Key Steps for Successful Abm

Most GTM teams aren’t short on signals.   They’re drowning in them.   We kept seeing the same issue across teams: - Accounts were showing intent in different places. - Someone would visit the site. - A company would engage with a newsletter. - Another team would start researching competitors.   Individually, none of these meant much. Together, they usually give us a lot of data about our ICP.   So instead of treating these as isolated activities, we built an ABM system that treats them as account-level signals.   Here is the step by step flow.   📌 Step 1: Detect account-level signals   We start by identifying companies that are already showing signs of interest.   👉 Buying intent 👉 Website visits 👉 Competitor, Ad & Newsletter engagement    📌 Step 2: Pull all signals into one system   Every detected account is pushed into Clay as the central workspace.   👉 One place for all signals 👉 One timeline per account 👉 No fragmented context across tools   Decisions only work when everything is visible in one place.   📌 Step 3: Qualify accounts against ICP   Not every active account is a good fit.   We qualify every account inside Clay using clear rules and blocklists.   👉 ICP match 👉 Company size and geography 👉 Industry relevance 👉 Existing customers or active opportunities   If an account does not fit, it stops here. That is intentional.   📌 Step 4: Enrich qualified accounts   For accounts that pass qualification, we add the context needed to act.   👉 Company and firmographic data 👉 Relevant contacts 👉 Missing fields required for outreach / routing   Enrichment is purposeful, not bulk. We only add what the next step requires.   📌 Step 5: Generate signal-based messaging   Messages are generated based on the exact signal that triggered the account.   👉 Different messaging for intent vs website visits 👉 Different framing for competitor research vs newsletter engagement   Every message is tied to something to the action.   📌 Step 6: Activate outreach across the right channels   Outreach is activated based on account value and signal strength.   👉 Email 👉 LinkedIn 👉 Cold calls 👉 Personalized videos 👉 Voice notes   This is selective and deliberate.   📌 Step 7: Personalised landing pages (optional)   For high value accounts, we sometimes add domain-level personalised landing pages.   👉 Used only when deal size justifies it 👉 Keeps post-click experience consistent 👉 Supports deeper ABM plays 📌 Step 8: Custom ABM plays (optional) When needed, we design custom plays aligned to GTM strategy. 👉 Bespoke signal combinations 👉 Creative outreach logic 👉 Tight alignment with sales motion    📌 Step 9: Book meetings   When an account shows interest, meetings are routed automatically.   👉 Booking flows 👉 Sales calendars 👉 Clean handoff with context   📌 Step 10: Update CRM and attribution   Finally, everything syncs back to the CRM.    Sales can see when and why a meeting took place. All in 1 cohesive ABM signal loop!

I analyzed 12 months of ABM campaigns that actually worked. Here's the data: Most Account-Based Marketing fails before it starts. After analyzing 12 months of successful ABM campaigns (and plenty of failures), I've identified the patterns that consistently drive pipeline. Here's what the data shows: 1. Timing matters just as much as content Accounts that received 3+ touches within 48 hours of showing buying intent converted 4x better than those that received the same content a week later. 2. The magic number is 6.2 (for this brand at least) The average closed-won deal had 6.2 stakeholders involved. Yet most ABM campaigns only target 1-2 personas per account. Expand your reach. 3. The "champion experience" is everything The accounts where we delivered a memorable experience to a single champion (personalized video, custom research, direct exec outreach) had 3x higher conversion rates. 4. Sales and marketing misalignment kills ABM Our most successful campaigns had sales activity within 24 hours of marketing touches. When this alignment slipped to 72+ hours, conversion rates dropped by 48%. 5. Personalization at scale actually works But not how most people do it. We tested 4 levels of personalization: - Generic (18% engagement) - Industry-specific (27% engagement) - Company-specific (42% engagement) - Individual + company-specific (63% engagement) 6. Direct mail isn't dead But swag is worthless (or at least it didn’t work for this audience 🤷♀️). Our highest ROI direct mail: Personalized research reports addressing the account's specific challenges. $250 spend → $45K in pipeline (average). 7. The "Double-Down Effect" When an account engages with ANY marketing touch, immediately increasing the frequency and personalization level produces a 3.5x lift in conversion rates. The companies getting ABM right understand it's not a campaign—it's a complete go-to-market strategy. P.S. I'm working on a new episodic ABM show in collaboration with Clay, so stay tuned 🤗

Most teams say they run ABM. Almost none actually do. What they call "ABM" is usually just a retargeting audience, a few landing pages, and a spreadsheet of accounts someone built six quarters ago. Real ABM is a system, not a channel. It requires three layers working together: 1. TAM Scoping You're not choosing accounts. You're choosing the game you're willing to play. Firmographic fit, lookalikes, and research-driven prioritization aren't optional - they define the ceiling of your entire GTM motion. 2. Personalized Campaign Execution Personalization is not writing someone's name in a subject line. It is aligning message, medium, and moment. Advertising, landing pages, email, video - none of it works unless it is anchored to the constraints of the account you selected. 3. Intent Signal Tracking & Attribution Signals are the feedback loop that make ABM compound. Ad engagement, site visits, product usage, LinkedIn interactions - each one reduces uncertainty about where an account is in its buying process. Attribution is not about credit. It's about confidence. A team that understands these three layers can scale revenue predictably. A team that doesn't will blame channels, tools, and agencies - when the real problem is that their GTM architecture was incoherent from day one. ABM isn't a tech stack. It's an operating system. The tools just make the system legible. Tools: TAM Scoping Firmographic matches: Apollo, ZoomInfo, Cognism Lookalikes: DiscoLike, PandaMatch 🐼, Ocean.io Account Research & Prioritization: Clay, MadKudu, 6sense, DemandSense Personalized Campaign Execution Personal-level advertising: Influ2 Personalized landing pages: Mutiny, Clay + Webflow Personalized video outreach: Sendspark Personalized cold email: Instantly.ai, Sendspark Personalized DMs: lemlist, Valley Intent Signal Tracking & Attribution Identify Ad Engagement: Fibbler, ZenABM, Vector Identify Website Visitors: Midbound, Vector, RB2B Identify Product Usage: Heap | by Contentsquare, Mixpanel, Amplitude Identify LinkedIn Engagement: Common Room, Trigify.io, Teamfluence™ Full Funnel Attribution: Usermaven, HockeyStack, Factors.ai

Client had 5,000 accounts in their "ABM program." Five. Thousand. That's not ABM. That's spray and pray with a fancy name. They had every intent signal you could buy. Sales ignored all of it. Know why? Because when everything's a priority, nothing is. Here's the system that actually drives pipeline: 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 1: 𝗚𝗲𝘁 𝘀𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀, 𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗼𝗽𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗮 𝗿𝗼𝗼𝗺 Most ABM fails here. Marketing picks accounts they think are cool. Sales picks accounts they'll never close. Nobody asks ops if we can even track this. We locked everyone in a room for 3 hours: - Sales brought their wish list - Marketing brought the ICP data - Ops brought the reality check Together they picked 25 accounts everyone agreed on. Not marketing's vanity logos. Not sales' pipe dreams. Accounts where we could actually win and prove it. 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 2: 𝗣𝗶𝗰𝗸 𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝘀𝗲𝗻𝘀𝗲 The alignment criteria that worked: - Sales has a path in (champion, warm intro, something) - Marketing can create relevant content - Ops can track the engagement - Finance agrees the deal size is worth it One client picked 25 accounts this way. Every department bought in. 21 took meetings within 90 days. Because sales actually worked them. Because they helped pick them. 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 3: 𝗗𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗱𝗼𝗻'𝘁 𝘀𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗲 𝗪𝗲𝗲𝗸 1: Research the hell out of them. Read their 10-K. Watch their CEO's last interview. 𝗪𝗲𝗲𝗸 2: Create something just for them. One client made a 5-slide deck showing exactly how they'd save $2M. Took 3 hours. Closed in 30 days. 𝗪𝗲𝗲𝗸 3: Your CFO calls their CFO. "Saw you're dealing with X. We solved that for [similar company]." 𝗪𝗲𝗲𝗸 4: Send something memorable. We sent one prospect a framed photo of their competitor's billboard. Note: "You should be winning this market." They called that day. 𝗥𝗲𝗽𝗲𝗮𝘁 𝗺𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗵𝗹𝘆. We ran it for 6 months: - Month 1: 3 meetings - Month 3: 11 meetings - Month 6: 19 meetings, $2.1M pipeline Same 25 accounts. Just kept showing up. Tools you need: - Your CRM - Way to coordinate outreach - Maybe intent data for timing That's it. The problem isn't ABM. It's that you're trying to do it at scale. ABM doesn't scale. That's the whole point. This week's fundamentals: Monday: ICP Tuesday: Events Yesterday: Webinars Today: ABM Tomorrow: Influencers Get your teams aligned. Pick 25 accounts together. Do unscalable things for them. Watch what happens when everyone's rowing the same direction.

It's easy to fall into the "doing things just to do them" trap in demand gen and ABM.  👉🏾 Launching campaigns because "it's our typical approach." 👉🏾Creating content because "we have to."   👉🏾 Chasing every lead with the belief that "more is always better." But with AI and automation making it easier than ever to produce generic content, it's even more crucial to pause and ask, "Why?" ✔️Why this campaign? ✔️Why this content? ✔️Why this account? ✔️Does it truly align with our ideal customer profile (ICP)? ✔️Does it resonate with their needs and challenges? ✔️Does it get results on our goals? Generic #ABM is just...marketing. And generic #demandgen is a waste of resources. 👉🏾 To break the autopilot cycle, be specific about your ideal customer. Use tools like 6sense or ZoomInfo to gather rich data, going beyond basic demographics to understand their firmographics, technographics, and psychographics.  👉🏾 Then, map your content to the buyer's journey. Don't just create content for content's sake. Use tools like HubSpot or Marketo to address their pain points and provide real value at each stage. 👉🏾 Analyze intent data. Tools like Bombora or G2 Buyer Intent can tell you which accounts are actively researching solutions like yours, allowing you to focus your ABM efforts on those showing high intent. 👉🏾 Don't forget to make it a personalized experience. Use AI-powered platforms like Persado or Phrasee to tailor your messaging to individual accounts and show a deep understanding of their needs. 👉🏾 Finally, measure what matters. Track metrics that align with your goals, not just vanity metrics. Tools like Google Analytics or Bizible can help you measure the true impact of your ABM and demand gen efforts. 👉🏾 And most importantly, find someone to challenge your thinking. A colleague, a mentor, even a (kind!) competitor. Someone who asks: ✔️Why are we targeting this account? ✔️Will this content truly resonate? ✔️Does this campaign align with our overall strategy? Break free from autopilot, be intentional, and be strategic. Then, watch your ABM and demand generation results grow. What tools or strategies do you use to focus on the "why" behind your marketing? #b2bmarketing #marketingstrategy

I used to hate not knowing where our next client would come from. So we started launching these creative ABM campaigns every quarter. The aim was simple: Sign more ideal clients. And that’s exactly what happened. Within the first few months, those campaigns got us in the room with brands we’d never been able to reach before. New markets. Big logos. And most of all, great clients. Now we launch one every 6 weeks and follow this 3-step process every time ⤵️ 1/ We made a list of our DREAM clients There are 2 tiers to this list: Tier 1: Major Global Brands These are brands that we know might be a tad out of our reach, but we still shoot our shot. Tier 2: High Chance Brands Brands we know there’s a high probability we’ll sign if we pitch them. We split our efforts 60/40. 60% targeting the global brand. 40% adapting campaigns for our wider ICP. —— 2/ Map Out Creative Campaigns We’ll then brainstorm campaign ideas where we can: A) Add value to them B) Get their attention A great example of this is our Monzo campaign that went viral on LinkedIn… 🏦 Monzo - Created a full Monzo UK campaign strategy - Explained it on a custom-built landing page - Created fake paper wallets with QR code to page on - Mailed them to Monzo HQ in wax-sealed envelopes Value: they received a fully mapped out creative ABM campaign strategy including forecasted impact Attention: It was delivered in wax sealed black envelopes inside paper wallets —— 3/ Use Multiple Channels To Distribute There is no “Silver bullet” marketing channel. They all work. But they also work much better if you use them cohesively. What often doesn’t work is: Day 1: Cold email Day 2: Cold email Day 3: Cold email What does is: Day 1: Cold email Day 2: Get sent a physical letter Day 3: LinkedIn DM Day 4: Cold email (NOTE: this is just an example) You want to increase touch points and use multiple channels. —— It’s very easy to get caught up in the technicalities and intricacies of marketing. But we’ve been able to sign dream clients and have a consistent flow of new customers by going back to the fundamentals. Step 1: Deeply understand your ICP Step 2: Find creative ways to get in front of them Repeat that cycle and you’ll never worry about new customers again.

i'm breaking a five-year silence. i haven't made a single video or post about ABM in half a decade, and there's a reason. i helped build the ABM category. wrote the books. did over a 1,000 episodes on ABM on the FlipMyFunnel podcast. got to get Terminus (by DemandScience) to a $100M+ exit. but then working with over 3,000 CEOs and founders implement GTM OS over the past 5 years, here's what i kept seeing underneath all the noise. 78% of ABM programs are still failing. 80% of B2B companies now run ABM. but only 23% exceed expectations. 40% can't prove ROI. 43% say sales and marketing alignment is still broken. widespread adoption AND widespread failure. so i spent last few months digging into this (i know i am nerd too): these are the five shifts successful ABM implementation companies are doing versus non-ABM companies: 1. existing accounts over new logos — 91% of high performers prioritize growing current customers. retention and expansion beat acquisition every time. (this fix is easy) 2. real-time signals over static lists — stop building annual target lists. the winners act on signals (funding rounds, new hires, intent data) within days. 3. small focused tiers over big lists — one leader cut from 500 accounts to 47. pipeline went up 3x. same budget. different focus. 4. account penetration over MQLs — the average buying committee is 13 people (and 100 fake AI agents). if you're celebrating one lead, you are bloating the pipeline. 5. operating system over tool stacks — the average ABM program runs 9 tools that don't talk to each other. a system beats a stack. i think execution is the ultimate differentiator in ABM. am i wrong on these ideas? love, sangram p.s. full breakdown at runongtmos (dot) com — what are your initial thoughts on these five shifts?

You attract better customers when your message has direction. Most companies rush into campaigns without doing the one thing that matters most: Defining their positioning. Before you talk to the market, you must know what you stand for — your promise, your value, and the exact space you occupy. Because positioning is the compass. It guides your messaging, branding, and every touchpoint your customer sees. It answers the fundamental questions: • Why do we exist? • What value do we bring? • Who exactly is this for? Without that clarity, every campaign becomes guesswork. With it, every message carries purpose and lands with the right people. When your positioning and value proposition are sharp, your entire growth engine aligns: Marketing, branding, advertising, even sales conversations. Even leading ABM frameworks make one thing clear: Account-Based Marketing begins with a tight ICP and strong positioning. That’s what maximizes relevance and eliminates wasted spend. So before your next marketing push, pause. Write down your positioning and your ICP on paper. A Simple 5-Step Framework to Strengthen Your Positioning 1. Define Your Core Promise → State the outcome you deliver in one clean sentence. 2. Identify Your ICP → Industry, size, challenges, budgets, buying triggers to go precise. 3. Clarify Your UVP →Why you win over alternatives example : faster, better, safer or smarter. 4. Map Your Differentiators → List the 3 things you do uniquely well. 5. Craft Your Positioning Statement → Who you help, what problem you solve, how you solve it and why you’re the best choice. This one exercise determines whether your marketing connects… or completely misses. Agree?

Dear Marketing - You can't give everyone the VIP treatment. It doesn't matter how "scalable" or "AI-first" your strategy has become. It's a trap many marketers fall into (or dive into depending on your mood), and it greatly affects ABM strategy. "Let's give everyone a highly-personalized marketing HUG." It's so important to structure all marketing efforts (ABM mainly) on the right accounts. Priorization is everything. I'll type it again... prioritization is everything! HockeyStack has been one of my main resources recently to up-level my understanding of how to THINK about prioritization in a meaningful way. Because it may seem easy, but it is damn hard. Spewing “let’s focus on the best-fit accounts” is one thing, but actually aligning sales and marketing on which accounts matter, why they matter, and how to engage them is where things get damn messy. The best teams I've come across have built a scoring framework to help build a foundation around the gut feel. They assign scores based on: Fit – How well does the account match your ICP? Intent – Are they actively researching solutions like yours? Engagement – Are they interacting with your content, attending events, or engaging with sales? "Kyle, c'mon. We were talking about this in 2018." "Well, fictional marketing leader reading this post. We are still lost and haven't advanced from spray and pray. I'm sorry." This is OLD NEWS but it still amazes me how many marketers do not take this approach to building clear account tiers: High-score accounts get custom content, executive involvement, and deep sales engagement. Mid-score accounts get automated nurtures and light-touch outreach. Low-score accounts? They wait until they show stronger intent. Scoring models and frameworks are important, but the alignment between GTM leadership is even more important. If sales is chasing one set of accounts while marketing invests in anything, y'all are screwed. And even MORE importantly, the best teams constantly adjust because if you do it correctly, the tiers will change based on actions. ABM isn’t about reaching more accounts. It’s about reaching the right ones at the right time.

Am I crazy, or are we over-complicating ABM? I hear marketers talking like ABM is a new concept. I see these expansive diagrams of complex workflows. I read debates on needing expensive software to be successful. Let’s make it simple: 1 - Segment your market and align prioritized segments with sales. 2 - Build an aligned GTM strategy with sales by prioritized segments. 3 - Ensure you can measure results accurately by segment. Let’s break it down: ** Align prioritized segments with sales ** WITH SALES is the key point of (1). This point doesn’t mean you take a target account list from sales without vetting it. It means a thoughtful analysis and debate where you ensure alignment across marketing, sales, and leadership (customer success if the account list has existing customers).  ** Build an aligned and prioritized GTM strategy ** You aren’t going to treat each segment (or tier) the same. Therefore, marketing and sales align investment, resources, and shared accountability by segment. Who is doing what and how the functions work together needs to be clear. ** Ensure you can measure by segment accurately ** Don’t blend everything back together for reporting. If your goal is to move the needle in a given segment, did you? If not, why not, and what needs to be done differently? The benefit of clarity is that it should be evident if what you are doing works. Most everything else, I’d argue, are tactics. Intent data, lead scoring, nurture/outbound cadences, etc. These things may or may not be important. It depends on the GTM strategy you develop with sales for each prioritized segment. At some point - you may need technology to automate and improve the above. However, this should be AFTER the above works, not before (imho). Last - steps (1) - (3) aren’t ABM. Rather, the list is just solid marketing, leadership, and business acumen. Let’s not overcomplicate it. #b2bmarketing #b2bsales #GTMStrategy