Most B2B marketing teams spend the majority of their budget on channels where competition is fiercest. Email, paid ads, cold calls. These are also the channels where buyer fatigue is highest.
According to Sendoso’s 2026 Digital Fatigue Report, 84% of buyers report fatigue from cold calls, 83% from marketing emails, and 82% from sales emails. Digital ads aren’t far behind at 78%.
The two channels where buyers report the least fatigue? Direct mail and gifts (40% report no exhaustion at all) and in-person events (34%).
Here’s the kicker: only 34% of marketing teams use gifting or direct mail regularly. The least-fatigued channels are the least-used channels.
This gap is getting wider. As AI makes it easier to generate emails, ads, and outbound sequences at scale, the digital channels are becoming noisier by the week. Every team now has access to the same AI-powered outbound playbook, which means the playbook stops working.
The channels that cut through are the ones that can’t be automated. A dinner for 10 people. A handwritten note. A $7 bag of sour gummy worms sent because you remembered a buyer mentioning her daughter loved them (Kamil Rextin, 42Agency).
This is the case for account-based marketing. The version any B2B team can run, if they’re willing to focus on fewer accounts and do the work that most teams won’t.
ABM is not just for big budgets
That was true five years ago. It’s not true now.
As Michel Gagnon puts it, the $100k marketing strategy can now be run by a team of three. AI handles the research and enrichment layer. Humans handle the relationships.
If you can name the companies you want as customers, you can run ABM.
Traditional lead generation is a volume game. You cast a wide net and hope the right people find you. ABM is a relevance game. You pick the accounts, understand what they care about, and show up in ways that matter to them.
As Sangram Vajre, co-founder of Terminus, puts it: “Not all accounts are equal in value, so why are you creating equal experiences for them?”
This doesn’t require an enterprise budget. It requires focus. And focus is something small teams are often better at than large ones, precisely because they don’t have the budget to spray across every channel.
What’s changed: AI does the research, you do the relationships
The reason ABM used to require big teams is that the research was manual. Identifying target accounts, mapping buying committees, tracking company news, personalising outreach. All of it took hours per account.
AI has collapsed that cost. Tools like Apollo, Relevance AI, and Sales Navigator can now handle the legwork that used to require a dedicated analyst:
- Account identification. Layer intent data from G2 or Apollo to find companies actively researching your category.
- Buying committee mapping. Move beyond targeting “the VP of Marketing” and map the full decision-making group: users, budget holders, influencers.
- Context gathering. Track company news, LinkedIn activity, funding rounds, and competitive moves automatically.
- Signal monitoring. Know when an account is in-market before they fill out a form.
This is what Emily Kramer at MKT1 calls the shift to account-driven GTM. It’s now possible for even a one-person marketing team to map their entire addressable market into a CRM. Which makes relying solely on inbound, waiting for leads to come to you, what Kramer calls “careless.”
But here’s what AI can’t do: build trust.
No agent is going to host a dinner. No workflow is going to remember someone’s daughter likes sour gummy worms. No automation is going to sit across a table from a CFO and have a real conversation about their problems.
Jon Miller, former CEO of Engagio (now Demandbase), makes the point well: “The whole point of ABM is that it’s spearfishing. You have to reach out to the right people in the account. That means outbound channels like direct mail, which is a great door opener. People get hundreds of emails a day, and probably get one or two packages a week.”
The winning combination is using AI to handle the research layer so your team has time for the high-touch work that actually moves deals.
What to actually do
If you’re starting from zero, here’s what a lean ABM motion looks like.
Start with 10 accounts, not 100. Pick companies where you have a genuine reason to believe you can help. If your list is too long, it’s wrong. ABM is about depth, not breadth. Use your bullseye customer framework to identify who you’re really after.
Warm up before you reach out. Follow their company on LinkedIn. Engage with their content. Share something useful. You’re building familiarity, not running a sequence. This isn’t optional. As the Sendoso data shows, buyers are exhausted by cold outreach. Showing up warm is the minimum.
Personalise the experience, not just the first name. Send them to a tailored landing page. Reference a competitor they’re evaluating. Show them you understand their world. Tools like Lovable or Bolt can spin up a custom page in minutes. The bar is higher than “Hi {First Name}.”
Use physical channels. This is where most teams fall short. According to 42Agency’s Kamil Rextin, the companies winning enterprise deals (Snowflake, Ramp, Hightouch) prioritise intimate dinners and thoughtful gifting over programmatic orchestration. The playbook:
- Host pain-point specific dinners with 8-12 people, mixing existing customers with prospects
- Send gifts after meetings as thank-yous, not before as bribes
- Keep it personal over expensive. Branded high-quality swag and thoughtful low-value gifts outperform generic high-value items
- Avoid alcohol (only 54% of adults drink regularly), anything requiring signatures, and anything that feels like a compliance risk
Measure deal velocity, not MQLs. The right questions are: are ABM-touched deals closing faster? Are they larger? Did the buyer attend a dinner or receive a gift before signing? If you’re counting leads, you’re measuring the wrong thing.
Treat every campaign as a hypothesis
The biggest mistake teams make with ABM is treating it as a program to be run rather than a set of hypotheses to be tested.
“We’re doing ABM” is not a strategy. “We believe hosting a pain-point dinner for 10 CFOs in London will accelerate 3 open deals” is a growth hypothesis. It’s specific, testable, and you’ll know within a quarter whether it worked.
This is the difference between activity and learning. A team that runs 12 dinners and never measures deal velocity has an ABM program. A team that runs 3 dinners, measures the impact on pipeline, and doubles down on what works has a growth engine.
The same applies to gifting, direct mail, and every other tactic in your ABM playbook. Each one is an experiment. What worked? What didn’t? What do we try next?
This requires a system. Not just a CRM, but a way to connect your strategy to your campaigns, track what’s actually moving the needle, and report results without spending half your week building slides. It’s one of the reasons we built Growth Method the way we did: to give small marketing teams a system for prioritising campaigns by predicted impact, analysing what worked, and so the whole team stays focused on outcomes, not outputs.
ABM doesn’t fail because the tactics are wrong. It fails because teams never close the loop between what they did and what happened. Whatever system you use, make sure it answers one question: did this move a deal?
Start small, stay focused
You don’t need to overhaul your entire go-to-market to start with ABM. You need a list of target accounts, a reason to reach out, and the discipline to do the high-touch work that most teams skip.
The channels your competitors won’t bother with are the ones worth investing in. Not because they don’t work, but because they’re harder to put in a dashboard and harder to justify in a quarterly review.
That’s exactly why they work.
If you’re spending most of your budget on the channels where buyer fatigue is highest, it might be time to rethink your channel strategy. Not by abandoning digital, but by rebalancing towards the channels where attention still exists.
The best marketing teams aren’t choosing between digital and physical. They’re using AI to handle the digital layer efficiently, so they have time and budget for the physical work that builds real relationships.
A $7 bag of gummy worms will outperform your next email sequence. The data says so. The question is whether you’ll act on it.