In June 2025, Gartner published a survey of B2B buyers that should have set off alarms in every marketing department running an ABM program. Seventy-three percent of buyers said they actively avoid suppliers who send them irrelevant outreach. Not ignore. Avoid. And a Gartner analyst summed up the mood in one sentence: many B2B buyers feel overwhelmed and frustrated by the outreach they receive from sellers. Read that again with your own inbox in mind. The very tactics the industry sells as personalization are producing avoidance, and the buyers are telling us so directly.
I want to sit with why this happens, because the failure is not an accident of execution. It is built into the premise.
The pitch every ABM platform makes, in some form, is personalization at scale. Reach a thousand accounts, and make each one feel like the only account. Say it out loud and the problem is obvious. Personal means for one person. Scale means for many at once. You cannot do a thing for one person and for many at once, not really, any more than you can whisper to a stadium. What you can do is manufacture the signs of personal attention and broadcast those. That is what the tools do, and buyers have gotten very good at spotting the difference.
Here is the mechanism, because it helps to see the gears. First the software watches for what the industry calls intent. It notices when people at a target company start reading about a certain problem and flags that company as warm. Then it fires. Display ads follow the company's employees around the web. Emails go out, each stitched together from templates and merge fields so it reads as if written for the reader. First name here. Company name there. A line about a "challenge companies in your space are facing," pulled from a dropdown. The system can send five hundred of these in an afternoon.
And the buyer on the other end recognizes every part of it. He knows the ad that started chasing him the day after his team searched a topic. He knows the email that opens by naming a challenge he supposedly has, because he got four of them this week and three used the same sentence. He knows the follow-up that pretends to be a gentle personal nudge and is obviously step two of a sequence, because the timing is too clean and the tone too smooth. None of this reads as attention. It reads as surveillance followed by a form letter, which is what it is.
Contrast that with what happens when the effort is real and unfakeable. When GumGum wanted T-Mobile's business, it did not spin up an automated sequence aimed at the CEO. Someone on that team learned that John Legere was a Batman fan and had the nerve to build an entire custom comic book, "T-Man and Gums," casting him as the superhero. He did not delete it. He tweeted it to his followers and GumGum won the account. The comic worked for the exact reason the automated email fails: Legere could tell, instantly, that a person had spent real hours on him and only him, and that no software on earth could have produced it. That is the tell buyers are always reading for, and the machine cannot forge it.
I want to be fair to the technology, because it is not lying about what it can do. It really can identify accounts showing signs of a buying cycle, and that is genuinely useful. The failure is not in the finding. The failure is in what teams do the second they find something, which is to reach for automation to handle the part that was never supposed to be automated.
Think about what actually happens when a signal fires. The software says, this company is looking into ransomware protection right now. That is a gift. It tells you a specific company has a specific problem on its mind today. And what does the standard playbook do with the gift? It sends an automated email that says, in effect, I noticed you were looking into ransomware protection. It takes the one moment when a thoughtful, well-timed, human reach-out would land like a small miracle and answers that moment with a robot announcing that it has been watching. The buyer does not feel understood. He feels caught, and then he feels cheaply courted, and the message goes in the trash.
The deeper issue is that these systems are built to remove the human from the loop, and the human was the product. The value of a GumGum comic or an Intridea billboard was never the cleverness of the idea alone. It was the proof that a person had spent irreplaceable hours on one specific buyer. That proof cannot be forged. You can automate the words. You cannot automate the caring the words are supposed to carry, and buyers, being human, are exquisitely tuned to the difference. They have been reading the sincerity of other people since before we had language. A merge field does not fool that instrument for long.
So the field is pouring money into making outreach look more personal while buyers get better and better at spotting the look. It is an arms race the sellers are losing, because a buyer only has to detect the pattern once to distrust it forever, while the seller has to fool a lifetime of social instinct on every single send. The Gartner number is what that losing race looks like on a scoreboard: not indifference, but active avoidance, from nearly three out of four buyers.
The next question is the obvious one. If everyone has the same tools, running the same plays, chasing the same signals, what happens to the whole field at once? That is where this goes next, and it is not pretty for the people still betting on the machine.
Sources: - [Gartner: 61% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience; 73% avoid irrelevant outreach](https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-06-25-gartner-sales-survey-finds-61-percent-of-b2b-buyers-prefer-a-rep-free-buying-experience) - [GumGum's "T-Man and Gums" comic for T-Mobile's John Legere](https://www.cognism.com/blog/account-based-marketing-examples) - [Intridea's billboard aimed at Ogilvy](https://www.cognism.com/blog/account-based-marketing-examples)