Best of LinkedIn: Account-based Marketing CW 48/ 49

00:00:00: provided by Thomas Algeyer and Frenus.

00:00:02: Based on the most relevant posts on LinkedIn about account-based marketing in CW-Forty-Eight and Forty-Nine, Frenus is a B to B market research company working with enterprises to optimize their campaigns with account and executive insights far beyond

00:00:16: AI.

00:00:17: Welcome back to the deep dive.

00:00:19: Our mission today is focused entirely on the account-based marketing landscape.

00:00:23: We've basically dissected the top insights and trends from B to B leaders on LinkedIn over the last couple of weeks.

00:00:29: So if you're in GTM strategy, this is pretty much the playbook your peers are using right now.

00:00:34: And the context here is absolutely vital.

00:00:37: I mean, the conversation around APM has just shifted so dramatically.

00:00:40: It's no longer about tuning a single campaign.

00:00:43: We're talking about the entire go-to-market execution model.

00:00:45: The trends are all pointing towards precision, outcomes, and experience-led engagement.

00:00:52: enabled orchestration.

00:00:53: It really is a systemic change.

00:00:54: Exactly.

00:00:55: That's why we're calling this the ABM operating system.

00:00:58: We've pulled together the most critical themes, and we're going to unpack them now.

00:01:01: We'll start with ICP discipline, then get into sales alignment, content, and finally, how to actually measure

00:01:08: ROI.

00:01:08: Let's do it.

00:01:09: So, theme one, ICP discipline and precision over volume.

00:01:14: If there's one theme that It just dominated everything.

00:01:18: It's this relentless drive toward precision.

00:01:21: The momentum has moved so sharply away from just broad reach.

00:01:25: Yeah, Tom B summarized this so well.

00:01:27: He argued that this obsession with, you know, capturing total addressable market is leading teams to chase volume instead of revenue density.

00:01:36: Exactly.

00:01:37: And Kushan Chekar had a great line saying that ABM works because it stops you from treating leads like lottery tickets.

00:01:42: Right.

00:01:43: But that discipline requires you to know who you want and why.

00:01:46: If you're just using basic thermographics industry, company size, you're still basically guessing.

00:01:50: So to get that precision, you have to go deeper.

00:01:52: And this is where Wider Dilemon's point about the SpiceD framework comes in.

00:01:56: He said, supercharges your ICP understanding.

00:01:59: Yeah, SpiceD is designed to diagnose the internal drivers.

00:02:02: So you've got situation, pain, impact, critical event, and decision.

00:02:07: And the one that really changes everything for marketing is that critical event.

00:02:10: Why is that one so important for ABM?

00:02:13: because it creates urgency.

00:02:14: It's the why now.

00:02:15: You know, is there a new regulation?

00:02:17: Did an internal project just fail?

00:02:19: Trenching leadership maybe.

00:02:20: Right.

00:02:21: And when you diagnose that, you can align your entire message not to a job title, but to their current business crisis.

00:02:27: That's real precision.

00:02:29: And it pays off.

00:02:29: I mean, the numbers Mallory Fetchu shared were just phenomenal.

00:02:32: and eighteen point eight four acts fully loaded ROI.

00:02:35: Incredible.

00:02:36: All from rebuilding their system around targeting the right accounts and prioritizing qualified pipeline, not just lead count.

00:02:43: It just

00:02:43: changes the math entirely.

00:02:44: And Kushen Shekhar reinforced this, citing that B to B companies using ABM see what, two hundred and eight percent more revenue from marketing.

00:02:51: It's huge, but let's be realistic for a second.

00:02:53: Nick Bennett mentioned the client with five thousand accounts in their quote on quote, ABM program.

00:02:58: Yes, spray and pray.

00:02:59: Right.

00:03:00: And he contrasted that with a team that locked themselves in a room and agreed on just twenty five accounts.

00:03:05: Twenty five.

00:03:06: Is that actually realistic for a company with say, a hundred million dollar target?

00:03:11: That's a fair question, but I think the lesson isn't the number twenty five.

00:03:15: The lesson is the intensity.

00:03:17: If you have five thousand accounts, you have zero intensity.

00:03:20: The successful approach Nick shared got them twenty-one meetings in ninety days because it forced the entire team to focus their energy where they could actually win.

00:03:28: You prove the model, then you scale.

00:03:31: And you can only have that kind of intensity if sales and marketing are totally locked in.

00:03:36: Which brings us to our next theme.

00:03:38: Alignment.

00:03:39: Yes.

00:03:39: Nicholas Wanschneider said ABM is shifting from a campaign to an operating system embedded in the company's DNA.

00:03:46: And if you look at why these things fail, Trinidadum Guayan nailed it.

00:03:49: She said most suffer because sales and marketing don't decide on targets together.

00:03:53: Which

00:03:53: leads to attribution wars.

00:03:54: Exactly.

00:03:55: And you get none of that surround sound effect for the buyer.

00:03:58: I loved how direct Lucy Hackman was on this.

00:04:01: She called programs run only by marketing demand gen wearing a wig.

00:04:05: That's a powerful image.

00:04:06: It is.

00:04:07: So for the audience, what's the first step to, you know, stop wearing that wig and build what she calls swarm ABM.

00:04:13: It seems to come down to convergence.

00:04:16: Swarm ABM is where sales, marketing, and even CS all converge on the same accounts at the same time.

00:04:22: A

00:04:22: unified front.

00:04:23: And a huge part of that is leadership visibility.

00:04:27: Fergus Parker pointed out that great content and tech fail if your leaders are invisible.

00:04:32: Absolutely.

00:04:33: He saw a client get a three X lift in connection to meeting rates just by activating their execs on LinkedIn.

00:04:40: aligned to those tier one accounts.

00:04:42: That credibility just accelerates everything.

00:04:44: That makes total sense.

00:04:45: But okay, an operating system sounds disruptive and expensive.

00:04:49: For teams trying to get buy-in, where do they even start?

00:04:52: You start small.

00:04:52: That's the most reliable pattern.

00:04:53: Mark Walker and Rick Harrison both emphasized this.

00:04:56: The

00:04:56: strategic pilot?

00:04:57: Exactly.

00:04:58: Pick five high value accounts.

00:04:59: you want to accelerate.

00:05:01: Set a really clear, measurable goal.

00:05:03: You prove the concept, you build an internal case study, and then you get the budget to scale.

00:05:07: All right, let's move from the model to execution.

00:05:10: Content.

00:05:11: Debjit Sen made a really insightful point that most teams have enough content.

00:05:16: The problem is they aren't using it correctly.

00:05:18: Right.

00:05:18: ABM doesn't need more content.

00:05:20: It needs better context.

00:05:22: And how do you create that context?

00:05:24: By reusing what you already have.

00:05:26: You take assets, even if they're six or twelve months old, and you shape them for the specific challenges of that account.

00:05:32: You connect your library to their pain.

00:05:35: And that personalization has to go deep.

00:05:37: I mean, Alex C's anecdote about start pitching the engineer was perfect.

00:05:41: Oh, yeah.

00:05:41: You're selling to a committee of six people, the CTO, CFO, procurement, and if you pitch efficiency to all of them, the deal just stalls.

00:05:50: Because each of them has different pressures, different fears.

00:05:53: Effective ABM needs what he calls an attack map for each stakeholder's hidden fears.

00:05:58: So the CFO's fear isn't about tech specs.

00:06:01: Not at all.

00:06:01: It's about vendor lock-in or what happens if the implementation fails.

00:06:05: You have to address those fears directly with your content.

00:06:08: So what does that look like in practice?

00:06:10: Well, Michael Groff had a great example.

00:06:11: A client doubled their demos in thirty days just by using landing pages tailored to the account's specific industry and pain points.

00:06:19: So not just swapping out a logo?

00:06:20: No, delivering hyper-relevant value from the first click.

00:06:24: And Vladimir Blagojevich's framework reinforced this.

00:06:28: Personalization has to progress and match where the account is in their journey.

00:06:34: It's a coordinated dance.

00:06:35: And LinkedIn is obviously a huge stage for that dance.

00:06:39: Priscilla Fener noted, it's way more than a lead gen channel.

00:06:42: It's about influencing the whole journey.

00:06:44: You're

00:06:44: warming them up long before they ever raise their hand.

00:06:46: Precisely.

00:06:48: Which brings us to measurement because that focus on influence changes everything.

00:06:52: It really does.

00:06:53: The old way isn't working.

00:06:55: Declan Mulkeen advocated moving away from what he called pretty data dashboards.

00:06:59: The Garmin screenshot of activity, I like that.

00:07:02: It's

00:07:02: perfect, right.

00:07:02: It shows you what you did, but it doesn't tell you how to win.

00:07:05: So you need an execution board instead.

00:07:07: Exactly.

00:07:08: A dashboard that coaches your team on what to optimize next and who to prioritize now.

00:07:13: Bill Habib called the old way the marketing data mirage.

00:07:17: Looks good, but the pipeline is flat.

00:07:19: So how do you cut through that mirage and prove the impact simply?

00:07:23: Semberg Baker recommended a really straightforward approach.

00:07:27: A target account split test.

00:07:28: A control group.

00:07:29: Yep, take a hundred accounts, split them, hit fifty with your ABM tactics, leave the other fifty for normal sales outbound.

00:07:36: If the marketing group converts at a higher rate, you have your proof.

00:07:39: And that avoids the whole vague, influenced pipeline issue that McKeil-Tarian criticized.

00:07:44: It does.

00:07:45: It moves to actually generated.

00:07:46: the budget always follows what's provable.

00:07:48: Now, AI is starting to change the speed of this.

00:07:51: Jerry Farr advised using AI to create a a canonical source of truth for accounts.

00:07:56: Right.

00:07:57: So you pull in everything, web research, CRM data, intense signals, into one massive document.

00:08:02: And

00:08:02: then what?

00:08:03: What's the point of that huge artifact?

00:08:05: The AI queries that document produce specific assets on the fly.

00:08:09: So you can instantly create an ABM campaign brief for sales that addresses the exact hidden fears of each stakeholder.

00:08:16: Without a human spending a week on research.

00:08:18: That's the goal.

00:08:19: And Mikhail Jekowski noted Nathan Latka's prediction that AI chat interfaces will replace dashboards entirely.

00:08:25: So instead of clicking around, you just ask which campaigns are working in APAC.

00:08:29: Exactly.

00:08:30: Sightings, anti-BMs, Zine.

00:08:31: AI is an example.

00:08:33: But, and this is the critical warning from Tyler Pleiss and Marcus Stahlbergkeck, is only an amplifier.

00:08:38: It is not a solution.

00:08:39: So if your strategy is bad, the software just becomes shelfware.

00:08:43: Immediately.

00:08:44: Yeah.

00:08:44: You have to do the hard work on strategy and alignment first.

00:08:47: The tech can only amplify what's already working.

00:08:50: ABM success is about organizational behavior change.

00:08:53: That's really the core takeaway here.

00:08:54: The shift is from ABM as a tactic to ABM as a fully aligned, disciplined, commercial operating system.

00:09:02: It demands precision over volume.

00:09:04: If you enjoyed this deep dive, new episodes drop every two weeks.

00:09:08: Also, check out our other editions on field marketing, channel and partner marketing, AI and BDB, MarTech, go-to-market and social selling.

00:09:17: And here's a final provocative thought for you to consider.

00:09:19: A recent study showed that only twenty-six percent of ABM programs are actually successful.

00:09:25: So given that success is all about deep organizational alignment and behavior change, the question you need to ask is this.

00:09:31: Are you investing in tech hoping it will fix your strategy?

00:09:35: Or have you already done the hard work of fixing the alignment that will make the tech successful?

00:09:39: That's the real metric of ABM maturity.

00:09:41: Something to chew on.

00:09:42: Indeed.

00:09:43: Thanks for diving dupe with us.

00:09:44: Subscribe

00:09:44: so you don't miss the next one.