Best of LinkedIn: Account-based Marketing CW 18/ 19

00:00:00: Provided by Thomas Allgaier and Frennus based on the most relevant posts on LinkedIn about account-based marketing in CW, eighteen and nineteen.

00:00:08: Frenness is a B to B market research company working with enterprises to optimize their campaigns With research grade account profiling an insights.

00:00:16: you can find more info in the description which

00:00:19: honestly Is the perfect context for what we're getting into today?

00:00:21: Absolutely because right now there are just Thousands of BtoB marketing teams staring at their analytics dashboards completely scratching their heads.

00:00:30: Yeah, they're wondering why there's super expensive.

00:00:32: account-based marketing campaigns are generating zero pipeline

00:00:36: Exactly!

00:00:37: Zero.

00:00:38: And we dug through the most relevant LinkedIn discourse over these last two weeks Calendar Weeks Eighteen and Nineteen And the overarching consensus reveals a pretty harsh truth for you guys listening.

00:00:49: A really harsh

00:00:49: truth?

00:00:50: Yeah, most teams aren't doing ABM at all.

00:00:52: I mean they are just doing regular broad-demand generation.

00:00:55: But they've just sort of slapped a fancy target account list onto it and called it a day.

00:01:00: Right!

00:01:00: The reckoning happening in B to D space right now because this is massive.

00:01:05: We're looking at complete structural breakdown.

00:01:07: what marketing team thought was working.

00:01:09: It's falling apart.

00:01:10: It really is.

00:01:11: You have the quiet collapse of these incredibly expensive software platforms, a fundamental shift in how teams align with sales and this frankly mind-bending realization about AI.

00:01:25: Right, it's no longer just a tool we use to write cold emails.

00:01:28: It is actually acting as a literal member of the B-to-B buying committee

00:01:32: Which is just crazy to think about.

00:01:34: but okay before you can market to an account or you know An AI gatekeeper You have to actually choose the account

00:01:40: right?

00:01:40: You need a target.

00:01:41: Yeah

00:01:42: and this is where the friction really starts.

00:01:44: How are teams actually picking their targets?

00:01:47: Because from what Mikhail Tarin shared in his post, it sounds like a lot of what gets called strategic ABM is just organized chaos.

00:01:54: Oh, organize chaos as putting it politely I think.

00:01:57: Tarine pointed out that a staggering number of these target lists are built purely on a founder's gut feeling.

00:02:03: or you know It's a random spreadsheet an intern built three years ago That just keeps getting recycled over and over

00:02:09: completely unchecked

00:02:10: exactly.

00:02:11: It's targeting based entirely on vibes.

00:02:13: A sales leader says, hey we need to close logos in the FinTech space because I read an article about it and suddenly that becomes the entire go-to market

00:02:21: strategy.".

00:02:22: Right!

00:02:22: And when you build an elaborate super expensive motion on a random list... The downstream result is just inevitable pipeline failure.

00:02:31: You're

00:02:31: building a mansion on quicksand.

00:02:33: Basically yeah but let me push back on that little bit Because were talking highly paid intelligent professionals here.

00:02:39: Are they really just being lazy?

00:02:42: That's a fair question.

00:02:43: Or is this an aspiration problem?

00:02:45: because Victoria Keira Lovett touched on this and she had this great analogy, She compared bad ideal customer profile building Bad ICP Building to A teenager wanting To date a celebrity.

00:02:57: Oh I loved that.

00:02:58: post

00:02:58: It so accurate.

00:03:00: Companies say well we want to sell it to enterprise Because its cool & prestigious.

00:03:04: But Ashley pointed out Aspiration doesn't build a repeatable business.

00:03:07: No it doesnt.

00:03:08: Portfolio data builds a repeatable business.

00:03:12: And Kirolova provided a beautifully grounded, like mathematical formula for finding your actual ICP rather than your aspirational one

00:03:21: which is so desperately needed.

00:03:23: what was the formula again?

00:03:24: It's high revenue share plus high win rate plus low churn.

00:03:29: that equals you're true target for ABM.

00:03:31: okay let's break the actual mechanics of

00:03:36: If you are winning, say one out of every two deals in the construction software space and they stay with you for five years.

00:03:43: Okay that's a great signal Right.

00:03:45: But then your only winning one outta ten deals on tourism space And they churn after just eight months.

00:03:50: Wow

00:03:51: yeah

00:03:51: Your market is literally screaming at where path of least resistance Is.

00:03:55: but

00:03:55: teams ignore math Because the construction deal might be smaller right?

00:04:00: And the tourism deal sounds sexier.

00:04:01: in board meeting

00:04:02: Precisely And Mateus Sekta built this exact problem He warned that most B-to-B teams don't even know the actual physical size of their viable market.

00:04:11: That is genuinely terrifying!

00:04:13: It is, if you set a marketing leadership team down and ask how many actual companies exist on planet Earth that fit this specific high win rate profile?

00:04:23: You usually just get dead silence.

00:04:25: they don't know if the number's eight hundred or eight

00:04:27: thousand So there are flying totally blind.

00:04:28: I mean They might be allocating a million dollar ad budget to reach an audience like Four hundred people.

00:04:33: Which happens all the time, unfortunately.

00:04:35: Sector argues you need a real calculated database not some vague Gartner or Forrester report claiming you operate in an eighty billion dollar market by

00:04:44: those massive vanity numbers.

00:04:46: Yeah You need to bottom up calculation of your total addressable Market Your serviceable addressable market and your serviceable attainable market.

00:04:53: Okay so meaning Tam is The Big Pie In The Sky.

00:04:56: Sam is who actually buys your specific flavor of the product.

00:05:00: Exactly!

00:05:00: And Bress Amis, you can literally reach and service with your current sales team and budget.

00:05:05: Yes You need to know that you are going after exactly say twelve hundred accounts Every downstream decision-your headcount Your event budget...Your channel mix at all must be reverse engineered from that specific number.

00:05:21: You know, even twelve hundred might be too generous for a real ABM motion.

00:05:25: Adam Tarina shared a strategy from sales leader named Tony Manpuso and it takes this restriction to the absolute extreme.

00:05:33: Honestly, it terrified me a little.

00:05:35: The cutting down in the way?

00:05:35: Yes

00:05:36: Mancuse's approach for resource constrained teams is to start with tens of thousands of accounts In your broader universe.

00:05:42: Okay Then you run them through a rigorous scoring model based on specific value props and recent trigger events like A new round of funding or a leadership change walking

00:05:52: spark Yeah

00:05:53: And that narrows it down to about a hundred highly qualified Accounts.

00:05:56: and then You have to make the hardest call-in business

00:05:59: if you cut eighty of him.

00:06:03: The discipline required to do that is just immense.

00:06:06: Wait, practically speaking if I'm a VP of marketing and i march into my CEO's office And say hey good news we are intentionally ignoring ninety nine percent Of our addressable market?

00:06:17: I am getting fired before lunch.

00:06:18: Oh absolutely.

00:06:19: so how Do you actually sell That internal discipline To leadership?

00:06:23: well You don't pitch it as Ignoring the Market reallocating tier one resources to the twenty accounts that are mathematically proven.

00:06:40: Samantha S. and Amprakash Karupinan brought this up in their post, they argued that ABM is not a marketing tactic it's not a secondary channel.

00:06:48: you just sit next to your inbound blog strategy right?

00:06:50: It is the complete go-to market redesign.

00:06:53: Ampraakash put it perfectly.

00:06:54: he basically said if your primary success metrics haven't shifted away from marketing qualified leads

00:06:59: Ah!

00:07:00: The classic MQLs.

00:07:01: Right those Classic MQLS.

00:07:03: If You Haven't Shifted Away From Those And Towards Actual Deal Movement

00:07:07: Because MQLs are a volume metric.

00:07:10: I mean, you can generate five hundred mqls by giving away free iPad in the webinar.

00:07:14: but if none of them were from those twenty target accounts You've achieved literally nothing

00:07:19: Nothing at all.

00:07:20: And Riccardo Montes Baobind noted something critical along these lines.

00:07:24: He wrote that pipeline is generated by alignment not activity.

00:07:28: Oh i love that freezing

00:07:30: Isn't it great?

00:07:31: In traditional setup marketing generates leads throws over the fence to sales and just washes their hands of it.

00:07:37: And then

00:07:37: if it fails, marketing blames sales for not closing and sales blames marketing for weak leads.

00:07:44: It's a tale as old time

00:07:45: Exactly but in an account-based model that silo has to be completely destroyed.

00:07:51: Marketing and sales must share the exact same pipeline goals work off The exact same target list

00:07:56: again.

00:07:56: That sounds phenomenal on a textbook Right.

00:07:59: But actually implementing that is incredibly messy, you can't just pause the entire company for six months to restructure.

00:08:08: So I really appreciated the insight from Andres and Kevich on how to actually start this without burning your existing marketing calendar.

00:08:15: To the ground,

00:08:15: oh yeah his approach is so practical

00:08:17: it Really?

00:08:18: Is he suggests taking something you are already doing like a plan broad webinar and just narrowing The focus instead of top ten trends in HR tech You make at A highly specific use case tailored for a small cluster Of Your target accounts

00:08:33: and the crucial mechanism there is sitting down with sales beforehand

00:08:36: exactly the success criteria with sales before that event even happens.

00:08:41: That upfront alignment is everything, you have to agree!

00:08:44: How many people from our specific target accounts need actually show up and call this event a win?

00:08:50: Are we aiming for five specific CFOs?

00:08:53: And when you are dealing with truly massive deals, the execution of those events has to be totally flawless.

00:08:59: Margaret Zadegaleyska described the environment of high value B-to-B where pipeline is like north of a hundred million dollars and she introduced one of the best analogies I've seen in a long time

00:09:10: The waiter analogy.

00:09:11: Yes

00:09:12: She said that the marketer needs act like a waiter.

00:09:14: It's brilliant way to frame it honestly.

00:09:16: You're serving invisible values through relationships and tailored microevents.

00:09:21: Galleyska firmly declares these high value spaces a no sales and marketing zone.

00:09:27: Let's pull that waiter analogy apart for a second because I think it explains the mechanism so well, A truly excellent waiter at a Michelin star restaurant doesn't run up to your table interrupts conversation and aggressively pitch you.

00:09:40: No, they read the table.

00:09:41: Yes!

00:09:42: They read The Room... ...they know if it's a tense business negotiation or romantic anniversary….

00:09:48: …they anticipate needs.. ..they silently refill the water glass without you ever really noticing that were there.

00:09:54: And in B-to-B marketing….

00:09:55: That translates to understanding their specific business problems before they have to articulate them to you

00:10:00: Exactly.

00:10:01: You aren't handing a Fortune five hundred CEO branded Yeti mug Or cheap stress ball.

00:10:06: You are providing genuine friction free insight.

00:10:10: The best marketing at this tier doesn't actually feel like marketing to the buyer.

00:10:13: But you know, delivering that level of invisible bespoke service requires an incredibly granular understanding of your audience.

00:10:21: You can't be a great waiter if he just blindly drop a tray of food in the corporate lobby.

00:10:26: Good point!

00:10:27: ...you need to know exactly who is sitting at the table

00:10:29: Which naturally pivots us right into shift toward contact-level execution.

00:10:35: Steve Armenti and Dimitri Lysitsky highlighted that the strategy has definitively moved from account level orchestration down to contact-level orchestration.

00:10:44: Yeah, we now have the tech and capability... ...to treat every individual person inside an account as a market of one

00:10:52: Which is funny because the term account based marketing Is almost misnomer at this point.

00:10:56: That's

00:10:56: just thinking

00:10:57: right.

00:10:58: I mean isn't the whole premise of ABM?

00:11:00: We stopped focusing on Individual Leads And started looking At The Company As A Whole.

00:11:04: Why are we suddenly obsessing over individual personas again?

00:11:07: Well, because as Ali Litman and Orla Murphy pointed out in their post the buying committees inside these accounts Are larger and more fracture than they have ever been.

00:11:15: That

00:11:15: makes sense.

00:11:16: You aren't selling to the account The account doesn't sign the contract.

00:11:20: A highly stressed group of human beings does And those humans Have entirely different often competing motivations.

00:11:28: Right, like the CFO's primary objective is risk mitigation and cutting costs but the CTOs' primary objective Is acquiring the most cutting-edge technology so they can retain their top developers

00:11:39: Exactly.

00:11:40: So sending a generic account level message about driving synergy to both of them is totally meaningless.

00:11:46: To win the deal you have to find a highly specific wedge for each stakeholder.

00:11:50: It's all about individual context.

00:11:52: You need to know that the CTO made a public promise on a podcast six months ago about migrating to.

00:12:15: They didn't spray ads at five hundred automotive accounts, they targeted exactly fifteen.

00:12:23: That intense focus again?

00:12:25: Yep!

00:12:26: Then...they ran incredibly deep enrichment on the individual decision makers.

00:12:30: They looked their social presence The things that were commenting on and crucially Their tenure in the role.

00:12:36: Tenure is such an underutilized signal.

00:12:39: I mean a VP who has been in this seat for four years Is usually just protecting his status quo.

00:12:45: But if he was there for four months They are desperately looking for a quick high visibility win.

00:12:51: To prove to the board they were a good hire

00:12:53: Absolutely, so they took all those signals of tenure The public comments the risk profiles and they fed them into Claude.

00:12:59: But they didn't just ask the AI to write a cold email.

00:13:02: no No?

00:13:03: They used Claude to build deep psychological personality profiles.

00:13:07: For each committee member they mapped out exactly what would motivate them.

00:13:11: then they orchestrated A five-touch sequence.

00:13:14: okay So what did that look like?

00:13:15: Well, they warmed them up with personalized ads and then instead of asking for the classic fifteen minute zoom call They invited The Buying Committee to a private food truck experience.

00:13:24: Wow It goes back to the waiter analogy no branded swag just a tailored localized event.

00:13:31: And they gamified it to lower the defensive shields.

00:13:34: the sequence essentially said hey the chefs want to name its secret burger Just for your team.

00:13:39: If you can come up with the winning name, they'll give you five hundred bucks.

00:13:43: It's so clever!

00:13:43: It

00:13:43: was playful.

00:13:44: it built instant rapport.

00:13:46: by the time the SDR reached out The food truck had done all the heavy lifting of establishing their relationship.

00:13:51: You know this structural dynamic.

00:13:53: that play is actually most important part.

00:13:55: Carlin noted that sales development rep doing the outreach reported directly to marketing not to sales.

00:14:02: Now why does that structure shift so critical?

00:14:06: because that's pretty unusual.

00:14:07: It changes the entire incentive model.

00:14:10: when an SDR reports to a traditional sales manager, their only metric is meetings booked

00:14:15: right

00:14:16: they will aggressively burn bridges just to hit there weekly quota.

00:14:19: Oh totally we've all gotten this.

00:14:21: terrible emails

00:14:22: Right.

00:14:23: but in the sdr reports to marketing and an ABM motion The goal becomes build the right relationship at the exact right time.

00:14:31: The SDR's outreach is mapped perfectly against the ad campaigns and event invitations.

00:14:50: food truck RSVPs, I mean that requires some heavy-duty technology.

00:14:54: Oh absolutely!

00:14:54: But looking at the discourse from weeks eighteen and nineteen there is a mass of reckoning happening with the tech stack.

00:15:00: right now The legacy tools that teams have relied on seem to be just collapsing.

00:15:04: Camille Rexton and Chris A brought forward some bombshell data regarding this.

00:15:08: We are seeing major enterprise companies quietly but rapidly turning away from massive, a hundred and twenty thousand dollars-a year black box ABM platforms like six cents in demand base.

00:15:18: But

00:15:18: those platforms were the unquestioned gold standard for the last five years?

00:15:22: Why they said an exodus.

00:15:23: it really comes down to a complete breakdown in trust mostly driven by broken ROI attribution.

00:15:30: Chris A detailed this classic nightmare scenario when his post

00:15:33: hopefully got me.

00:15:34: so accompany drops eighty five thousand dollars on the license.

00:15:38: They spend the first eight weeks just trying to get the tool to sync cleanly with Salesforce.

00:15:44: Finally, it's running and the platform proprietary AI start flagging accounts as high intent.

00:15:50: Okay

00:15:51: sounds good so far

00:15:52: right?

00:15:52: So it spits out a list of two hundred companies that are supposedly actively researching your solution based on third-party data.

00:15:59: The sales team naturally jumps in the phones

00:16:01: Right!

00:16:02: The sales reps call them And reality is completely disconnected from dashboard.

00:16:06: Half the accounts aren't buying anything.

00:16:08: Someone just accidentally downloaded a white paper Yeah, and the other half they already signed a contract with your competitor A week ago because the intent signal from the platform is delayed.

00:16:16: Oh that's brutal.

00:16:17: And because it's a black box algorithm you can even see The underlying data to figure out why this signal was so wrong

00:16:23: exactly.

00:16:24: So the reps lose faith in the tool immediately.

00:16:26: And when the CFO comes knocking at the end of year asking to see a definitive closed one pipeline generated by that eighty five thousand dollar investment, marketing just can't prove it.

00:16:36: They

00:16:36: have fuzzy metrics!

00:16:38: The platforms claim revenue was influenced by them and in tight economy CFOs do not pay for vague influence.

00:16:45: those tools get cut.

00:16:47: But the takeaway here isn't that AI is useless in account-based marketing.

00:16:51: It's that the application of the AI is shifting from broad opaque intent data to highly specific execution, like we just talked about how Ryan Carlin used Claude for persona building.

00:17:02: Yeah but Even that has immense risk if it's applied poorly.

00:17:05: Jen Ellen Newth had a fantastic warning about the lazy use of generative AI in outreach.

00:17:09: What

00:17:09: did she say?

00:17:10: She argued that buyers have developed an instant radar for AI-generated cold emails.

00:17:14: Oh,

00:17:15: she compared to the fake handwritten envelope didn't she which is so universally relatable.

00:17:19: Yes, you get an envelope in your mailbox.

00:17:22: It looks like it was written with a blue ballpoint pen You open up feeling little spark of curiosity and its just pre-approved credit card offer from the bank.

00:17:31: You instantly feel manipulated and duped.

00:17:35: And that is exactly the psychological reaction a buyer has when we use LLM to scrape their LinkedIn and write personalized email That lacks any actual strategic insight.

00:17:45: We look lazy.

00:17:47: We look lazy and we train our prospects that our communications are inherently deceptive, so they just learn to permanently ignore

00:17:53: us.

00:17:54: If the expensive old guard intent platforms are losing trust and lazy chat GPT emails or actively damaging our brand equity, where is technology actually going?

00:18:06: This brings us to what I found to be the most provocative mind-bending trend from The Sources.

00:18:11: According Scott William Forrest Lee Auden and James Tuck who was referencing a brilliant concept for Marissa Decay...

00:18:21: It's

00:18:22: wild.

00:18:23: It really is!

00:18:24: We are witnessing the very early stages of a shift from account-based marketing to agent based marketing.

00:18:31: Explain the mechanism for that, because it fundamentally changes the job

00:18:39: Before a human buyer ever hits your landing page or downloads, you're beautifully designed slide deck.

00:18:44: Or speaks to your SDR.

00:18:46: they are deploying an AI agent right there opening Microsoft co-pilot or chat GPT enterprise or perplexity and they were typing something like compare the top three supply chain logistics platforms for a midsize manufacturing firm focusing on implementation speed

00:19:01: so that I is doing The first pass of the vendor research.

00:19:05: it is acting as the ultimate unbribeable gatekeeper.

00:19:08: Yes,

00:19:08: the AI porces the entire internet decides what evidence is credible generates a shortlist and dictates the narrative of your brand to the human buyer.

00:19:17: so What does this actually mean for you?

00:19:19: The listener right now?

00:19:20: how do you adapt to an AI gatekeeper?

00:19:23: Well, it means that if your brand architecture isn't optimized for how large language models ingest and synthesize information you are in serious trouble.

00:19:31: Big trouble?

00:19:32: Right!

00:19:32: If your entire value proposition is buried inside a gated PDF an AI scraper cannot access or its hidden behind a flashy video with no text transcript,

00:19:43: perplexity

00:19:44: literally can not read you.

00:19:45: You don't exist to them

00:19:46: Exactly…you aren't just losing market share to the competitor – you're completely invisible.

00:19:53: It requires a profound operational shift.

00:19:55: You have to ensure your technical documentation is flawless, Your FAQs are structured cleanly in semantic HTML and you're brand is cited by authoritative third-party sources that the LLMs actually

00:20:08: trust.".

00:20:09: You're marketing to The Machine!

00:20:10: You really Are...you Have To Start Testing Your GoToMarket Messaging Against AI Agents.

00:20:16: They Are Your Tools They Are Teammates And Now they Are Your Target Audience.

00:20:20: Okay, let's pull all these threads together into a cohesive picture for the listener.

00:20:24: B to be.

00:20:24: marketing is clearly undergoing a brutal but very necessary correction.

00:20:29: We're finally shedding the spray and pray demand generation that was just masquerading as ABM.

00:20:35: To win in this environment you have to do the unforgiving math on your ICP and build the internal political capital, to ignore ninety-nine percent of your addressable market.

00:20:45: You have to shatter the silos and operate as a unified go-to-market engine where marketing and sales share identical pipeline goals in target

00:20:52: lists.".

00:20:53: That alignment is key!

00:20:54: And then read the table like a Michelin star waiter engaging specific members of The Buying Committee with undeniable research human relevance?

00:21:02: And finally, you have to restructure your entire digital footprint for an era where AI agents are acting as the gatekeepers.

00:21:23: Thank you so much for joining us on this deep dive into the source material.

00:21:26: Don't forget to subscribe To The Feed.

00:21:28: and as we sign off today, I want to leave You with one final slightly unsettling thought to mull over.

00:21:34: Oh boy Well if AI agents are increasingly doing the initial vendor research in short listing For the buying committee And On the flip side marketing and sales teams were Increasingly using AI Agents to generate their outbound contact and execute Their campaigns How long until BDB marketing is quite literally just our AI trying to persuade their AI while the humans sit back and wait for final receipt?