It's Account-Based Experience, Not Marketing: A Conversation with Aleksandra Rakowska

Everyone says they do growth differently. Few have actually built pipelines that close six and seven-figure deals. Aleksandra Rakowska has. She built ABM programs at Launchmetrics and now leads growth marketing at Kpler, targeting strategic enterprise accounts where a single deal can change your entire quarter. She started in PR and communications, moved into growth marketing, and now operates across cultures, teams, and revenue functions, aligning marketing with sales on real revenue rather than clicks.

What makes Aleksandra worth listening to is a background most growth marketers do not have: she ran B2B SaaS growth by day while producing fashion events for houses like Hermès and Stella McCartney. This conversation is about why most ABM programs quietly fail, what sales teams say they want versus what actually moves deals, and why the real customer journey is far messier than the funnel on the slide.

Fashion and B2B are the same job

The surprise from running growth marketing and luxury fashion events at once, Aleksandra says, is how much they share. A fashion event is an experience, from the hand-delivered invite to the car that picks up the client to the room itself, all holding one consistent narrative. B2B is the same. The common misconception is that B2C sells to people and B2B sells to businesses, but there is still a human on the other side of the screen making the decision. Her advice to marketers is not to "over-business" B2B into forgetting that person.

That reframe carries a practical warning about the funnel. You have to actually test your customer journey step by step, because the story your ad tells has to match the experience on the website, or it simply will not click. And crucially, the journey does not end at a form submission. She once tested her own funnel end to end and found the inbound demo request could sit in a queue for weeks before the BD team picked it up, by which point the prospect is already deep in pricing talks with a competitor. Speed to lead is not a nicety in a competitive market. It is the whole game.

Strategic friction beats more volume

The other thing fashion taught her is scarcity and desire. In luxury you create desire by not giving people everything immediately. When she moved into B2B tech, everyone was doing the opposite: one-click signups, no demo required, all in service of MQL volume. So she experimented with strategic friction. Small private roundtables for six to eight executives, one-to-one strategic workshops with limited spots, even going back to a prospect to say that slot is gone but two remain. It worked, because people want to feel part of something exclusive and intimate rather than another 500-person webinar anyone can join.

Her guidance is genuinely counterintuitive for performance marketers: do not be afraid of volume dropping. Stop obsessing over the number of leads and focus on conversion rates, deal sizes, and pipeline quality. Hermès does not make ten thousand Birkins so everyone can have one, and that is exactly why people want one.

ABM is really ABX

Aleksandra is precise about why most ABM programs fail. It is easy with five or ten accounts, where you can research the CMO's favorite wine to craft a truly personal experience. At 200 or 500 accounts, people default to slapping a logo and a company name on an ad and calling it personalization, which misses the point entirely. At Launchmetrics they deliberately renamed it ABX, account-based experience, to signal it is not a pure marketing play. It has to work at the company level, involving sales, CS, and BDRs, as one team hitting an account from every angle.

The other silent killer is account readiness. Leadership throws a list of accounts at marketing, often ones sales failed to engage for months, and expects marketing to warm them up. But some of those accounts are locked in a four-year contract with another vendor and simply are not in market. So a good ABM marketer has to be willing to walk away, rotate accounts by quarter, and come back when the timing is right, perhaps when a new CMO arrives. As for what sales says it wants, her favorite is "marketing air cover," a phrase she genuinely does not understand. What actually moves deals is one narrative, one experience, and every function going in as a single team.

The tools she would burn

Asked what she would keep if she had to kill 70 percent of a B2B SaaS marketing stack, Aleksandra names an over-reliance on tools that adds work and chaos without adjusted processes or trained teams. First to burn: intent data tools, and she says this as an ABM marketer. Real intent, how long someone spent on your site, whether they attended a webinar, is useful. But manufactured intent based on keyword clusters is not, because every competitor buys the same signal, so the account you spotted is now getting fifty near-identical emails. Next, multiple analytics platforms, since attribution is hard enough with one. And AI chatbots, which she finds impersonal in a world already drowning in automation, predicting that human-to-human interaction will become the most valuable and sought-after thing on the market. What she keeps is simple: a CRM, one analytics setup, and the native ad platforms.

The funnel is messy

The strategy that looks brilliant on a slide but collapses against a real pipeline, Aleksandra says, is the traditional awareness-consideration-conversion-loyalty funnel. The truth is you have no idea where in that journey a prospect actually is. A white-paper download could be a curious intern, a VP three months into evaluating you, or a competitor doing research. The failure is treating them all the same, dropping everyone into a nine-step nurture when one needs pricing, one needs research, and one needs to be left alone. A lot of deals happen simply because someone got on a phone or met at an event and had a real conversation, not because you engineered a perfect nine-step funnel.

She is also clear on when to kill a campaign: not on cost efficiency or MQL volume, but on whether those leads convert. She has killed campaigns with great MQL numbers because the leads went nowhere, and she warns that boxing marketers into an MQL target while isolating them from the rest of the business is a serious disadvantage. If she were banned from running paid ads for six months, she would double down on the organic LinkedIn presence of the founder and stakeholders, and on answer-engine optimization, because a strong human voice and content an LLM can pick up tomorrow beat a perfectly targeted ad.

Key takeaways

A few things worth keeping.

B2B is still human. The person on the other side of the screen makes the decision. Do not over-business your way into forgetting the experience and the story.

Speed to lead wins. The journey does not end at the form. A demo request sitting in a queue for a week is a deal handed to a competitor.

Use strategic friction. Scarcity and exclusivity can outperform volume. Optimize for conversion, deal size, and pipeline quality, not raw lead counts.

ABM is ABX. Personalization at scale is not a logo on an ad. It is sales, CS, and marketing hitting an account as one team, and knowing when an account simply is not ready.

The funnel is messy. You rarely know where a prospect really is. Treating every lead identically is the mistake, and many deals close on a real conversation, not a nurture sequence.

Frameworks worth stealing

Test your own funnel

Walk your customer journey end to end as a real prospect, from ad to landing page to form to follow-up. Check that the narrative stays consistent and, critically, that a submitted lead actually gets picked up fast. The gap between your designed funnel and the lived one is usually where deals leak.

Strategic friction

Instead of removing every barrier for volume, add deliberate scarcity for quality. Small private roundtables, limited-seat workshops, and genuine exclusivity make high-value prospects feel part of something and convert better than another open webinar. Judge it on pipeline quality, not lead count.

Account-based experience

Treat ABM as a company-wide motion, not a marketing campaign. Align marketing, BDRs, account managers, and CS around one narrative per account, and screen for account readiness before you invest. Rotate accounts across quarters and be willing to walk away and return when the timing is right.

Prune the stack

Kill tools that add work without changing process. Drop manufactured keyword-intent data, consolidate to one analytics platform, and reconsider impersonal chatbots. Keep the CRM, one analytics setup, and the native ad platforms, and invest the freed energy in founder-led organic and answer-engine optimization.

Quotes worth keeping

The lines I wrote down.

Don't think of B2B as selling to businesses. There's a human being on the other side.

Don't obsess over the number of leads. Focus on conversion rates, deal sizes, and the quality of your pipeline.

To this day I do not know what "marketing air cover" means.

And the prediction worth sitting with.

In a few years, the most valuable thing on the market will be human-to-human interaction.

Rapid fire round

Same questions every guest. No prep, no warning. Here is how Aleksandra handled it.

Best advice you've ever received? Just get over yourself. Stop obsessing over what other people think of you. Not everything is about you, and people move on the second after they read your comment.

Advice you ignored or wish you had listened to? The same advice. Still a work in progress.

What would you tell your younger self? Keep pushing and do not be afraid to fail. You learn far more from failure than success, and the fear of it holds too many professionals back.

Ongoing challenge that keeps you up at night? Attribution. Constantly trying to prove that the team's work is moving the wider business, and choosing the one model that actually works.

Favorite spot? She keeps a running list saved in Google Maps, and confesses a love of Shake Shack after 17 years as a vegetarian.

Tool you can't live without? Notion. Her whole life, from annual planning to notes on her friends, lives in it.

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Aleksandra Rakowska is the head of growth marketing at Kpler, where she runs enterprise ABM programs, after building account-based marketing at Launchmetrics. She started in PR and events and works across international markets from London. Find her company at kpler.com, and reach out to her on LinkedIn.