Our Enterprise / Account Based Marketing Playbook
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Let's give into today's essay on Enterprise Marketing, aka Account Based Marketing.
The traditional ‘inbound’ playbook that works relatively well for a small and midsize business (SMB) market breaks down when it comes to selling to enterprise markets. The primary reason is that enterprise buyers fundamentally buy and discover solutions differently than an SMB buyer generally does. They are less likely to be on search, querying the problems they’re trying to solve. The buying cycle is inherently longer and more complex. More people are involved, the ticket sizes are significantly bigger, and the risk is exponentially higher. You have to be a ‘line item’ on the profit and loss statement; it's a consultative sales process that is heavily driven by outbound events, networks, and top-down motions, among others.
While Inbound / S.M.B. marketing has always been represented as a funnel (awareness, consideration, purchase) to mean that you have a ‘big top of the funnel,’ enterprise markets work differently. Instead of 100,000 companies that need to be ‘aware,’ only 100 do. Instead of SEO, Ads, and search-oriented content, it needs more sales enablement and direct sales.
This is precisely what Account-Based Marketing (ABM) platforms understood early on, building an entire industry and narrative around becoming a must-have platform for enterprise sales and marketing. They talked about flipping the funnel, about IP-based advertising (where only specific companies see your ads across the display network with questionable inventory), and they invented the idea of ‘3rd party intent’ using a network of publishers and 3rd party cookies to create ‘intent’ alerts.’ But amongst all this noise around ABM platforms, we have lost the fundamental idea of enterprise Go-To-Market (GTM). Below, we attempt to simplify it and present some playbooks/campaigns/ideas you can implement for your enterprise GTM program.
Note: Typically, ABM programs will talk about three flavors of ABM:
1:1 ABM.
1:few ABM.
1:Many ABM.
It's our P.O.V. that 1:many is not A.B.M. but a narrative invented by ABM vendors to sell display ads. If you are doing 1:many ABM (100K accounts), you are in fact, doing demand generation / inbound marketing primarily. Enterprise GTM., by nature, is about 1:1 approaches or ‘doing things that don't scale’.
ABM., aka Enterprise Marketing Playbook:
Step 1: Build an Account list of your ideal prospects.
An excellent place to start is to look at the historical data of your most successful clients and then build lookalike audiences of your best customers or accounts. What are the common patterns among your best customers? Is it a technology / vertical / Geography / Team / Company Size / Revenue (it's probably a mix of the above)? You can use tools like Apollo, Zoominfo, KeyPlay, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, or Clay to build account lists.
Your Enterprise GTM programs will only be as good as your account list. Don’t let sales or leadership list ‘accounts they’d love to close but aren't realistic’—chasing them will waste resources and time. Focus on what you can realistically close.
Some things to consider when picking accounts:
Technographic fit: For example, selling ERP software is great for companies already using SAP.
Product Usage: (yep, you can do ‘enterprise’ if you have a freemium product (most freemium companies run an enterprise and freemium funnel). My favorite example of this came from a chat I had with Clair Byrd from her time at Twilio - an engineer from Airbnb signed up for a free trial of Twilio and showed an extremely high degree of product usage. You might want to upsell into the org for a ‘top-down’ adoption and ‘bottoms-up’ usage. This means assigning the right resources to the account to get executive buy-in on Twilio as a solution while working with the champion (the engineer who signed up) to navigate the internal complexities.
Revenue Potential: Enterprise Marketing is not appropriate if you are selling a $20/mo product, given its long sales cycles, complex solutions, and larger ticket sizes. Select target accounts that would see value in your solution and not balk at the enterprise pricing.
Expansion: Enterprise, aka Account Marketing, is not just about new logo acquisition. It can also be efficient to sell into the organization, cross-sell into different departments, or upsell into an existing customer base.
Another thing to consider - using AI and signal-based lookalikes - is what your best customers have in common and how you can find another account like them. For example, Clay.com and Keyplay offer lookalike modeling that takes customer names and finds other closely related accounts.
Account list building is the most overlooked and critical part of an ABM program's success. It's often overlooked because it's not as exciting as running campaigns, but if you don't have the correct list of accounts, you won’t see much success from any program.
Step 2: Account Research & Planning
Once you figure out your target accounts, the next step is to understand the market landscape, company priorities, key decision-makers, and other dimensions of the decision-making process. We use CBInsights, Crunchbase, analyst reports, and earning reports to understand each account's priorities and challenges. With LLM / AI models, you can run workflows to generate digestible briefs.
You can also download our Account Planning Template: Account Plan Social Share
Once you have a more robust understanding of the accounts you want to target, work on categorizing and assigning them to account owners. Also, find a way to segment your accounts into priority/fit. Here’s how we do it:
Tier 1 (T1): These are the accounts with the highest priority that you want to close. Think of them as getting white glove service. You do deep dives into the research, build customized campaigns, and invest time and effort into hyper-personalization.
Tier 2 (T2): Accounts in this bucket are those where you are a lower priority. They might be smaller accounts where you assign fewer resources but still do enterprise marketing to close them.
Those in the Great Fit become your Tier 1 accounts, where all your orchestrated efforts should be directed.
Step 3: Build an Account Plan for T1 Accounts
This is the part where you plan how to communicate your dream-like offer and incentives to the right people through a suitable medium. While this is essentially coming up with a complex set of decisions, knowing precisely what you can do and how is the best way to prioritize realistic actions, you can pursue your ABM strategy.
This includes a couple of things:
First, build a master KPI dashboard mapping indicators that make sense for the particular account you're targeting.
Second, building a campaign calendar that orchestrates Paid Media, Direct mail, Events, Webinars, Customer Experience, Sales activities, and whatever else might be required to close the account.
We created an ABM template that you can use to understand better how to develop your account plan. Click here to see the template.
The challenge of enterprise sales is that you must become part of the prospect's solution consideration set. Enterprise sales are not impulsive purchases; they can be 18-30 months long.
The consideration set is a set of 3 - 4 products that the prospect has shortlisted. To be in that consideration set, you need to build mental availability, i.e., stay top of mind for the prospect so that you are the first to mind when they want to buy a solution like yours.
This can take different mediums and approaches.
Step 4: Build a Campaign Plan
Once you have determined the overall target account list and have allocated resources to the program, it’s time for the fun part of building out creative campaigns and content.
This is also what certain folks call “playbooks”.
Here are some ideas. Remember, ABM / Enterprise Marketing is not just about Digital Ads. It is an offline/online/personal/corporate blend to navigate a complex process.
Event Playbook: Events are still a big driver for most enterprise buyers and hold much value when done right. There are a few ways to integrate events into your Enterprise Marketing Playbook:
Owned Events: Host your event for prospects and customers. Selling to a CFO? Have your company's C.F.O. host a round table of industry CFOs and invite some existing customers and target accounts to it.
Host sales dinners: Book a restaurant and invite your target account executives and your own executives for an invite-only event. Bonus if you have a ‘guest’ who is well-known and influential in the industry (this will make it easier for others to feel inclined to attend).
Roadshow: Intercom used to call these the world tour. Go around cities and countries with a high concentration of prospects and host an event across different cities. Invite key prospects and use it as a brand activation opportunity to build trust.
Attend Industry Trade shows, but make it enjoyable:
Buy a billboard by the airport (we did this for a customer around the Marketo Conference)
Make a pre-event Ad (we had a small GIF of the AE’s attending the event that ran as a social ad and people at the event mentioned it)
Create an ‘event bounty’ (we dressed a customer VP Sales in Orange Sneakers and promised a reward for anyone who found him and took a selfie)
We hired a limo and taxied people to and from hotels to the venue during SaaStr. Everyone called it a ‘moving booth’.
Also, remember to measure events beyond the apparent meetings and leads to brand activation and experiential marketing.
Step 5: Create Personalized Campaigns and Content:
If you know who you are selling to, their challenges, and their priorities, wouldn't it make sense to customize your entire approach? That makes enterprise marketing interesting (but also challenging to scale).
Suppose you are selling a P.O.S. solution to Starbucks. They are a publicly traded company, so you can have ChatGPT or Gemini review and summarize earning reports and quarterly priorities. One of the reports talks about the high cost of employee training with existing P.O.S. and how it is a priority for them to find a better solution because it costs them millions in lost productivity. You can then:
Create tailored messaging for Starbucks aligning to this exact pain point (our POS comes with full-service training + is 5X more straightforward to use and faster than legacy POS)
Create content for a specific buyer (X department at Starbucks who is responsible for POS rollout)
Create content to align the influencers (i.e., multi-threading) like IT / Finance / InStore Exp / etc, who are involved in the decision-making.
Notice that I haven't mentioned ‘6sense or LinkedIn Ads’ yet. Those are channels to get the message to the right people, not the ‘campaign’ itself.
Once you know who and what, you can start producing assets like:
Customized Content about why Starbucks needs to switch. How can you help them? What are the business cases? This can be content like videos, a podcast, customer case studies of other coffee retailers, presentations, podcasts, landing pages and web pages tailored for this account (Starbucks)
Creative and Copy that you can deploy across LinkedIn / Meta / OOH / Native / and Editorial Advertising to reach them
You can research where the VP of purchasing and CFO spend their time, the people they follow, and the blogs they read (hint: use a tool like SparkToro)
You can buy a billboard across the Starbucks HQ in Seattle
You can target and re-market to them across Social / Search Ads
You can buy a full-page ad in NYT
You can hire a PR firm to talk about you + other coffee chains using your POS and highlight the employee productivity benefits in reputable publications executives read (like WSJ)
The idea is to create a ‘surround sound effect,’ as Clair Byrd said to me once.
The outcome is that they see/hear/learn about you, and you build enough trust that either they come to you (aka Inbound), or you can go to them (aka outbound), and they do not need to be told/convinced what you do; they’re already sold on it.
One of our customers who we work with on ABM said to us, “Our AE was talking to the senior executive at enterprise company X and the executive said, ‘I see you guys everywhere, so great job on getting the message out.’
Most folks mean ‘we run LinkedIn Ads” when they mean ABM. It's definitely part of it but it's not ABM.
Note on 6sense / DemandBase etc: For years we’ve been told by Martech vendors that we need tool X or Y to ‘actually do ABM’ and countless times I’ve seen marketing teams buy the tool, sign a 100K contract to run some Display Ads that get placed on questionable inventory and ‘intent’ data based on someone visiting about a broad topic on some industry website. Only to see zero results and no adoption by the sales team.
Step 6: Measurement
It's not just about leads. It's about existing opportunities and moving them through the funnel.
ABM can be measured in a few ways:
Leads: Although enterprise/account marketing doesn’t always mean ‘generate leads,’ you can generate leads, so measure how many of your inbound leads are coming from your target / named account list.
Account Engagement: out of the named account list, how many are currently seeing your content, engaging with your content, coming to your website and in other ways, ‘know you exist.’
Coverage: Out of those named accounts, how many decision-makers and stakeholders do you currently have in your CRM? How many have an account owner assigned?
Paid media: On the Paid Media side (like LinkedIn), how many target accounts are being served impressions, at what frequency, how many of those are watching your video, and what percentage are completing it?
On the 1P data side: what campaigns, channels, and activities lead to named accounts visiting your website? What is their web engagement, how many pages do they view, and how long do they spend on the site? What content resonates the most?
Influenced pipeline: since marketing isn't ‘creating’ net new leads,’ how much do marketing activities influence sales cycles, and what tactics work better?
Logo acquisition: What’s my average cost to acquire a new logo?
Deal Velocity: Are ABM Campaigns leading to faster sales cycles? What are the activities that help get named accounts faster? What sales enablement material helps? (more on this in the next section)
Recall: how many of your target accounts can remember you in aided / un-aided awareness?
LinkedIn now offers brand recall as part of their measurement suite.
Opps/BDR before ABM and opps/BDR after ABM: Is there a noticeable difference between the Opps/BDR process before and after ABM? If you can get it from 5 to 6 that is a huge increase.
Our friend Dave Rigotti from Inflection.io (ex Marketo / Bizible) also has a great way to measure recall. Here it is (thank you Dave):
Create a list of accounts you want to target. Ours were just our target accounts. Since we did ABM that was the universe of companies we really cared about.
Spin up a basic LinkedIn page to run ads against. Ours was called "marketing survey" (we didn't want people to know it was from Bizible as it would sway results)
Create and run ads to your brand survey. It doesn’t have to be complicated, it just has to work.
I set it up including unaided awareness, aided awareness, perception, some questions to pivot audience, etc.
Run the LinkedIn ads to the account list you created. Sit back and relax for a few weeks. And you’re done!
I always asked for a demo at the end. We’d pass them over to sales, who would follow up and turn them into pipeline. It basically paid for itself.
It cost $4,000 for somewhere between 100 - 200 submissions (I don’t remember exactly). It was definitely enough for us to have a pulse on the market.
Regardless of how you choose to measure your ABM strategy, the main point to keep in mind is that ABM is essentially GTM for enterprise markets. With a much smaller TAM and higher ACV, you can’t exclusively rely on software to tell you if your ABM is working.
Note: an underrated aspect of Hubspot is their new Target Accounts view. It not only shows you the status of pipeline and target accounts but also activity and engagement against those accounts. All you need for this to work is to have strong data hygiene.
Want to see what an ABM campaign may look like in practice? Check out this template.
Step 7: Tie the dots
The most important yet overlooked aspect of enterprise programs sales.
You must also ensure that the sales and marketing teams work together, inform one another, and promote the same message across multiple touchpoints and stakeholders. When marketing is running multithreading campaigns, make sure Sales is aware and following a similar playbook and messaging.
Enterprise accounts will most likely not just come to talk to sales purely based on marketing campaigns. Sales will have to outbound into these accounts, leverage social selling and develop champions in accounts.
Pro tip: Salespeople are essential in ABM because they both sell and become front-line researchers. Pay special attention to what sales teams are doing to improve closing rates and inform them of any insights you may find in your marketing campaigns.
Step 8: Don't forget about the human touch
Remember, these are just people doing their daily work at their organization, and getting pitched solutions isn't their highlight. Be human. Send them cupcakes. Everyone loves cupcakes.
No matter what you decide, spark their interest and help them notice you exist without entering hard pitch mode.
Pro-tip: Bad swag gets tossed away. Try to do something that genuinely brightens their day. Beyond the ABM Steps
As you probably noticed by now, with clear examples, the strategies that succeed in SMB translate only indirectly to enterprise markets (at best). While ABM strategies and playbooks are abundant and helpful, beyond the steps above, what matters is to think about how to become part of the consideration set of products an enterprise client may buy to solve a problem.
That’s the job. To become an easy and effective product to choose for multiple stakeholders who need to show positive results in a profit and losses statement. Should you decide to go for a platform or to look at it as an account vs. lead-focused effort between sales and marketing, the job isn’t done until you become a challenger product in an established category.
It is an uphill battle, but let’s not kid ourselves; ABM is just marketing for enterprise leagues.
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