Insight

Over the past year, we’ve talked to marketing and sales professionals across the mining sector about how account-based marketing (ABM) is working for them. The tools have improved. The targeting is sharper than it was five years ago. And yet the wins aren’t materialising in line with this progress.

The pattern that kept surfacing wasn’t a tactics problem. It was that all the investment goes into the visible, technical layer of ABM – platforms, scoring models, channel mix – while five unglamorous fundamentals underneath go quietly unaddressed. None of these fundamentals sound urgent on their own. But their neglect as a group is why ABM underperforms particularly badly in mining.

Five neglected fundamentals:

1. The person who can veto a deal is often not the person marketing is built to influence. And the buying committee is large: 63% have 11+ people, sometimes rising past 30 once EPC/EPCMs and mining/drilling contractors are involved, which are charged with narrowing the shortlist to an average of 3.76.
2. Target-account lists are shaped more by sales conviction than by evidence of who’s genuinely in-market, and are rarely cleaned up once built.
3. Field teams hold the buyer knowledge that would make targeting sharper, but are rarely tapped by marketing.
4. Lead sourcing is opaque enough that most teams couldn’t verify where a lead came from if asked.
5. The channel buyers use most – the vendor’s own website – is also the one they trust least. Most vendor content is built to impress when buyers want reassurance.

1. Who really has the power to say no?

The power of veto was a continually recurring theme. Our research with senior mining decision-makers indicated that IT and cybersecurity functions hold overarching power of veto over a technology purchase, while holding only a fraction of final budget authority. Integration complexity and a C-suite that doesn’t fully grasp its own data infrastructure came up again as live frustrations sitting underneath that veto power. 

The practical result: a buying committee where influence and authority don’t sit in the same seat. You can build the most precisely targeted campaign in the sector and still be talking to the wrong person in the room.

The reality is that content has to address the needs of a large team spanning more than a dozen functions – from technical leads to finance to the C-suite to IT and, of course, procurement. These functions split broadly into influencers and gatekeepers, depending in large part on the type of the investment. 

A recommendation from a champion inside the buying team must survive scrutiny from people with genuinely different priorities – a much higher bar than most vendor content is built to clear.

2. Is your list built on evidence, or does it just need a clean?

Sub-standard target-account lists suffer from two separate problems that are too often treated as one. 

First, a lot of account lists are shaped by who the sales team (or the loudest voice in the sales team) believes should be buying, rather than by genuine signals of who’s in-market. At any given moment, only 5-10% of a vendor’s target audience is actively looking to buy. Knowing who they are is what lets you shift messaging between brand (sowing the seed with buyers who are out of market) and activation (converting those who are in-market).

The second issue is rarely even discussed: even a well-built list decays fast in an industry defined by consolidation and depleting assets. Mergers, site closures and project teams disbanding after commissioning combine to turn a list that was accurate six months ago into one that is unfit for purpose today. Nobody finds list hygiene exciting, and its value – though plainly logical – is hard to quantify. So, it tends to happen once, at the start of a campaign, and not again.

Precision targeting doesn’t mean much if a list has gone stale.

3. Where does the strongest buyer insight exist?

Almost every vendor we spoke to had someone – a field engineer, a product lead, an account manager – who understood exactly how a specific buyer thinks, who influences them, and what has blocked deals before.

That knowledge almost never makes it into a CRM or informs targeting. It’s not lost through carelessness; it’s lost because capturing it isn’t anyone’s job. The most valuable input into a sharper ABM programme is often only a conversation away, and structurally invisible to the team running the campaign.

4. Do you know where your leads come from?

Lead generation that promises verified, consenting (opt-in) contacts is easy to justify against a KPI. But delivery chains are often longer than they look – subcontracted, then subcontracted again – until the original source is genuinely hard to trace and accountability is diluted.

Most teams we spoke with hadn’t asked their publishers and suppliers directly how their leads are generated, and by whom. Fewer still had a confident answer.

It’s a strange blind spot in campaigns otherwise built on precision.

5. Is your best channel also your weakest one?

Here’s the sharpest tension we found. Buyers consistently name the supplier’s own website as their most valuable source of information when considering a vendor – not events, not a sales call, not an emailed set of specs. But websites are simultaneously failing the trust test. More than two-thirds (70%) call them too sales-focused and 57% say the messaging is exaggerated and overcomplicated.

In a sector without the dense third-party review infrastructure of other industries, that credibility gap matters more than it would elsewhere.

So what should that content cover? Our research points to a clear answer, and it’s an unglamorous one.

For vendors chasing new logos as much as growing existing accounts, compliance and reliability consistently rank as the two most critical attributes for a buying committee, ahead of the more ambitious claims most vendor content leads with. 

Set against a committee of 11 to 20+ people, that makes sense – a group that large is optimising for risk reduction, not inspiration. Content built to impress might land with one or two. Content built to reassure has a better shot at resonating with large buying teams.

What connects all of this?

None of these issues will show up on a campaign dashboard. They don’t get a line item, a platform, or a case study. That’s precisely why they are persistent problems. The parts of ABM that are easy to buy have improved considerably, while the parts that are only fixable through unglamorous internal work have barely moved. 

Closing the gap between current results and what’s possible means rolling up your sleeves on these fundamentals – and the cheapest place to start is internal: a one-hour debrief with your field team, an honest clean of your target-account list, and a plain-speaking pass over your website before the next campaign goes live.