How Sqrl’s Account Based Marketing Software Helps B2B Companies Identify Their Ideal Target Accounts
Account Based Marketing starts with one fundamental question: which companies should you focus on?
For many B2B organisations, that question is surprisingly difficult to answer. They know their current customers. They may have a shortlist of companies they would love to work for. Sales often has a few names in mind. Management may have a view on strategic markets. But a complete, rational and data-driven overview of the Total Addressable Market is often missing. That is exactly where Sqrl comes in. Sqrl combines Account Based Marketing methodology, AI agents, business data and software to help B2B companies identify, select and prioritise the right target accounts. Currently, our software is especially strong in Western Europe, where we use a combination of data sources, company databases, public information and platforms such as LinkedIn to build a clear view of the market.
The result: B2B companies can move from a fragmented view of “interesting companies” to a structured Target Account List based on fit, relevance and commercial potential.
Why Target Account Selection Is a Major Challenge in B2B
In B2B markets with complex customer journeys, growth is rarely limited by ambition. Most companies know they want to grow. They often know which sectors are strategically important. They may also have a clear proposition, a strong product or a proven service. The challenge is more practical: where exactly is the market?
For many SME+ companies, it is difficult to map their market in a cost-efficient way. They know who they currently sell to. They know a number of competitors, partners, prospects and dream accounts. But they do not always have a complete overview of the Total Addressable Market, let alone a clear view of which companies within that market are the best fit. That makes business development more reactive than it should be. Instead of focusing on the accounts with the highest strategic relevance, sales and marketing often depend on existing networks, inbound leads, historical relationships or individual assumptions. These can be valuable, but they rarely provide a complete and objective view of the market. Account Based Marketing requires a different starting point. It requires clarity.
From Ideal Customer Profile to Target Account List
The first step in Sqrl is defining the Ideal Customer Profile. We do this by working closely with the client. We ask questions such as:
- Who are your best current customers?
- Which customers are most profitable?
- Which customers are strategically important?
- Which companies would you love to work for?
- In which sectors, applications or regions do you see the strongest fit?
- What type of organisation benefits most from your proposition?
- Which accounts are already on the radar of sales or management?
These answers help us build a profile. Not just a theoretical description, but a practical mirror of the companies the client already serves well or would like to serve in the future.
That internal picture is a strong starting point, but it’s still an assumption until it’s been tested outside the building. Before scaling a profile into a full market search, we often validate it through short interviews with companies in the target market itself, not just with the client’s own team. It’s a quick way to find out whether the challenges you assume these companies have are the challenges they actually have, before you’ve built a campaign around a guess. This step is optional, but for clients building a profile in an unfamiliar segment, it tends to save far more time than it costs.
Once the profile holds up, it becomes the input for our AI agents. The AI agents then search, compare and enrich the market using multiple data sources. We use company databases, public sources, web data and platforms such as LinkedIn to identify companies that match the profile. In other words: the best existing and desired customers become the mirror, validated against the real market, and Sqrl uses that mirror to find similar companies.
Mapping the Total Addressable Market
A key strength of the Sqrl software is its ability to help map the Total Addressable Market. The Total Addressable Market, or TAM, is the broader market of companies that could theoretically be relevant. But within that market, not every company is equally interesting. Some are a perfect fit. Others may be relevant in the future. Some may be influencers, partners or ecosystem players rather than direct prospects. That is why Sqrl does not stop at simply producing a long list of companies.
Once the obvious non-fits have been filtered out, we classify the remaining accounts into the categories we use across our methodology:
- Ideal fit accounts;
- Potential fit accounts;
- Influencers.
This creates a much more useful output than a generic company list. It helps business development teams understand where to focus, which accounts to prioritise and how to build a structured Account Based Marketing strategy. The process moves from broad market mapping to a focused Target Account List.
From Total Addressable Market to Target Account List
The real value emerges when the broader market is translated into a Target Account List, or TAL. Within Sqrl, we use the TAM as the starting point. From there, we identify the accounts that have the strongest fit with the client’s proposition, sector focus, strategic ambition and commercial potential. This step is crucial for Account Based Marketing. Without a strong Target Account List, ABM becomes too broad, too generic or too dependent on assumptions.
This is also where a lot of generic ABM advice steers SME+ companies wrong. The classic playbook splits target lists by tier, a handful of accounts for fully bespoke 1:1 treatment, a slightly larger group for “ABM lite”, and a much bigger group of hundreds run on autopilot. That works if you have a team large enough to run three programs at once. Most SME+ companies don’t, and trying to run all three tiers in parallel is usually how an ABM program ends up half-finished on all fronts instead of fully working on one. Sqrl works with a single, focused Target Account List of twenty to a hundred accounts, grouped into one or more clusters that share a dominant characteristic, rather than split across tiers that each need their own content and cadence. We go into why this 1:cluster approach fits SME+ companies specifically in our article on what Account Based Marketing actually means.
Why a Tighter Target Account List Beats a Bigger One in Account Based Marketing
It’s worth being explicit about something that’s easy to gloss over: mapping your Total Addressable Market and building your Target Account List are not the same exercise, even though they happen back to back. A TAM mapping can easily surface several hundred companies that match your profile in some way. That number is useful information about the size of your market. It is not your campaign list. Putting several hundred accounts straight into an active campaign dilutes your messaging back to exactly the kind of generic, broad targeting Account Based Marketing was supposed to replace.
The discipline is in the next step: taking that broader pool and narrowing it down to the twenty to a hundred accounts that genuinely deserve a coordinated campaign right now. The rest of the TAM doesn’t disappear, it’s a reserve to draw from later, as accounts are won, disqualified, or simply change. But the active Target Account List itself stays sized to what a small business development team can actually act on with focus.
What Used to Take Weeks or Months Now Happens Much Faster
Until recently, mapping a market properly was a time-consuming process. A year ago, this type of research could easily take weeks or even months. It involved manual desk research, scattered data sources, spreadsheets, sales input, LinkedIn searches, industry lists and many rounds of validation. That work is still important, but Sqrl changes the speed and quality of the process. By combining AI agents, data sources and ABM methodology, we can now create a structured view of the market in a fraction of the time. This allows business development teams to move faster and make better decisions. It also reduces one of the biggest barriers to Account Based Marketing for SME+ organisations: the cost and complexity of identifying the right accounts.
A Practical Example From the Industrial Market
One of our clients sells industrial solutions and applications in the field of motion. The company is particularly strong in solutions for the food and beverage sector, which is also one of its strategic target markets. Before working with Sqrl, the business development team and management were able to identify around 35 relevant companies based on their existing knowledge, current customers and desired accounts. That is already a useful starting point. But it was not a complete market view. During a Target Account List sprint, using the Sqrl software, we mapped the market in the Benelux region. The result was much broader and much sharper than expected. We identified more than 300 new accounts.
From these accounts, around 100 were classified as ideal fit accounts. Nearly another 100 were identified as potential fit accounts or influencers. Some of these companies were physically located almost around the corner from the client. That is the power of a structured, data-driven Account Based Marketing approach. It reveals opportunities that were already in the market, but not yet visible to the organisation.
In this case, the ideal fit accounts landed right at the upper end of what we’d recommend as an active Target Account List. Rather than spreading the budget thinner across the full 300, the client launched a focused campaign on that core group, with the broader potential fit pool kept in reserve for later.
From Target Accounts to Focus Accounts
Finding the right accounts is only the first step. The next step is activating those accounts and identifying where real intent is developing. In the example above, the ideal fit accounts were placed into a broad awareness campaign. The goal of this campaign is not to immediately convert every account into a sales opportunity. The goal is to create visibility, build relevance and measure intent.
Based on engagement and intent signals, target accounts can then be transformed into focus accounts. This is a crucial step in our ABM methodology. A target account is an account that fits the profile and is strategically relevant. A focus account is a target account that starts showing meaningful movement. That movement can come from engagement with content, interaction with campaigns, website behaviour, personal contact, event interest or other measurable signals. Once an account becomes a focus account, the deeper buying group and buying persona journey begins, moving from the always-on awareness track into focused, intent-driven nurturing. This allows Sqrl to create a personalised, differentiated customer journey at scale, without needing to personalise for every account from day one.
Why This Matters for SME+ B2B Companies
Large enterprises often have access to extensive research teams, expensive databases, dedicated market intelligence and mature revenue operations. Many SME+ B2B companies do not. But that does not mean they should rely on incomplete market knowledge. In fact, for SME+ companies, focus is often even more important. Sales capacity is limited. Marketing budgets need to be used wisely. Business development teams cannot afford to spend months chasing accounts that are not a good fit. Sqrl helps solve this problem.
It gives B2B companies a more rational view of their market. It helps them understand where the best opportunities are. And it gives sales and marketing a shared account list to work from. That shared focus is essential for Account Based Marketing.
The Combination of Software and Methodology
The strength of Sqrl is not only in the software. It is in the combination of software, data, AI agents and ABM methodology, delivered through sprints.
Software can help find and enrich accounts. AI can search faster and compare more data than manual research. But Account Based Marketing still requires strategic choices.
- Which markets matter most?
- What does an ideal customer really look like?
- Which accounts deserve a place on the active Target Account List?
- Which buying groups should be activated?
- Which signals indicate intent?
- When should business development step in?
These are not purely technical questions. They require commercial thinking, B2B experience and alignment between marketing and sales. That is why Sqrl is built as both a software platform and a guided ABM approach. We do not simply deliver a list. We help clients turn that list into a growth engine.
