ABM Benchmarks: Who Was Counted, and When

Demandbase's Labs report on the state of ABM in 2026, read on 18 September 2026, states its population in the title: 1,452 companies, which the body defines as 1,452 tenants, each a Demandbase instance, plus 429,634 ad campaigns, 38 million marketing activities and 9.7 million sales interactions. 6sense's guide to ABM metrics, rendered the same day, cites its own 2025 report for the claim that nearly 80 percent of organisations have an ABM programme while only 29 percent of ABM teams are measured solely through ABM-aligned metrics, and does not say how many people were asked. Both are benchmark pages. Only one says what sits under the line.

That is the reading rule here. Every account-based marketing benchmark is a ratio, and the ABM metrics guide works through why the denominator is the number a programme can quietly choose. This page does the other half of the job: it collects the published figures, dates each one, and records for each whether the publisher stated a population, so that a team setting targets knows which numbers were measured and which were asserted. Figures from the four publishers that guide already reads, Zoomforth, Improvado, Salesmotion and Influ2, are not repeated here. The platforms the figures describe are compared in account-based marketing platforms and ABM tools.

How to read a benchmark before you adopt it

Three questions decide whether a published figure can become a target. Who was counted: marketers surveyed about their own programmes, or platform telemetry watching accounts move. When: a fielding window or a publication date, because a 2023 win-rate lift describes 2023 buying committees. And what the ratio divides by, the question source pages most often leave out.

A figure that answers all three is a benchmark. A figure that answers none is a claim, and the honest thing to do with a claim is to record it as one. The sections below apply that test to each publisher, in the order of how much they disclose.

Demandbase Labs: the one with a stated population

Demandbase's State of ABM 2026 report is platform telemetry rather than a survey, and it says so: 1,452 tenants, 429,634 ad campaigns, 38 million marketing activities and 9.7 million sales interactions, analysed to identify the patterns that consistently drive stronger pipeline. Its figures, as published on 18 September 2026:

Per the report, teams operating within more mature frameworks see a 22.33 percent median MQA conversion rate, against 14.19 percent for less mature programmes. Per the same report, companies tracking three to four buying groups see a 48.5 percent higher win rate than organisations taking a broader, less structured approach. Companies using four advertising products report a 58.7 percent win rate, which the report describes as a 71 percent lift over companies running none. The report states that organisations connecting CRM, marketing automation and predictive models achieve MQA-to-pipeline conversion rates above 22 percent against a 14 percent baseline among teams with limited integration. And the report states that buying groups receiving 180 to 190 touches reach a 94 percent conversion rate.

Two cautions travel with those numbers. The population is Demandbase customers, so every figure describes programmes already running on an ABM platform, and the maturity and integration splits compare customers to other customers. And the four-ad-products figure compares Demandbase's own advertising tiers, published by the vendor that sells them. Neither caution makes the figures wrong. Both make them a description of a platform's customer base rather than of B2B marketing at large.

6sense: a survey without a count on the page

6sense's guide to ABM metrics, rendered in a headless browser on 18 September 2026 after the vendor's apex refused plain fetches, cites its 2025 report titled What's (Currently) Measured Isn't What Matters for four figures: nearly 80 percent of organisations report having an ABM programme; only 29 percent of ABM teams are measured solely through ABM-aligned metrics; only 13 percent of ABM programmes report closed-won revenue to leadership; and 57 percent of account-based teams use a combined sourced and influenced attribution approach. The guide also states that marketing qualified accounts from target accounts are tracked almost equally with marketing qualified leads from non-target accounts, 49 percent against 44 percent.

The guide states no respondent count and no fielding window for that report, and the report itself was not opened for this page, so its population is recorded as not stated on the page read. The guide's other numbers, that buyers do 84 percent of their research anonymously and that a deal typically involves 150 to 200 touchpoints, appear without a source and are recorded as claims.

The guide also offers worked examples, such as a company whose best fifth of accounts generate three times the pipeline and convert 40 percent faster, and a range of 15 to 25 percent account-to-opportunity conversion for SaaS against 8 to 12 percent for manufacturing. Those are illustrations, not measurements, and should not be quoted as 6sense benchmarks.

Source	Method	Population on the page
Demandbase Labs, 2026	Platform telemetry	Stated: tenants, campaigns, activities
6sense guide	Survey, via its 2025 report	Not stated
Forrester blog	Survey, 2024	Not stated
ZoomInfo guide	Directional ranges	Not stated
Starr Conspiracy catalogue	Secondary catalogue	Stated for two of five studies

Forrester: one figure, one named survey

Forrester's ABM blog category page, read on 18 September 2026, carries one benchmark figure in its post summaries. A post by Kelvin Gee dated 28 January 2025 states that according to Forrester's Demand, ABM, And Customer Marketing Survey, 2024, 56 percent of opportunities handed off to sales fail to close successfully. The survey is named and dated; the respondent count is not on the category page, and the survey itself sits behind client access, so the population is recorded as not stated on the page read.

That figure is useful because it is not a lift. It is a base rate for what happens after handoff, and a team reporting influenced pipeline should hold it beside the pipeline number before promising revenue.

ZoomInfo: ranges labelled directional by their author

ZoomInfo's guide to thirteen ABM metrics, on its pipeline site and marked updated 07/02/2026 on the page, publishes ranges rather than measurements and, to its credit, labels them. It states that B2B organisations with mature ABM programmes report two to three times higher win rates on target accounts than on non-ABM pipeline, and that the lift typically takes 12 to 18 months to materialise. It states that top-performing programmes typically see 60 to 70 percent of target accounts engage within the first 90 days, that a penetration rate of 20 to 40 percent within six months is a healthy early-stage benchmark with best-in-class programmes above 60 percent, and that engaging fewer than 40 percent of a buying committee is a leading indicator of stalled deals. It calls the penetration figure an industry directional range.

No study is named for any of those, and the page's customer example, a Smartsheet result, is a vendor case rather than a benchmark. The ranges are recorded here as ZoomInfo's stated expectations, worth having because a team will meet them in a sales conversation.

The Starr Conspiracy: a catalogue with provenance attached

The Starr Conspiracy publishes an ABM benchmarks page, last updated 9 September 2026 by its own stamp, that catalogues figures from five named publishers and states its verification method: each datapoint cross-checked against the original publisher's report or press release, de-duplicated, date-stamped on capture, with unconfirmed datapoints excluded rather than estimated. It also states its limitations, that most cited research skews toward North American and EMEA enterprise organisations with contract values above 50,000 dollars.

Because it is a secondary source, every figure below is recorded as the catalogue's attribution; the underlying reports were not opened for this page. The catalogue attributes to ITSMA's 2024 Account-Based Marketing Benchmark Study, fielded March to May 2024 with 167 respondents, a 171 percent qualified-pipeline lift for mature programmes over matched non-ABM controls within 12 months, a 76 percent share of mature practitioners reporting higher ROI from ABM than from any other marketing investment, a 23 percent share of programmes classified as mature, an 18-month median time from launch to mature performance, and a median of 4.2 engaged stakeholders per target account against 1.6 in non-ABM treatment. It attributes to Demandbase's State of ABM Report 2024, 412 respondents fielded in the second quarter of 2024, a 91 percent larger average deal size for ABM accounts, a 63 percent engagement rate for named accounts in mature programmes within six months, a median closed-won contract value of 148,000 dollars against 76,000 for non-ABM sources, and 3.4 times the engagement for personalised content. It attributes to Forrester's ABM Wave for the second quarter of 2023 a 36 percent higher win rate and a 30 percent faster cycle on ABM-targeted opportunities, to Momentum ITSMA's 2024 performance study a 208 percent increase in marketing-sourced revenue from ABM-engaged accounts, and to Demand Metric's 2024 report a 70 percent adoption rate, up from 49 percent in 2020.

The catalogue is the only source on this page that states the maturity definition behind its lift figures: 24 or more months in market with documented account selection, dedicated headcount and integrated technology. That definition is why the lifts are large: they compare programmes that survived two years to everything else.

Row	Demandbase 2026	6sense guide	Forrester blog	ZoomInfo guide	Starr catalogue
Who was counted	✓Yes	✕No	✕No	✕No	~Partial
When it was measured	~Partial	~Partial	✓Yes	✕No	✓Yes
What the ratio divides by	~Partial	✕No	✓Yes	✕No	~Partial
Maturity defined	✕No	✕No	✕No	~Partial	✓Yes
Limitations stated	✕No	✕No	✕No	✓Yes	✓Yes
Primary research read here	✓Yes	✓Yes	✓Yes	✓Yes	✕No

What the figures agree on, and where they cannot be compared

Two patterns survive across sources that share nothing else. Maturity is the variable every lift figure conditions on: Demandbase's 2026 telemetry splits on framework maturity, ZoomInfo puts the win-rate lift 12 to 18 months out, and the catalogue's ITSMA attribution puts median time to mature performance at 18 months with a 24-month definition. A programme in its first year comparing itself to any of those numbers is comparing itself to a different population. And coverage of the buying group is the input the telemetry sources reward: Demandbase's buying-group and touch-count figures and ZoomInfo's committee-coverage threshold both say that the number of people reached per account moves the outcome, which is the pattern the ABM campaign examples guide shows in practice.

What cannot be done is to line the figures up. A 22.33 percent MQA conversion from Demandbase telemetry, a 21.3 percent MQA-to-SQO conversion the catalogue attributes to a 2024 TOPO and Gartner study, and Forrester's 56 percent post-handoff failure rate are three ratios over three denominators from three populations. A slide that stacks them is a slide about its author.

Using this for targets

Set targets from the source whose population is closest to your programme, and say which source it was. A team on an ABM platform with a defined buying-group model can read Demandbase's maturity split as a range it might move between. A first-year team should take the 18-month figures as a warning against reading its own numbers early, not as a promise. Every team should hold Forrester's post-handoff failure rate against whatever pipeline it reports, because pipeline is the number benchmarks inflate and closed-won is the one only 13 percent of programmes, by 6sense's survey, report upward at all.

We run outbound rather than ABM programmes, on Email Bison and in-house tooling for email and HeyReach for LinkedIn, one message per campaign, and what we are paid for is a qualified meeting that meets criteria agreed in writing. That gives us no stake in the figures above, and it means the denominator question is answered before launch: the list is the population, and a reply rate is a rate over that list and nothing else. If the constraint is that the target accounts are not taking meetings, RevenueFlow books qualified meetings on a pay-per-meeting basis.

The short version

Five sources, read on 18 September 2026, publish account-based marketing benchmarks. Demandbase's 2026 Labs report states its population and gives maturity, buying-group, integration and touch-count figures from telemetry. 6sense's guide cites its 2025 survey for adoption, measurement and attribution figures with no count on the page. Forrester's blog names a 2024 survey for one post-handoff failure rate. ZoomInfo publishes directional ranges and says so. The Starr Conspiracy catalogues five publishers with respondent counts for two, a maturity definition and a stated method. Adopt a figure only once you can say who was counted, when, and what it was divided by.

Demandbase figures and population are per the Labs report page titled The state of ABM in 2026; 6sense figures per its Guide to Account-Based Marketing Metrics, rendered in a headless browser; the Forrester figure per the post summary dated 28 January 2025 on its ABM blog category page; ZoomInfo ranges per its thirteen ABM metrics guide, marked updated 07/02/2026; catalogue attributions per The Starr Conspiracy's ABM benchmarks page, last updated 9 September 2026. All fetched 18 September 2026. Underlying ITSMA, Momentum ITSMA, Demand Metric, TOPO and Forrester reports were not opened for this page.

Sources: The state of ABM in 2026, Demandbase Labs, Guide to Account-Based Marketing Metrics, 6sense, Account-Based Marketing blog, Forrester, 13 ABM Metrics You Should Be Monitoring, ZoomInfo, ABM Benchmarks, The Starr Conspiracy