Why lead scoring models fail in ABM (and how to fix it)

If you’ve spent any significant time in Account-Based Marketing (ABM), you know the challenges of alignment between marketing and sales all too well.

Your team puts a lot of effort into producing great content and executing campaigns across multiple channels—all on a limited budget.

Then you design an advanced lead scoring system that surfaces contacts with a significant level of engagement—and turns them into marketing-qualified leads (MQLs), ready to be approached.

But then the MQLs you worked so hard for go untouched for months.

Where is the disconnect?

Sure, it’s easy to blame Sales for not taking action. And in some cases, there is truth to that.

But as someone who has worked closely with dozens of ABM marketers from startups and enterprises alike, I’ve witnessed firsthand how being overly reliant on scoring models can hinder your alignment with Sales.

Don’t get me wrong, the idea behind scoring leads is logical and has the Sales team’s best interest in mind: give them the most engaged prospects so they don’t waste time on people who are not ready to buy.

Lead scoring works great as a means of filtering out the noise when your SDRs have little time left outside of talking to all the inbound leads they’re flooded with. That is, when you go out to a very wide market, and that market’s in great shape.

But ABM isn’t exactly “going out to a wide market”, is it? 

ABM can look different across various organizations, but usually entails going after a carefully picked list of top ICP companies. Often, though not always, they are in the Enterprise segment.

Another common trait is that the buying power in those target accounts mostly belongs to a limited number of senior stakeholders (usually Director+). Those people are typically hard to reach, let alone engage.

It’s in this new reality that scoring models fall flat.

A combination of “top companies” and “senior stakeholders” means very bad news for MQL-oriented marketers.

The biggest obstacle?

They are not coming for your e-book or webinar. And you can bet they have more important things to do than filling out a form on your website or reading your newsletter and clicking on links inside it.

Expecting C-level execs and directors to proactively engage with your brand to the point they become an MQL is unrealistic at best.

Not that it’s impossible. But, since ABM limits us to a finite list of chosen accounts, the stream of such high-quality leads ends up being so meager that its very existence can be neglected.

The limited number of qualified leads from each target account isn’t just a marketing issue—it has a ripple effect that creates friction between teams that should be aligned (Marketing and Sales).

Here’s how I’ve seen that misalignment play out in practice countless times.

The MQLs that pop up from ABM campaigns are individual contributors who have little to no influence on decision-making.

How Sales treats these leads varies from company to company. 

If you’ve got a newly hired SDR team, they usually jump at these leads with enthusiasm. But as months go by, it becomes apparent that none of those MQLs led to any significant qualified pipeline.

Seasoned SDRs & AEs already know it’s not worth their time, so they often ignore MQLs altogether.

Instead, they look for people with buying power and spend time on good old cold prospecting, which defeats the purpose of scoring leads.

The simple graph below demonstrates the disconnect between marketing “leads” and who Sales really wants to talk to. The horizontal axis reflects the level of engagement of the prospect, while the vertical axis represents their decision-making power.

When I try to recall all the times I discussed this specific problem with ABM marketers, one particular case stands out. 

The team I talked to was fixated on the idea of increasing the number of MQLs, while their Sales team was doing cold outreach on the side.

I asked them if their MQLs had higher conversion rates when outreached by Sales compared to cold prospects, since MQLs presumably are so engaged.

“Actually,” one of them replied hesitantly, “our MQLs conversion rate is lower than that of cold prospects.”

Back then it struck me as an astonishing discovery, but now that I look back on it, it makes total sense (see graph above).

ABM pipeline is mainly Sales-driven due to the complexity of the deal cycle. 

However, Marketing can and should help Sales drive that pipeline and accelerate it to revenue. 

But while generating leads seems like the most obvious way to do that, it’s not the only way. And when it comes to ABM, it’s far from the best option.

So, where else can Marketing provide value? 

Gong’s Udi Ledergor put it very well: “making sales easier”. 

For one thing, cold outreach is no walk in the park. If business leaders paid attention to all the prospecting emails they get and listened to every cold caller, it would make their heads spin.

It’s hard for your SDRs to break through all that noise. 

Any awareness or engagement you can build among the buying committees could prove valuable. It helps SDRs pick a better moment and a more relevant message for their outreach.

The only way to pull this off is by surrounding those specific decision-makers with relevant content everywhere you can. 

Luckily there are solutions out there to make it happen.

In this flow, you’re no longer asking Sales to reach out to someone whose contact details you traded for a downloadable PDF. (Okay, two PDFs and one email click from them.)

Instead, you’re warming up their own prospects—people they already care about—to your brand and messaging. 

In other words, you generate intent exactly where Sales needs it. And rather than wait for MQLs, you surface every intent signal from those decision-makers back to the SDRs.

A well-executed sales air cover tactic increases the likelihood of account penetration and results in more meetings with the right people. 

That, in turn, means more qualified pipeline, which inevitably leads to higher revenue.

It’s not a hypothetical concept.

ABM marketers I worked with saw a boost of 1.5X to 3X on cold prospecting conversion rates with buying committees who engaged with marketing content (without ever filling out any forms).

Now that’s what I call true synergy between Marketing and Sales. Or, in other words, revenue marketing.

This approach works beyond the top of the funnel. There’s value in implementing it throughout the entire sales cycle, all the way to Closed Won (and even past that point).

When a deal lands in the pipeline, the sales rep (and sometimes a solution engineer like myself) enters a long journey—months of relationship-building with the buying committee. But there’s little chance for them to meet every single member of the buying committee.

The modern B2B buying journey is anything but straightforward.

Whatever marketing can do to influence the decision-making process will help Sales better multithread, which improves deal velocity and increases win rates.

There are more use cases like this, but all of them follow the same core principle: instead of throwing irrelevant leads over the fence and washing their hands of it, Marketing shadows Sales everywhere they go, “making sales easier” and improving business outcomes across the board.

That’s why it’s called sales “air cover”. 

Sales are like troops on the ground, and one cannot launch a successful campaign without proper air support. That’s how essential Marketing’s role is in ABM.

Measuring Marketing success by MQLs is straightforward. Any pipeline that started with an MQL is credited to Marketing; the rest is considered Sales-sourced. 

But how do you manage attribution with an Air Cover strategy, where you are not trying to generate MQLs in the first place?

Naturally, if you change your goals, you have to change the way you define success. There’s no way around it. 

Traditional attribution models are not capable of representing the full picture of marketing influence on pipeline in an ABM play.

Consider a situation where Sales closes a deal they’ve been working on for the past year. 

During this time, multiple contacts from the buying group have seen ads tailored to their role and interacted with a few of them. This includes the final signatory—their CEO—who the AE never got a chance to talk to directly.

But the initial meeting was booked by an SDR who’d been reaching out to a contact they sourced, and there has not been a single MQL or form-fill involved.

How would you measure marketing’s influence on that deal with an attribution model?

Spoiler alert, you probably can’t.

If your team is measured only or primarily by MQLs, ABM may prove to be a never-ending struggle. 

As a solution engineer, I’ve been through cases where I had to refuse to sell our contact level advertising platform to teams who were willing to buy.

The reason was very similar every time: I knew those teams would not be able to unlock the value of the solution with their KPIs (MQLs, first-touch attribution, etc.).

Walking away from a deal is a bitter pill to swallow, even more so for my AE partner. But we believe in honest sales. If you know your solution cannot help this specific buyer for now, it’s best to be upfront about it.

Make no mistake—there are ways to properly measure the success of marketing efforts in ABM. 

However, I can’t fit them into this article as it’s a huge topic of its own. But you can check this separate piece if you’d like to learn more about an alternative to attribution.

Lead scoring is an inbound tactic by its nature. 

It helps filter lead traffic from wider marketing campaigns, but it can’t lure a small set of handpicked individuals through an artificially designed “marketing funnel”.

ABM, on the other hand, is inherently an outbound motion. 

When Sales and Marketing go after the same contacts at the same time, there is no “handoff” and fingerpointing. There is alignment because both teams partner to achieve one goal—revenue growth.

That doesn’t mean you have to ditch your entire lead scoring system overnight. 

Introducing the air cover tactic alongside your existing marketing motions can be a solid first step to a more strategic ABM approach. 

The next logical step would be re-evaluating marketing success criteria.

If you’re looking for ways to influence specific buying committees in your ABM accounts to drive more pipeline and revenue (and measure the results), consider Influ2, our contact-level advertising solution.

Should you book a demo, I’ll be happy to learn about your daily struggles and share best practices from the most successful ABM practitioners I worked with (think Datadog, Snowflake, Crowdstrike and more).