Best of LinkedIn: Account-based Marketing CW 46/ 47

00:00:00: Provided by Thomas Allgeier and Frennus, based on the most relevant posts on LinkedIn about account-based marketing in CW-Forty-Six and Forty-Seven, Frennus is a B-to-B market research company working with enterprises to optimize their campaigns with account and executive insights far beyond AI.

00:00:17: Welcome back.

00:00:17: Today, we are on a critical mission, really, to synthesize the signal from all the noise on LinkedIn when it comes to account-based marketing.

00:00:25: We're looking specifically at what B to B leaders we're talking about in weeks forty-six and forty-seven to boil it all down.

00:00:32: And that boiling down is so important right now.

00:00:34: I mean, if you look at all the intelligence shared across those weeks, the message is just crystal clear.

00:00:38: The whole era of spray and pray.

00:00:40: It's over.

00:00:41: Officially.

00:00:41: It's done.

00:00:42: We're talking about, you know, extreme precision, AI being operationalized everywhere, and this ruthless obsession with quality over volume.

00:00:49: What actually works?

00:00:50: Okay, let's start right there with what works because the buyer's climate basically dictates every single move we make.

00:00:56: The first huge theme we saw from posts by people like Anna Gabriela Rodriguez and Joanna Biddle is this fundamental change in the B-to-B buyer journey.

00:01:04: Oh, absolutely.

00:01:05: The change is structural.

00:01:06: Joanna Biddle, she highlighted that the overall buying cycle is actually getting shorter.

00:01:10: Jeweler,

00:01:11: how much shorter?

00:01:12: It dropped from about eleven point three months down to ten point one.

00:01:16: So buyers are consolidating their research and they're just they're doing it way faster.

00:01:21: That

00:01:21: speed is one thing.

00:01:22: but when they actually decide to talk to a seller, that's the really critical part,

00:01:26: right?

00:01:26: That's it.

00:01:27: Buyers are now reaching out when they're only about sixty-one percent of the way through their process.

00:01:31: Yeah.

00:01:32: Now that might sound good, like great early engagement, but when you connect that data to what Sarah Patrick and Caitlin Bailey were saying, the picture gets a lot starker.

00:01:43: So what's the stark picture?

00:01:45: Well, the data is just brutal.

00:01:47: Ninety-five percent of the eventual winner is in any deal.

00:01:50: They are on what's called the day one shortlist.

00:01:52: Ninety-five

00:01:52: percent.

00:01:53: And once that list is set, nearly eight out of ten just buy from their number one choice.

00:01:57: Wow.

00:01:58: So what you're saying is, if your brand isn't shaping their thinking before they even have their first formal meeting, you're basically competing for the leftover five percent.

00:02:07: Exactly.

00:02:07: It completely redefines the game.

00:02:09: It moves the focus away from just bottom of funnel optimization to, well, total supremacy in the top and middle.

00:02:16: Which is why, as Lissy Hackman pointed out, ABM isn't some side experiment anymore.

00:02:21: No, it's the core growth motion is how you get on that shortlist in the first place.

00:02:25: This has to force a huge organizational shift.

00:02:28: We saw so much chatter about ABM itself needing to evolve.

00:02:32: People are even questioning the name account-based marketing.

00:02:36: That's the big debate.

00:02:37: Jeremy Grande all made a great point that the model is shifting from being just account based to being person first, but unified with the account.

00:02:44: Okay.

00:02:45: But the louder conversation, the one championed by people like Megan McParland is that ABM is dead.

00:02:51: And the future is account based experience.

00:02:53: ABX.

00:02:54: Okay, wait, we hear ABM is dead all the time.

00:02:56: Is this just another piece of jargon or is there a real measurable difference here?

00:03:01: It's more than jargon.

00:03:02: It's about a shift in mindset and really accountability.

00:03:06: ABM often focuses on running campaigns at accounts.

00:03:09: ABX is a whole company philosophy.

00:03:10: Yeah, it demands that every single touch point, every ad, every sales email, every customer success call is unified and feels human and relevant.

00:03:21: It's about an internal commitment to reducing friction for the buyer.

00:03:24: So making sure that even the fifteenth touch point feels just as intentional as the first.

00:03:29: Precisely.

00:03:30: Corey Peterson put it perfectly.

00:03:31: He said ABM or ABX has to be seen as a long-term commitment.

00:03:35: It's a relationship, not just a six-week ad campaign.

00:03:39: If you're not thinking that way, you're just not making that day one shortlist.

00:03:42: That commitment brings us right to our second big theme.

00:03:46: the engine behind all of this, which is, of course, AI and signals.

00:03:50: Tricia Lee put it so well.

00:03:51: She said, AI isn't the next big thing.

00:03:54: It's already here.

00:03:55: It's intrinsic to GTM now.

00:03:57: And we're not just talking about using chat GPT for headlines.

00:03:59: This is about deep intelligence.

00:04:01: We saw some really concrete data from an inflection group study shared by Megan Hire and Dorothea Gosling on why companies are adopting AI for ABM.

00:04:09: So what are the actual drivers?

00:04:10: What's pushing them?

00:04:11: The number one reason for seventy one percent of companies.

00:04:15: is the need for real account insights.

00:04:17: You can't get on that shortlist without knowing what's happening in the dark funnel.

00:04:21: Makes sense.

00:04:22: What's number two?

00:04:23: Number two, it's sixty one percent is hyper personalization at scale.

00:04:27: You know, delivering relevant messages to individuals without having a hundred people manually writing emails.

00:04:33: And I'm guessing the third one is about efficiency.

00:04:35: You got it.

00:04:36: At fifty nine percent, it's about scaling strategic impact without just hiring more people.

00:04:42: AI is a force multiplier for the strategist, not just an automation tool.

00:04:46: And that leads to this necessary mindset change.

00:04:48: I love Jessica Campo's observation that AI is the engine, not the driver.

00:04:52: Yes,

00:04:53: and the engine needs fuel.

00:04:54: Tricia Lee called that fuel signals.

00:04:56: Quality actionable signals are the new operating system for go-to-market.

00:05:00: Right, because if the signals are garbage,

00:05:02: your AI output is garbage.

00:05:03: It's that simple.

00:05:04: Teams have to get granular about what actually indicates intent.

00:05:07: Rachel Bryant gave a fantastic breakdown of the signals that matter most.

00:05:10: The one that really jumped out to me was anonymous website traffic by account.

00:05:15: Why is that so critical?

00:05:16: It's all about the seventy percent rule.

00:05:18: Over seventy percent of your buyers are on your site, reading, comparing, looking at pricing.

00:05:24: And they never fill out a form.

00:05:25: They're

00:05:26: invisible.

00:05:26: Totally.

00:05:27: So if you only track form fills, you're flying blind for most of the journey, tracking anonymous account level intent.

00:05:35: That's how you light up the dark funnel.

00:05:36: So beyond anonymous intent, what else is key?

00:05:39: You have to track a multi-person engagement.

00:05:41: One person reading something is interesting.

00:05:44: Four people from the same target account reading four different high intent articles in one week.

00:05:49: That's a huge signal.

00:05:50: That's

00:05:51: a buying committee format.

00:05:52: Exactly.

00:05:53: And you need to cluster the topics.

00:05:55: Are they just learning or are they deep into comparing features?

00:05:59: And Scott Martini's made a great case for third-party signals.

00:06:02: Things like job posts and news articles.

00:06:04: Yeah, because sales reps actually trust them.

00:06:06: A rep can see a job post for a head of digital transformation that mentions a problem your product solves.

00:06:12: They can verify that with their own eyes.

00:06:14: It builds so much more trust than just some black box intense score.

00:06:18: But this creates a paradox, right?

00:06:20: Christina Jaramillo and Eve Chen warned about this interpretation gap.

00:06:24: This is the critical failure point right now.

00:06:26: AI is creating more activity, more emails, more alerts, but it's not always leading to more revenue.

00:06:32: Why not?

00:06:33: Because teams stop short.

00:06:35: They get the signals, but they don't do the human work of translating them into a coherent strategy.

00:06:40: They just let the machine automate action without any intentional design.

00:06:44: So intelligence without a human strategist is just more noise.

00:06:48: It's having the map, but no general to decide which hell to take.

00:06:52: Exactly.

00:06:53: You need human judgment to design the experience.

00:06:55: Otherwise, you're just spamming people faster.

00:06:58: Okay, so we've got the strategy, the need for ABX and the intelligence to fuel it.

00:07:03: Let's pivot to the ground game.

00:07:04: How do you actually execute with this level of precision?

00:07:07: Well, we have to start at the very beginning or it all falls apart.

00:07:10: Karen Oakland and Bo Soil, they just hammered this home.

00:07:13: The single biggest breakdown between sales and marketing is the definition of the ICP.

00:07:18: The ideal customer profile.

00:07:20: What's the common mistake there?

00:07:22: It's what they call a Frankenstein list.

00:07:24: It's just a bunch of firmographics, company size, industry that looks good on paper.

00:07:30: but misses the actual intent triggers.

00:07:32: If your ICP is messy, your targeting is messy, your messaging is generic,

00:07:37: and your ad spend is wasted.

00:07:38: Completely.

00:07:39: You can't build precision on a cracked foundation.

00:07:41: So once that foundation is solid, we get to personalization.

00:07:45: And it has to be way smarter than just mail merge.

00:07:47: Mark Walker talked about level three personalization.

00:07:49: Yeah, level three is not just knowing their name and title.

00:07:52: It's about connecting all those signals we just talked about.

00:07:54: So for example,

00:07:55: it's knowing the new VP you're targeting came from a company that was a happy customer or knowing their exact KPIs because you saw them in a recent job description they posted.

00:08:06: You take all that and link it to their anonymous behavior on your website.

00:08:09: You're tailoring the message to their immediate context and what actually motivates them.

00:08:13: Yes.

00:08:14: It lets you deliver an unignorable point of view.

00:08:16: Yeah.

00:08:17: Melinda Monaco shared examples of tailoring entire experiences by vertical, making sure every asset speaks directly to that industry's reality.

00:08:24: That's level three.

00:08:25: And to do any of this, you need total GTM alignment.

00:08:29: Easy to say, but how are companies actually making it happen?

00:08:32: Elric Liglor pointed to the model that companies like Snowflake use.

00:08:37: Sales, SDRs, and marketing operate as one single unit.

00:08:41: One unit.

00:08:42: One unit, one playbook, one account funnel.

00:08:44: They got rid of the whole messy MQL handoff drama completely.

00:08:49: They just work warm, intent-rich accounts together.

00:08:52: And apparently they saw a thirty-six percent meeting rate on their high value accounts.

00:08:56: Thirty-six percent.

00:08:57: That shows what happens when everyone is focused.

00:08:59: So, ABM isn't a marketing program anymore.

00:09:01: No,

00:09:02: it's the revenue operating model.

00:09:04: Sarah Erdmash and Katarina Marifest dressed that it has to be a cross functional motion.

00:09:08: Sales has to be in the room planning.

00:09:10: And Alexander Robson pointed out that it's less about the flashy new tool and more about building trust between the team.

00:09:15: so they actually use the intelligence.

00:09:17: Trust

00:09:17: is that invisible layer that makes the tech work.

00:09:20: Okay, let's finish up with a few tactical nuggets.

00:09:23: Jack Porter from Bird Dog shared a really cool tactic on social ABM.

00:09:26: Oh,

00:09:27: this is brilliant.

00:09:28: And basically free.

00:09:29: His team generated over twelve hundred qualified meetings this way.

00:09:33: Super simple, really effective.

00:09:35: His sales reps would just personally connect with people at their target accounts on LinkedIn.

00:09:40: And once they were connected, the organic algorithm would start showing their content to those prospects.

00:09:45: They got hyper-targeted distribution without paying for ads.

00:09:48: That is smart.

00:09:49: It's using relationships to bypass the expensive paid channels.

00:09:53: It is.

00:09:53: And speaking of paid, Debjit Sen's audit of LinkedIn ads had a crucial warning.

00:09:58: He said teams have to avoid native targeting and always use negative job titles.

00:10:03: Negative

00:10:03: job titles?

00:10:04: Why is that so important?

00:10:06: because LinkedIn's ad platform can act like broad match.

00:10:09: If you target VP of marketing, you're probably also paying to show your ad to marketing assistants, interns, even recruiters.

00:10:15: It's just waste.

00:10:17: Using negative job titles to block those roles keeps your audience clean.

00:10:21: That's the definition of precision right there.

00:10:23: You know, it all comes back to Declan Mulkein's point that most teams have a too much tech not enough strategy problem.

00:10:30: Right.

00:10:31: Tech just accelerates what's already working.

00:10:33: But if your ICP is a mess or your value prop is weak, no tool in the world is going to fix that.

00:10:39: The thinking has to come first.

00:10:53: Thank you so much for joining us as we synthesize the current state of account-based marketing.

00:10:59: And as you go back to your planning meetings, here's a final thought for you.

00:11:02: If ninety-five percent of the winners are on that day one shortlist and AI is making the dark funnel bigger every day, how are you ensuring your brand is shaping the buyer's thinking before they even know they're researching?

00:11:14: That is the real race.

00:11:16: We'll see you next time.

00:11:17: Subscribe and follow for more insights.