For years, B2B marketers have been taught to draw lines around their audiences: “These are our strategic accounts. Those are tier two. Here’s our vertical program. Everyone else goes into broad-based demand.”

There was good reason for this. When insights are scarce, customization is expensive, and teams struggle to coordinate across systems and functions, marketers have to make hard choices about where to focus. But something important has changed: The constraints that required those lines are falling away.

Buyer and account insights that once relied on manual research are now available at scale. GenAI and personalization tools have dramatically expanded our ability to tailor experiences. And integrated platforms, workflows, and agents are bringing real-time orchestration across marketing, sales, and customer success within reach. So why are we still organizing our strategies around yesterday’s constraints?

The Pyramid Has Become The Problem

The traditional ABM pyramid gave B2B marketers a practical way to organize accounts by importance. But it included assumptions about the opportunities and buyers within the accounts that didn’t necessarily behave according to the tiers these accounts were put in.

A strategic account might have tremendous overall revenue potential but little need for a particular solution. A lower-priority account might still contain a high-fit opportunity. Buyers can belong simultaneously to an important account, vertical, use case, buying group, and opportunity. Those distinctions matter, because revenue doesn’t come from tiers. It comes from buyers connected to opportunities within accounts and segments.

Technology increasingly allows B2B marketers to see and respond to those relationships dynamically. That doesn’t mean prioritization disappears (quite the opposite!). It means we can get much smarter about what we prioritize, when, and why.

So what replaces the old model?

  • First, start with growth strategy, not account tiers. The right question is not “Which accounts does this team want to target?” but “Where does the business expect growth to come from?” That creates a common starting point for deciding which markets, segments, opportunities, accounts, and buyers matter most.
  • Second, connect buyers to opportunities. Accounts are useful containers, but they don’t buy things. People do, in pursuit of needs that correspond to opportunities. Our strategies need to flex across account and segment boundaries accordingly, starting with the opportunity and the buying group behind it.
  • Third, accept that not every potential deal deserves equal attention. Dynamic does not mean less focused. High-fit opportunities should earn greater investment throughout the lifecycle, whether that means reaching buyers sooner, spending more to engage them, or applying more human attention.

Use Segmentation To Guide, Not Confine

Segmentation and prioritization are as critical as ever. Understanding markets, macrosegments, microsegments, accounts, buying groups, and opportunities gives B2B marketers increasingly specific ways to understand buyers without forcing their assignment to a single, predetermined experience.

The real value of AI, automation, and agentic capabilities is not to execute the old ABM playbook faster. It’s doing something much more transformative — chipping away at the limitations that required that playbook in the first place.

Static segmentation was a solution to scarcity. Dynamic prioritization is a response to abundance.

Forrester clients can access the full report and schedule a guidance session to help put this in practice for their own audiences and marketing efforts.

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