The ABM Drift Problem: Why Tiering and Buying Committees Keep Expanding

ABM doesn’t “stop working.” It just gets… fat.

Like, one day you look up and your Tier A list has 120 accounts, your SDRs are “multi-threading” 17 people per company, and everyone’s pretending this is what focus looks like.

It’s not focus. It’s drift.

We’ve seen too many teams swear they’re doing disciplined ABM while slowly turning it into “high-intent lead gen with extra steps.” Nobody sets out to wreck it. That’s what makes it dangerous. Drift feels reasonable the whole time.

There’s also no big failure moment. No dramatic postmortem. It happens quietly, then suddenly you’re spending premium effort on accounts you can’t explain anymore.

If you’ve been running ABM for more than a year, drift is probably already in the room with you. Not because you’re bad at this. Because drift is the default state. Stopping it takes active resistance.

That’s a big reason why we built VAIS. To catch drift before it eats your pipeline and your team’s sanity. But before we talk fixes, it’s worth getting brutally clear on how drift actually happens.

Here’s the clean, no-BS rewrite, tuned for a C-level reader and in the tone you asked for. No metaphors. No industry refs. No filler.

How Drift Actually Happens

Drift doesn’t start with a mistake. It starts with a reasonable request.

Sales asks to add a few accounts they already have relationships with. Marketing flags companies showing intent that “look close enough.” Leadership wonders why a competitor’s flagship customer isn’t on the list.

Each request makes sense on its own. None of them feel reckless. Saying no feels unnecessary. Or political. So you say yes. Then you say yes again. And again.

One quarter, Tier A is a disciplined list of 50 accounts with clear criteria. The next quarter, it’s 75. Six months later, it’s 120, and Tier A no longer means “accounts we can win this quarter.” It means “accounts we’d like to win at some point.”

That shift matters more than most teams realize.

Because once Tier A becomes aspirational instead of transactional, prioritization collapses. SDR effort spreads thin. Personalization degrades. Reporting still looks busy, but decisions get harder instead of easier.

When everything is a priority, nothing is in fact a priority.

This is what we see repeatedly when working with B2B teams running ABM campaigns. The strategy itself is fine. The problem is governance. Without enforced constraints, execution drifts until the label stays the same but the system underneath it no longer works.

The Buying Committee Problem

The same drift shows up in committee mapping. It starts as a smart insight and ends as an excuse.

Yes, B2B deals involve multiple stakeholders. No, that doesn’t mean you should email everyone who knows the number of zeros in the budget.

Here’s how it usually goes.

First you map the real decision path. The people who can say yes. That’s 3 to 5.

Then someone says, “We should include influencers.” Fair. Now you’re at 8 to 10.

Then the fear kicks in. “What if we miss someone?” So you add anyone with a relevant title, just in case. Now it’s 15+.

At that point you’re not multi-threading. You’re flooding. Congrats, you’re doing role spam and calling it personalization.

And the tradeoff is obvious if you’re willing to say it out loud: the more people you try to hit, the less real each touch becomes. Messaging gets generic. Outreach cadence gets templated. SDRs stay busy, but replies drop anyway. Meetings get softer. The pipeline gets louder and less trustworthy.

Buyers notice. Always. They can tell when you’re talking to them versus spraying titles and hoping something sticks.

CTA BOX: If committee mapping keeps turning into “everyone with a title,” our Intent-Driven Lead Generation approach helps you isolate who actually matters in the buying process, not who might be adjacent to it.

What Drift Actually Costs You

Drift never shows up in a dashboard as “drift.” If it did, this would be easy.

Instead it shows up as symptoms people argue about in meetings. Response rates sliding. Sales cycles stretching. SDRs burning more hours for the same output. Deals stalling because you are anchored to the wrong account or the wrong role. And then the slow one that nobody wants to quantify: brand erosion.

Buyers remember who wastes their time.

This hurts more in competitive markets because there’s no margin for sloppy execution.

Your buyers are almost always evaluating you against 3 or 4 alternatives. So every unfocused touch is a gift. If your first wave hits the wrong role or a weak-fit account, you don’t just lose a reply. You give the competitor who shows up with tighter targeting a clean runway. They look sharper. You look noisy. That gap compounds fast.

The brutal part is that drift feels like effort. It creates activity. It creates coverage. It even creates anecdotes. But it doesn’t create momentum.

A simple Google search should tell you why B2B buyers ignore most outreach. Drift is one of the biggest reasons. Not because buyers are cynical, but because most outreach is built on guesses. Drift increases the number of guesses you make. And buyers can tell.

The Two Decisions That Actually Fix This

After enough cycles of watching ABM drift, you realize the “fix” isn’t a new channel or a smarter sequence. It’s discipline. And discipline is just decisions you’re willing to enforce.

In practice, ABM comes down to two.

Decision 1: Which accounts deserve attention right now?

Not “strategically important.” Not “we want them someday.” Right now. This quarter. Because there’s evidence they’re in motion.

Tier A should be small enough that you can name every account and justify it in 10 seconds without reaching for a spreadsheet. If you can’t do that, your tiering isn’t a system. It’s a list.

Decision 2: Which roles should not be in the first wave?

This is the one most teams avoid because it feels like leaving money on the table. It’s not. It’s avoiding self-inflicted damage.

Everyone obsesses over who to include. Very few teams define who gets deliberately excluded early. But that’s where discipline actually lives. Not every stakeholder should hear from you at the same time. Some roles only make sense after you’ve earned a foothold. Some should not be touched until a deal is real.

When you define who’s out, you protect your brand from the “spray and pray” behavior that makes B2B outreach feel like background noise.

This is exactly what VAIS forces. These two decisions stay explicit, constrained, and reviewable so your team spends effort where it can convert instead of where it merely looks busy.

A Quick Gut Check

Don’t overthink this. Answer quickly.

Has your Tier A list grown by more than 20 percent in the last two quarters?
Can you explain, without qualifying language, what separates Tier A from Tier B?
When was the last time an account was moved down a tier?
How many contacts are SDRs hitting in the first wave per account?
Do you have a documented “do not contact first” list?

If you hesitated on any of these, drift is already in motion. Not hypothetically. Operationally.

CTA BOX: Want to stop guessing? Download the Tier A/B/C Account Prioritization Template and diagnose your ABM health in about 15 minutes.

What a Disciplined Framework Looks Like

The fix isn’t clever. It’s uncomfortable. You need rules that override good intentions.

Tier A: Active Buying Window

Cap it. Fifty accounts max, or ten percent of your TAM, whichever is smaller. These accounts must show intent in the last 30 days. Review monthly. If an account goes quiet, it drops. No exceptions. No “but we have a relationship” carve-outs.

Tier B: Qualified but Inactive

Strong ICP fit, no buying signals. These get nurture, not sales pressure. When intent appears, they move up. Review quarterly.

Tier C: Aspirational

Accounts you’d like to win but have no active path into. Brand only. No sales touches. These are not targets. They’re ideas.

The exact numbers matter less than enforcement. If adding one account to Tier A requires removing another, you force the prioritization conversation drift exists to avoid.

If you need help defining your ICP and tiers, our guide on Why ICP Clarity Makes Every Campaign Count walks through it in detail. 

Committees Without Sprawl

For buying committees, discipline comes from sequencing, not coverage.

Wave 1: Max Three Roles

The person who owns the problem. The person who owns the budget. One technical validator if required. That’s your entry point.

Wave 2: Earned, Not Assumed

Additional stakeholders are contacted only after engagement from Wave 1. Not before. Not preemptively.

Never the First Wave

C-suite unless they are the direct buyer. Procurement. Legal. Anyone whose job is to slow things down. Hitting them early doesn’t accelerate deals. It creates friction you later have to undo.

This sequencing is core to how we run Full-Funnel ABM Programs. The goal isn’t fewer people. It’s the right people, in the right order, at the right moment.

The Bottom Line

Drift is the default. Without active resistance, every ABM program expands until it stops working.

The teams that win treat discipline as a feature, not a limitation. They make explicit trade-offs. They protect their brand by not spamming every plausible title. They measure success by pipeline quality, not activity volume.

If you’re seeing your own program in this, that’s normal. Drift happens to everyone.

What matters is whether you catch it early or explain it away until it’s too late.

FAQs

1. Is ABM drift inevitable, or are we just bad at execution?

Drift is inevitable. Poor execution just accelerates it. Any system that relies on judgment without constraints will expand over time. ABM is no different. The teams that hold it together don’t have better intentions. They have stricter rules.

2. How big is too big for a Tier A list?

If your leadership team can’t name most of the accounts and explain why they’re there without checking a doc, it’s too big. In practice, Tier A breaks down fast once it goes beyond what your team can actively reason about, usually 30 to 50 accounts.

3. Why can’t we just keep Tier A large and prioritize within it?

Because humans don’t prioritize well inside bloated lists. Everything becomes “important,” so effort spreads evenly instead of intentionally. Large Tier A lists feel flexible, but they remove the forcing function that makes real prioritization happen.

4. Aren’t we risking deals by not contacting all stakeholders early?

No. You’re risking deals by doing it. Early overreach creates confusion, resistance, and internal blocking you haven’t earned the right to navigate yet. Sequencing stakeholders reduces friction. Flooding them creates it.

5. How do we say no to sales or leadership when they want exceptions?

You don’t argue opinions. You point to rules. If Tier A has a cap, adding one account requires removing another. That shifts the conversation from politics to trade-offs. Drift thrives in exception culture. Discipline survives only when exceptions have a cost.

6. What’s the fastest way to tell if drift is already hurting us?

Ask two questions.
First: when was the last time an account moved down a tier?
Second: do SDRs know who not to contact first?

If either answer is “I’m not sure,” drift isn’t coming. It’s already active.

Priyanshi Kharwade