The account-based marketing market is on track to reach $1.15 billion in 2026, according to Mordor Intelligence, growing toward $2.02 billion by 2031. The single biggest driver behind that growth, worth an estimated 2.5 percentage points of the 11.94% forecast annual growth rate on its own, is rising adoption of intent-data partnerships. Set that next to an independent audit of how accurate those intent signals actually are, and the growth story gets less comfortable. Precision tops out at 0.63, even among programs that have been running the tooling for three years or more.
What the audit measured. The Starr Conspiracy reviewed 47 mid-market ABM deployments (200 to 1,000 employees, mostly B2B SaaS, HR tech, and fintech) between January and October 2024. A flagged account only counted as a hit if the company’s CRM showed real engagement from that account within the following 30 days, and that hit rate is what the firm reports as precision. Pilot programs, under a year old, scored 0.42. Established programs, one to three years in, scored 0.51. Mature programs, three years or older, scored 0.63. The firm is careful to note the sample is weighted toward mid-size companies and should not stand in for B2B overall, but the climb from stage to stage is the real finding here. Years of tuning buy modest gains, not reliable accuracy.
The number worth sitting with. A precision score of 0.51 means roughly half the accounts an intent platform flags as ready to buy show no corroborated engagement a month later. That is close to picking accounts at random. Even mature programs, the ones with years to refine their models and data sources, land at 0.63: better than a coin flip, but well short of the confidence most of these platforms are sold with.
Confidence has not caught up either. A separate survey of 400 marketing leaders across the US, UK, France, and Germany, commissioned by 10Fold and reported by MarTech in August 2026, found that only 49%, fewer than half, said they had strong confidence in how clean and complete their marketing data really is. Despite that, 85% to 88% of respondents across paid social, paid media, and owned content said the same data still drives their budget and strategy decisions. The survey traces the gap to fragmented reporting: only 35% of respondents have fully integrated reporting across channels. ABM teams leaning on intent signals sit inside that same gap, between what the data can actually support and what it is being asked to justify.
What this means for a program running on intent signals today. Treat a flagged account as a reason to look closer, not a reason to skip qualification. Ask a vendor for its own precision numbers, measured the way Starr Conspiracy defines it (corroborated engagement within a fixed window), not just volume of signals detected. And keep budget and attention on the stakeholders a model cannot see: the finance approver, the legal reviewer, the committee member who never visits the website. The market is growing because intent data promises to replace that guesswork. The accuracy numbers say it is still mostly automating the guess.
Sources referenced in reporting: Mordor Intelligence, The Starr Conspiracy, MarTech.