Demand gen & ABM agencies, reviewed and ranked
B2B pipeline programmes and account-based motions. Scored hardest on whether they report pipeline and revenue or hide behind MQL counts.
22 evaluated.
MQLs are the metric agencies choose when pipeline is bad
Revenue and pipeline measurement carries the heaviest weight in this rubric, at a quarter of the total, because lead volume is the easiest number in B2B to inflate and the least connected to revenue. An agency optimising to MQLs will hit its MQL target. Ask what happened to pipeline and CAC, and whether they would still be paid if those went the wrong way.
‘We do ABM’ usually means a list and some ads
A real account-based motion has target-account selection you can interrogate, orchestrated plays across channels, and genuine sales alignment — the sales team knows which accounts are in-programme and what to do when one engages. Retargeting a purchased list is not ABM, however it is described in the deck.
Ask who builds the measurement
Most of the arguments in this category are about attribution, and attribution is plumbing: CRM configuration, funnel instrumentation, an agreed model. Agencies that can stand that up prove their own numbers. Agencies that cannot will at some point explain that the pipeline exists but the system is not capturing it.
Evaluated
Demand Gen / ABM22 evaluated
demand_gen_abm rubric — the one written for what this category actually sells, not a general agency rubric. Several of these records were first filed elsewhere and scored against a rubric they were not competing in; where that happened, the record carries a rescored_from field showing the previous verdict and score, so the change is auditable rather than silent.