Best of LinkedIn: Account-based Marketing CW 28/ 29

00:00:00: Provided by Thomas Allgaier and Frennus, based on the most relevant LinkedIn posts about account-based marketing in calendar weeks twenty eight and twenty nine.

00:00:08: Frenness is a BDB market research company working with enterprises to optimize their campaigns with account an executive insights far beyond AI

00:00:17: Right.

00:00:17: And just to set the stage here, today's deep dive is really for strategic B-to-B marketing professionals if you're looking completely dominating LinkedIn right now.

00:00:34: Exactly, and we've got a really solid roadmap for you.

00:00:37: today We're going to explore four key themes.

00:00:40: So start with ABM strategy in fundamentals then move into account intelligence and signals touch on the whole AI and automation explosion And finally wrap up with linkedin ads and paid channels

00:00:50: sounds perfect.

00:00:51: Let's just dive right into that first theme this strategy and fundamentals because frankly The core tension at an abm Right Now is there some massive gap between having a real go-to market strategy versus?

00:01:01: You know doing outbound and slapping a fancy name on it.

00:01:05: Oh, one hundred percent.

00:01:06: It's like putting a really expensive tailored suit on standard demand gen.

00:01:10: Yeah exactly.

00:01:11: And there was this great point from Maria Scheifler that gets right to the heart of this.

00:01:15: She pointed out go-to market success doesn't start with some colorful perfectly planned campaign

00:01:22: calendar Right which is what everyone wants to do first.

00:01:25: Totally, but she says it actually starts with a really sharp universally agreed upon ideal customer profile for every single segment.

00:01:34: and here's the crazy part if you let that ICP definition drift for say two years, your pipeline is just going to stop converting.

00:01:43: I mean it has do right.

00:01:44: the market moves so fast and actually Dan Rosenthal put some real parameters around this that i think are super helpful.

00:01:49: he basically argued that true ABM works best when you have a total addressable market of under twenty thousand accounts.

00:01:56: wow

00:01:56: okay That's pretty specific.

00:01:58: cap Right And Your Average Contract Value Needs To Be Above Fifty Thousand Dollars.

00:02:03: Or alternatively, you have to have a dedicated enterprise sales motion because it's all about working backwards from this highly targeted list.

00:02:10: Yeah the unit economics just don't work.

00:02:12: if your contract value is like ten grand You'd go bankrupt running a true one-to-one motion

00:02:18: Exactly!

00:02:19: You had to go deep not broad

00:02:20: But going deep.

00:02:21: and Shivam Shukla brought us up which I thought was brilliant.

00:02:26: It's not just about hammering company with ads its' about mapping actual buying committee inside that account

00:02:33: Because you're not selling to a logo.

00:02:34: You're selling the people

00:02:35: right highly anxious People usually.

00:02:37: he noted that, you know The CEO wants growth?

00:02:40: The CFO is demanding immediate ROI and the cto Is just terrified of a security brooch.

00:02:46: so if you send them all the same generic message Yeah

00:02:48: If you sent a generic synergize your workflows email it completely fails.

00:02:53: It doesn't address their individual priorities at all which

00:02:55: brings up the biggest internal hurdle.

00:02:57: Nancy Carlisle Harlan dropped a massive reality check on this.

00:03:01: She basically said that ABM fails because sales, marketing and customer success are completely misaligned on which accounts actually matter.

00:03:08: Oh the internal alignment problem?

00:03:10: Yeah

00:03:10: classic!

00:03:11: Right.

00:03:12: it's not because you don't have good creative or campaigns It's because nobody agrees on the targets.

00:03:18: But here's the thing You can even hope to achieve that cross-team alignment if you don' t know what of those target actively ready to buy

00:03:26: right now.

00:03:27: Yeah, timing is literally everything which is a perfect pivot to our second theme account intelligence and signals.

00:03:34: The timing advantage because the difference between just having a list of logos And having an actual pipeline of buyers it all comes down to signals.

00:03:42: in the math on this is honestly pretty sobering.

00:03:45: Malav Thakar shared this stat And it explains so much the pain and B to be marketing at any given moment.

00:03:51: Only about five percent of your target accounts are actually in market, just

00:03:54: five percent.

00:03:55: that is wild

00:03:56: right?

00:03:56: So if you're blasting your whole budget evenly across everyone You're wasting ninety-five percent on your money Which

00:04:02: is why we rely on signals.

00:04:04: but people get this so wrong.

00:04:05: Carolyn Dylks clarified a major misconception here.

00:04:09: She pointed out that, like a content download or registering for a webinar.

00:04:13: That is an interest signal!

00:04:15: It's not an intent signal.

00:04:16: I don't

00:04:16: think it's such a crucial distinction...

00:04:18: Right because someone downloading away paper could just be an intern doing research.

00:04:23: she says you have to layer first-party behavior Like checking your pricing page with third party intent To actually find the real buyers.

00:04:30: Yeah You have to stop conflating curiosity With buying power.

00:04:34: and hey by the way if you are finding this breakdown of B to be trends valuable.

00:04:38: You know, take a second to subscribe to the show so you catch all our future deep dives.

00:04:43: we track this stuff constantly

00:04:44: definitely do that.

00:04:46: So on that note of strict signal logic Dev Jitsen shared a case study that blew my mind.

00:04:52: He took over this struggling program right.

00:04:54: they had four hundred target accounts and in six months They got a grand total of four opportunities ouch

00:05:00: Six months for four ops

00:05:02: exactly.

00:05:03: So he just ruthlessly cut the list down from four hundred to just twenty five accounts.

00:05:07: Down to twenty-five?

00:05:08: Yeah, but they were based on incredibly strict signals.

00:05:11: recent website visits active LinkedIn engagement existing sales relationships and then used highly personalized videos for outreach.

00:05:18: And what happened?

00:05:19: nine opportunities in a single quarter Just by focusing purely on the ones actually showing intent.

00:05:24: That is power of focus right there.

00:05:27: You see this at highest levels too.

00:05:29: Eric Kwanström shared how Datadog prioritizes their accounts, and it's fascinating.

00:05:33: Oh I love datadogs go to market!

00:05:35: What do they do?

00:05:36: They don't use broad demographic filters-they look for highly specific technical signals like... ...They monitor an account's github repository usage And the complexity of their tech

00:05:46: stack.

00:05:47: Wow so you're looking at actual symptoms of a problem that they solve Exactly.

00:05:51: If an engineering team is suddenly shipping tons code Their infrastructure probably stressed Which means they need Datadoc.

00:05:57: today Using this method, one of their SDR teams hit seventy-five percent of the monthly quota in a single day.

00:06:04: A single day?

00:06:05: That's insane!

00:06:06: But you know once you found those high intense signals The bottleneck used to be time it took actually build personalized assets for them.

00:06:13: Which brings us to theme three AI and automation.

00:06:17: Oh yeah...the massive collision between execution speed and strategic depth.

00:06:22: Right because Larry Hiledakis talked about his new tool called ten minute ABM And the claim here is wild.

00:06:29: It basically compresses what used to take a hundred hours of manual production into ten minutes.

00:06:34: Wait, A HUNDRED HOURS INTO

00:06:35: TEN MINUTES?

00:06:36: HOW?

00:06:36: It generates hundreds of personalized ad sets for specific accounts and it pulls the messaging directly from actual sales call recordings.

00:06:44: so its perfectly tailored.

00:06:45: I mean this speed is incredible but...and i think that's where people push back.

00:06:50: if you attach a Ferrari engine to your broken shopping cart You know..you're just gonna crash faster.

00:06:55: Yes

00:06:56: Xandres Zinkovich made this exact point.

00:06:59: He said, AI only scales a strategy that already works.

00:07:03: If your manual setup was failing automating it just means you're blasting bad marketing at an unprecedented scale.

00:07:09: You are annoying more people much faster Precisely.

00:07:13: But when does work?

00:07:14: its pretty incredible.

00:07:15: Ryan Carlin built the set up for a fifty million dollar tech company and shows where automation is working flawlessly.

00:07:21: What did he build?

00:07:22: He created three distinct agentic workflows that made their ABM literally one hundred percent hands-off.

00:07:29: So Agent One qualifies net new ICP accounts, Agent Two enriches the buying committee by cross referencing LinkedIn data.

00:07:36: and then Agent Three actually provisions the CRM.

00:07:39: it creates the hub spot records without a human ever touching a keyboard.

00:07:43: so a sales rep just logs in and sees perfectly researched accounts ready to go.

00:07:47: That is The Dream.

00:07:49: But, you know there's a flip side to this AI stuff that is actually pretty terrifying for marketers.

00:07:53: Bill Hobbib shared the stat from G-II data.

00:07:55: Oh I think i know what your talking about!

00:07:57: Yeah, sixty nine percent of buyers selected different vendor than they originally planned after using AI search.

00:08:02: Sixty Nine Percent?

00:08:03: Right.

00:08:04: AI isn't just helping us execute campaigns.

00:08:06: it actively rewriting the vendors short lists before sales rep even knows their account looking.

00:08:11: That completely changes research phase.

00:08:13: if the AI doesn't like you are erased entirely.

00:08:17: Exactly.

00:08:18: So if AI is changing how buyers research and how fast we can build assets, it really begs the question.

00:08:25: How do we actually get these assets in front of the right people without just setting our ad budgets on fire?

00:08:31: Which is a perfect transition to our final theme – LinkedIn ads & paid channels.

00:08:36: It's time move past vanity metrics And treat paid channel as targeted sales system.

00:08:42: Prosper Okachiku laid out fantastic framework for this.

00:08:45: It's all about mapping your channels to account tiers so you don't burn out the audience or wallet.

00:08:51: Yeah, because treating every account equally is a huge mistake!

00:08:54: Exactly – he says Tier One accounts VIPs get all four channels orchestrated, adds to warm them up, LinkedIn DMs to nurture cold calls and emails... Right…the

00:09:03: full red carpet.

00:09:04: But tier three accounts?

00:09:05: They just get email.

00:09:06: You have match channel investment with actual potential value of the account.

00:09:11: That makes total sense.

00:09:12: And even within those top tiers, structurally setting up the campaigns matters so much.

00:09:17: Emilio Kruschenko over at Usurpilot shared this really tactical win that I love.

00:09:21: Oh yeah what did they change?

00:09:22: They split

00:09:23: their audience by CPM So basically into higher and lower cost country cohorts.

00:09:28: Okay because the algorithm is lazy.

00:09:30: right.

00:09:30: Exactly If you mix expensive US clicks with cheaper clicks somewhere else.

00:09:35: The algorithm just spends all your money on the cheap ones and ignores your main targets,

00:09:40: right?

00:09:40: It takes the path of least resistance.

00:09:42: so she split them structurally And then she changed the campaign objective from website visits to brand awareness

00:09:50: which feels super counterintuitive.

00:09:51: everyone wants to click

00:09:52: it does.

00:09:53: But that simple structural change almost doubled their impressions and cut their cost per click by over fifty-five percent.

00:10:01: That is wild, but it proves you have to understand platform mechanics.

00:10:04: Tim Davidson did an audit of this series C SaaS company... ...that was spending a hundred twenty thousand dollars a month.

00:10:10: A hundred and twenty grand a month on LinkedIn

00:10:12: Yeah!

00:10:13: And they were using maximum delivery bidding which basically tells the platform, hey I don't care about efficiency just spend all this money before midnight.

00:10:19: Oh no

00:10:20: that's sky rockets.

00:10:21: your costs for no reason

00:10:22: right.

00:10:23: and their flagship one-to-one campaigns targeting they're top forty three VIP accounts.

00:10:29: They had a dismal point three two percent click through rate

00:10:32: wait point three to percent.

00:10:34: why was it so low?

00:10:35: because The creative look like every other generic boring B to be add in the feed.

00:10:40: It Just didn't stand out at All.

00:10:42: Wow.

00:10:43: Yeah, you can have the best targeting in the world but if the creative is invisible... You're done!

00:10:47: But when do get it right?

00:10:48: The upside is massive.

00:10:49: Matteo Foix shared this report where a LinkedIn-only outbound system generated two point six million dollars and qualified pipeline In just six months.

00:10:57: Two point six Million from Just LinkedIn.

00:10:59: Just LinkedIn no emails No cold calls..but they achieved with a massive twenty three point eight percent reply rate because They had data foundation And intent layers dialed in perfectly.

00:11:09: When you have that One channel is totally enough.

00:11:12: Which is just incredible, and you know as we wrap this up it really brings me to a final pretty provocative thought.

00:11:18: based on all of the material that's been spent a lot of time talking about AI tools doing heavy lifting right?

00:11:22: Yeah absolutely

00:11:23: but there's this cautionary tale from Harsharaj I think everyone needs hear.

00:11:28: HubSpot recently tried to pool customer CRM Theta into a shared AI tool.

00:11:34: The idea was to make the AI smarter for everybody.

00:11:37: Oh, I remember this.

00:11:38: people were not happy.

00:11:40: massive revolt immediate revolt yeah because as AI becomes the baseline engine For Everybody like when everyone can write a thousand emails in ten minutes?

00:11:49: The technology itself isn't your competitive mode anymore.

00:11:52: That's a great point.

00:11:53: It just levels the playing field completely

00:11:55: exactly your proprietary hard one historical account.

00:11:59: beta is Your only true strategic advantage left.

00:12:02: don't trade that away for a quick software feature.

00:12:04: I couldn't agree more.

00:12:05: if you enjoyed this episode new episodes drop every two weeks.

00:12:08: also check out our other editions on Field Marketing Channel and Partner marketing AI in B to be more tech go-to market, and social selling.

00:12:16: Thanks much for tuning into This deep dive.

00:12:18: everyone really appreciate it.

00:12:19: make sure you hit subscribe And we will catch You On The Next One.