How to set up account-driven GTM: TAM mapping, account tiering, signal tracking
Part 2 of 3 in "Shift to account-driven GTM" series
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Account-driven GTM strategies are rapidly becoming table stakes. If you’re still relying on inbound alone, tracking only leads and not accounts too, and not leveraging data enrichment and signal-based workflows, you’ll struggle to compete with companies using this more proactive, account-driven approach.
It’s time to take steps towards mapping your TAM & ICPs into your CRM and running campaigns to these accounts.
In my newsletter 2 weeks ago, I laid out the case for why you should account-driven GTM strategy. This newsletter follows that up with a much more tactical guide.
In this newsletter:
This newsletter is part 2 of a 3 part series. Subscribe so you don’t miss part 3.
Part 1 (2 weeks ago): Why you need to shift to an account-driven strategy
Part 2 (this newsletter!): The set up and foundation required for an account-driven GTM strategy
How to define your TAM (total addressable market), ICPs (ideal customer profiles) & account tiers
How set up account tiers & “signals” in your CRM & GTM stack
Where to start on account-driven GTM set up
Part 3: Deep dive into running signal-based campaigns
For paid subscribers in our template library:
List of 50+ tools to help you orchestrate account-driven GTM
50+ signal-based campaign ideas
Recommended products & agencies
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🎓 Course recommendations on Maven + event on 3/20
I’ve taught 5 month-long cohorts for marketers on Maven, but have taken a pause on teaching to focus on the newsletter, podcast, advising, and investing. Even though I’m not teaching, I think taking Maven courses is an amazing way to grow your career and skillset. So, I’ve teamed up with Maven in a new way.
I’ve curated courses from GTM leaders I trust and think my subscribers will love learning from. Use code KRAMERxMAVEN to get $100 off any of my selected courses.
Mallory Contois, Community-Led Growth: Mallory leads Community at Mercury and started Old Girls Club (where I’m a member).
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Kira Klaas, Brand for Growth-Stage Leaders: Kira has deep experience leading brand teams at startups like Later, Notion, Brex, and Gusto. Her substack (and course) are a can’t miss.
Leah Tharin, Product-led Growth in B2B: Leah hosts ProductTea, my favorite podcast to be a guest on! She’s not only extremely knowledgeable on PLG, but she’s incredibly authentic and funny (my favorite qualities in humans).
Plus more from Ron Kohavi, Kate Syuma, Rob Litterst & Wilson Sadowski on a/b testing, PLG, and Pricing
Event: Choosing your Growth Engine: CLG, PLG, ABX, ETC? on 3/20/25
I’m also bringing together my most trusted expert on PLG (Leah Tharin) & CLG (Mallory Contois) for a real-talk discussion on how to figure out the best way to grow. Despite all the acronyms in this description, we’ll try to minimize the jargon and give you real suggestions on how to scale your growth engine, no matter the path you choose.
Recap: “Account-driven GTM strategy”
Before I jump into my tactical guide to researching accounts, here are the core principles of an account-driven approach to keep in mind:
I use the phrase “Account-driven GTM” to describe this new approach, not ABX or ABM: Account-driven GTM is broader—it structures your entire GTM strategy around accounts, balancing 1:1 personalized outreach with scalable marketing. ABX & ABM are loaded terms and can lead you to ignore brand building and inbound as viable strategies.
Account-driven GTM starts by proactively mapping your TAM & ICPs, followed by determining the best GTM strategy for each account tier, and using intent signals, engagement data, and firmographics to run more effective campaigns.
Account & contact data, everywhere for everyone: This shift is driven by the improved ability to map and track all potential customers—not just a small ABM list of 100 accounts. You can leverage firmographic, demographic, and intent data to more effectively reach your target audience.
This process is not just an expansion of ABM or a minor tweak to inbound: It’s a fundamental shift in how B2B companies approach marketing and sales, requiring changes in operations, analytics, campaign execution, and content creation.
This newsletter will tackle phase 1, the orangey-gold sections. Part 3 will cover the pink phase 2 sections.
A metaphor for setting up an account-driven strategy…
I thought a metaphor might help, and since I need to put away my laundry at this very moment, this one came to mind. Think of organizing your accounts like organizing your clothes.
Step 0 - Structure, map, and prioritize your TAM: Before you can organize your clothes, you need to understand what clothes you even have hanging around your house–on chairs, in drawers, in laundry baskets, etc. You also should understand what clothing size you are today and your rubric for clothes you’ll keep vs get rid of/donate.
Step 1 - Define your account tiers - Once you know what you’re working with, you can then figure out what goes in drawers, on shelves, on hangers or in bins in the basement. That’s account tiering.
Step 2 - Map your TAM into your CRM: Now you can actually start putting clothes into these places. In account-driven GTM that place is your CRM (or data warehouse).
Step 3 - Choose “signals” & campaigns for each tier: Finally, you can start putting together outfits. Outfits are your campaigns.
Step 0: Define your TAM & ICPs
Why is this step 0 and not step 1? Many companies will have already done this regardless of whether you are using an account-driven strategy. Understanding your TAM & ICPs is part of building your marketing strategy & foundation.
🔭 Overview
What to do: Before you can effectively segment and prioritize accounts, you need to define:
Total Addressable Market (TAM): The total universe of companies that could buy from you, regardless of fit or intent. (Pink in the diagram)
Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs): The subset of your TAM that represents your best-fit customers—companies most likely to buy, succeed, and grow with your product (Orange in the diagram)
Not in your TAM: Figuring out who you aren’t targeting is just as important. If a company won’t benefit from your product in the next ~1 year it’s not worth tracking.
Note: In the past, GTM teams sometimes used terms like SAM & SOM to break down their TAM (Green & blue in the diagram)
Never heard of SAM or SOM? That’s probably for the best and you aren’t alone. Here’s the debate on LinkedIn.
I’ve always found SAM & SOM confusing and complicating, so I typically just say “TAM” to mean currently addressable TAM that fits your ICP.
That said, the TAM you use for shaping your GTM efforts might be a bit different than what your company uses to pitch investors on market size (you want your market size to seem big when pitching VCs on your vision, but want to narrow it down for GTM).
As always, use whatever terms that work for your company!
Why do it: It’s hard to start organizing, without knowing what you are actually organizing. And if you don’t have the right targets in the first place, the effort of moving to an account-driven strategy won’t be worth it!
Remember: Unlike traditional ABM, where you focus only on a small list of high-priority accounts, you’re not just creating parameters for a small list of really great-fit accounts. Instead, you’re understanding the whole universe of who you can market and sell to, organizing it, and tracking progress against it.
🛠️ How to define your TAM & ICPs
Explaining how to identify your target audience could easily fill a separate newsletter series. And many of these decisions are made at the company-strategy level. If you’re still at that stage and having high-level conversations, this newsletter I wrote last year on choosing the right size “niche” might help.
Here’s my best advice for identifying your audience in a few bullets:
Start broad, categorize everyone who could buy your product–what are there common characteristics?
From there, think about who can benefit most from your product. Who feels the problem most acutely?
Then, identify who most needs a solution to that product.
You can also look at who your best customers are currently and where you feel the most market pull.
If you aren’t sure if you have it right, try doing a positioning exercise for the audience you’ve selected. If you can’t do it effectively, you may have the wrong audience. See the MKT1 Guide to Positioning for more on this.
From here, you can start developing your ICPs – or the best fit companies and people today.
If you have customers already: who has the shortest sales cycle and highest LTV?
If you don’t have customers yet: who do your competitors and complements target? (Don’t just copy who they target, use it to shape who you should go after).
After you’ve identified your TAM and ICPs:
Pressure test this by looking at the total market size for this audience, running positioning exercises (as I mentioned), and talking to as many people that fit your definition as possible.
Keep a running list of your ICPs in your perceived priority order–and be willing to revisit regularly. More on that in the MKT1 Guide to Annual Marketing Planning.
Make a list of criteria you can use to identify these companies (and individuals within the companies). Don’t limit this to company size and industry–get really specific. If you could access any info you wanted to identify these companies, what would you ask for?
⚠️ Pitfalls to avoid
Getting lost in who is in your TAM, SAM, SOM. The most important thing is you figure out what companies you are targeting, and who within those companies you are targeting. The jargon can be a huge distraction.
Making ICPs too broad. If your ICP is “any SaaS company,” your team will waste time on low-fit accounts–and it will be much harder to differentiate.
Limiting your segmentation to basic firmographics: There are so many data points and criteria you can use now. Get creative!
Quick aside on setting up the right org chart:
Shifting your GTM strategy like this will require some level of team transformation.
Covering how this impacts your org chart is a whole separate newsletter (which I will hopefully write later this year).
That said, this new strategy relies on your GTM teams orienting around account-based goals and coordinating efforts cross-functionally.
You’ll need people who can do account & contact research using modern tools, automate workflows, etc. and you’ll need people who can plan, launch, and measure campaigns by account tier.
How you make this work between Rev Ops, marketing, or SDRs (sales development reps) really depends on how your organization is structured and will likely include some combination of talent across these teams.
Step 1: Create account tiers
🔭 Overview
What to do: Tiers are the primary way of determining the GTM attention your accounts get. Put another way, account tiers are simply a type of segmentation with the specific purpose of helping you prioritize, so you can apply different levels of effort (both time & money) to the right accounts.
You’ll segment your TAM into 3 to 4 tiers based on fit, value, and/or intent—whatever is most useful for your team. You’ll map accounts that fall into these tiers into your CRM.
Why do it: A long list of accounts and contacts is relatively useless without segmentation. Not every account should be treated the same, and thanks to better tools, you can now determine priorities upfront rather than struggling to qualify and route accounts when they come in.
Should you really map your entire TAM? Maybe. Tracking accounts over time is super useful, but it can be costly and distracting. If your TAM is huge (tens to hundreds of thousands), skip it. If it’s smaller, it might be worth it. But, only map your overall TAM if have the sales focus, product alignment, rev ops, and support capacity to handle these accounts—otherwise, stick to mapping the portion of your TAM that fits your ICP for the next ~1 year.
🛠️ How to create account tiers
Tiering criteria
To avoid burying the lede (and yes, that’s how that expression is spelled, it still confuses me too), I recommend tiering by highest ICP fit plus deal size. But to back up, there are a few “variables” you can use to tier accounts. Whatever you decide, have a clear definition for each tier.
ICP fit: Prioritize accounts based how closely they match up to your ICP.
Deal size: Revenue potential now and in the future, based on deal size, expansion potential, and budget. You can also think of this as highest potential LTV (lifetime value).
Intent level: Determine which accounts are actively in-market, using engagement signals, hiring data, and 3rd-party intent.
Tiers: How many & how often?
Most startups have 3 account tiers, but I often recommend 4. Here’s how these break down:
Tier 1: Highest priority and best-fit accounts (this is probably similar to your old ABM list, if you had one).
Tier 2: 2nd highest priority, and usually a good fit, but with a lower potential deal size or likelihood of buying.
Tier 3: In your TAM, but not the highest priority either due to size, revenue potential, or intent.
Tier 4: I use this tier as a catch all for accounts that come inbound that you haven’t mapped. It puts your accounts in a neat and organized bucket–and you can pull from this when you revisit your tiers next quarter.
Note: This isn’t apples to apples comparison with the other tiers because it happens during the quarter, not in advance.
Tiering timeline: Most startups adjust tiers quarterly, but choose a cadence that works for you.
Remember the point of updating account tiers: Reviewing and refining account tiers helps you make sure resources are allocated effectively and that the marketing and sales teams focus on the most promising companies.
A useful KPI with an account-driven strategy = % of accounts in each tier you engage. Given this, switching tiering criteria mid way through the quarter or adding new accounts to tiers as you go along can get tricky from a tracking perspective. So it’s best to have a clear and consistent way of handling accounts that surface during the quarter–one way to do this is to use a 4th tier (as described above).
My recommendation for defining tiers
Recommendation: Overall fit = ICP match + potential size: I suggest using “overall fit” as your primary tiering criteria, which is a combination of ICP match + potential deal size as your tiering criteria.
Intent signals are then layered on top of your tiers (as a separate variable) to drive your campaign and follow up strategies
Including intent size in account tiering: While I like tracking intent separately from account tiers, some companies will want to use intent as a variable to determine tier. If that’s the case, I recommend:
Tier 1 = high fit & high intent
Tier 2= high fit (same as in tier 1) with lower intent
This way, tier 1 are your cherry-picked, highest-of-high priority accounts. And this often aligns better with how sales thinks about deals. Tier 2 are the same level of fit, but have shown less interest.
⚠️ Pitfalls to avoid
Account tiering is just one way of segmenting your accounts: No matter how you tier, adding other fields in your CRM that help you filter and segment your audience will be needed. E.g. company size, funding stage, tech stack, industry, etc.
Relatedly, don’t try to jam every possible criteria you could into your account tier definitions. If you make the definition of each tier too opaque, too subjective or combine too many things, it becomes really hard to assign accounts to tiers. You can always use the additional fields I mentioned above to help you organize and segment campaigns.
Avoid creating unused tiers that simply mirror firmographic breakdowns. If your tiers only reflect company size (e.g., enterprise, mid-market, commercial) that’s a bit redundant and they won’t help prioritize accounts for GTM activities—the core purpose of account tiering!
You also don’t want to have so many tiers they’re not actionable—think about whether your Tier 3, 4, 5, etc. are actually going to be treated differently by your marketing and sales teams.
Account-driven GTM Tools
Now seems like a good time to take a break from running you through the steps to set things up and remind you that there are TONS of tools that can help you with every process mentioned in this newsletter.
Here are just a few that are frequently used, but I have a long list of over 55+ tools in the MKT1 template library, which includes some MKT1 discount codes, categories, descriptions, etc.
And don’t sleep on trying out our partners’ products: Clay, Default, Attio, Pocus, and Mutiny (who put out a fascinating report this week on marketing & sales alignment).
Step 2: Map your “TAM” into your CRM
By TAM, I mean the portion of your TAM that matches your ICP and account tiering definitions.
🔭 Overview
What to do: Add account and contact data for each tier into your CRM or data warehouse. You’ll start with whatever data you need to define and your tiers, then add in signals and data later.
Why do it: By having account and contact information in your CRM from the start, you can proactively track intent and engagement to determine who is ready and likely to buy. You can comprehensively market and sell to the right companies and people.
🛠️ How to add your TAM to your CRM
Take the criteria you established above and identify what sources you’ll need to use to filter the universe of companies to match your TAM.
Then use this criteria to research accounts using data enrichment tools, and populate each tier with all relevant accounts.
Some might already be in your CRM from other research efforts or leads that came inbound–that’s great, just make sure you don’t lose the history on those. This also serves as a reminder to watch out for messy duplicates. Routing tools like Default can help here!
Populate each account with contacts, based on who is typically involved in the evaluation and purchasing process for your product.
Add all relevant firmographics you need for tiering as fields in your CRM (for instance, your tier 1 definition might require that a company have an employee in a specific role (like a CFO). It’s best to add both an individual field for “role” and a separate field for field for account tier).
Note: It’s nearly impossible to do this step without the right tools and it will be a decent-sized project even if you do have the right tools. To ease the burden of getting this done, remember you only need to add the necessary data to make sure accounts are a fit for each tier at first. You can take a phased approach and add more firmographic and contact data later. You can also just start with tier 1! Advice for how to start small is at the end of the newsletter.
I made an attempt to list out some of the fields you may need to create to do this, more are listed in my template & resource library.
⚠️ Pitfalls to avoid
Data hygiene is critical here! Define what data you want to collect before you invest tons of time into account research—and watch out for duplicates.
Dumping data into your CRM without a clear plan will only create chaos down the line, so it’s a fine line between having a bunch of data to segment and prioritize and creating a mess. Always keep this in mind!
Don’t throw out your old contact-focused funnel. Instead, think of this account-mapping process as layering on an account-based view to your database, not replacing it. You still need to be able to track activities by contact, but also see how an account is progressing at a high level.
In Salesforce, because there are “objects” for both Leads and Contacts, it can get messy if you have old Leads that haven’t been converted into Contacts and associated with the right Accounts (meaning you just have phantom leads hanging out in your CRM!). It’s a good idea to clean this up first before you start researching contacts, so you don’t end up with duplicates and incomplete engagement history.
Step 3: Choose “signals” to track for each account & contact
🔭 Overview
What to do: In this step, you’ll connect more data points to get the info needed to run campaigns (both automated and triggered campaigns, as well as ad hoc campaigns), further prioritize between accounts in the same tier, and move accounts through various “engagement” stages.
Intent signals are a behavioral or data-driven indicator that a company or individual fits with your ICP definition, is actively researching or considering a product in this category, or is ready to buy. Intent signals will help you prioritize your accounts, trigger marketing and sales activity (alongside ICP fit, revenue potential, and other data), and craft relevant content.
Why do it? You’ve mapped the most important information for your company already–you used that to create tiers. But, way more data is available to help you better reach the right people at the right companies at the right time. Using this “signal” data will help you better tailor your efforts to the right people and accounts.
🛠️ How to choose signals
Are signals just a modern term for lead scoring or behavioral activity? Yes, kind of. We have more data we can use, so maybe we needed a broader catch all for this stuff, or a fancy new name, but either way, signals seem here to stay, so I’m leaning in.
Remember, you already should have added the data required to divide your accounts into tiers to your CRM. Now it’s time to establish which 1st, 2nd, and 3rd party signals you want to track.
Start by tracking the data points that indicate if a prospect or company is facing the problem you solve, considering a similar solution, or showing interest in your specific product.
It’s also useful to map out the always on and ad-hoc campaigns you want to run, and back into the signals you need (e.g. if you want to run a campaign for people that follow a partner on LinkedIn, you’ll need to pull that “signal” into your product).
Next, determine the source of your signals. This will include how you get 1st party (your own data), 2nd party (partner’s data), and 3rd party (from external tools and sources) into your tools and workflows–see diagram below for additional details.
Integrate these tools and data sources with your CRM and marketing automation tool, so you have email outreach, campaign influence, engagement in a centralized place. Managing this across multiple tools is challenging, so make sure it also flows into your source of truth platform!
Lots of people define signals as “1st, 2nd, and 3rd party signals”. I find this doesn’t really help me categorize or brainstorm all the potential signal-based campaigns I can run. So, I like to make a very long list of potential options for campaigns and signals (not worrying about the difference), and then prioritize this list and map it to tiers—I started this list for you, and a longer list is available for paid subscribers.
⚠️ Pitfalls to avoid
Start small. Identify the initial campaigns you want to run, and start tracking those signals.
Signal overload: If you start tracking everything, it can be extremely overwhelming to determine what campaigns to run.
Outreach overload: Even worse, if you don’t set up proper rules of engagement, you can send way too many communications to one person or company (especially if sales & marketing don’t have clear stages and rules of engagement).
Some signals just won’t make sense for your audience or align with the campaigns you want to run (e.g. While some companies may be comfortable reaching out to everyone who commented on a LinkedIn post, others might not).
Tracking account stages: Since we’re talking about rev ops set up, I have to note that to measure success of your account-driven strategy, you need to set up account stages in your CRM. Without these, it’s hard to track progress, trigger the right GTM actions, and align sales and marketing on who owns the next step. These stages should update automatically in your CRM based on intent signals and GTM activity. And while an account-driven strategy is by definition account-first, contact-level tracking still matters too. I’ll dive deeper into running and measuring account-driven campaigns in Part 3 of this series.
How to baby step into an account-driven set up
If you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed by this process, that’s okay. It’s a bit overwhelming, as it’s a pretty big state change in how we operate in GTM. You’re shifting from reactive to proactive. You’re building out a whole new “layer” of ops set up. You’re adding in new campaign types.
The good thing about all of this is you don’t need to do this all at once, here’s how you can move a bit more gradually to an account-driven GTM strategy:
Start by mapping tier 1 only: You’ll still need a high-level plan for what will go into tiers 2 and 3 in the future, but you can start with just doing account & contact research for tier 1, and get that into your CRM.
Run personalized campaigns to tier 1 accounts for a quarter: See how this performs and learn what works in a less scalable way, then take whats works and automate more of this process for your tier 2 and tier 3 accounts.
Don’t “turn off” inbound! Actually at no point in the process will you completely abandon inbound. You always want people looking for you to be able to find you and either jump into the product or book a meeting right away. So don’t switch all of your focus just to tier 1, personalized, outbound and traditional “ABM” strategies.
Track just a few signals at first: Choose the ones thatrea most correlated with closing deals. Maybe that’s attending a webinar, maybe that’s having a specific role at a company, maybe it’s using a complementary product. Don’t feel like you need a million signals tracked and every data point ever in your CRM!
Takeaways
Account-driven GTM starts with mapping and prioritizing your TAM: Before you can tier and target accounts effectively, you need to define your TAM, ICPs, and what’s outside your market—this way your GTM efforts are focused on the right companies.
Account tiering is essential for prioritization: Not all accounts should be or need to be treated the same (anymore). Segmenting into tiers (based on ICP fit, deal size, and intent) helps allocate resources efficiently across marketing and sales.
Use modern tools to map your TAM into your CRM: Adding account and contact data ensures you can track engagement, run targeted campaigns, and measure progress over time. Without a structured CRM setup, scaling account-driven GTM is nearly impossible.
Tracking signals helps you engage accounts at the right time. Move beyond basic firmographics—leverage 1st, 2nd, and 3rd-party intent signals to prioritize accounts, trigger marketing and sales activity, and tailor outreach based on engagement data. - More on this in the next newsletter in the series!
Start by mapping and running campaigns for Tier 1 accounts before scaling to other tiers. Keep inbound running, track a few key signals, and build on the strategy quarter over quarter.
Read next post in the series: Guide to signal-based campaigns
More from MKT1
🙏 Thanks again to our sponsors: Default, for automating inbound workflows; Attio, the next-generation CRM with built-in AI; and Brand24, social listening for brand tracking. All 3 companies have MKT1 discounts!
📖 Additional reading: Mutiny just released their State of Marketing and Sales Alignment report. Only 15% of sellers trust marketing to drive enterprise pipeline–we’ve clearly got a long way to go on GTM teams working together. They have a ton of interesting stats on the marketing and sales relationship, check it out here.
🧑🎓 Recommended courses: I’ve partnered with Maven, where I used to teach courses, to curate courses from GTM leaders I admire. Get $100 off by signing up on my Maven page.
📰 Next newsletter: Account-driven GTM part 3 will hit your inbox in early March.
🎙️ Next podcast: Dear Marketers Episode 3 is out on Wednesday, answering the question “How do I hire a great team?”
📅 Next Event: Choosing your Growth Engine: CLG, PLG, ABX, ETC? on 3/20/25 with Mallory Contois, Leah Tharin—co-hosted by Maven. RSVP Here »
🧑🚀 Job board: Jobs from the MKT1 community
✂️ Template & resource library (for paid subscribers)
List of 50+ tools to use in an account-driven GTM, recommendations for products to help you with account and contact prospecting, tracking intent and qualifying accounts, planning campaigns, and measuring performance.
50+ signal-based campaign ideas to help identify signals, craft campaigns for your target accounts, and organize your accounts into tiers (don’t miss all 3 tabs).
Additional resources: Fields list, account tiering methods, signal-type definitions