly narrow down their TAMs and engage the right people at the right accounts with better prioritization and personalization than their competitors.
Common Room will keep building the platform that helps them do it.
Fix broken ABM with Common Room
Get started for free or get in touch to see how Common Room’s GTM AI shows you who to target, when to engage, and how to convert.