🕵🏻♂️ How to create ABM playbooks (new pipeline)
We share 5 essentila pillars for ABM playbooks to generate new pipeline and practical examples you can replicate
The most common question about ABM we receive is
“How to orchestrate ABM playbooks to generate new pipeline”.
There is no surprise.
There is a lot of content about ABM strategy, importance of ABM, etc., but how often do you see practical case studies? How often do you see B2B companies or ABM vendors revealing their playbooks?
Not often, right? 😁
Most ABM playbooks you can find are pretty standard.
1. Orchestration: Purchase ABM platform to orchestrate ABM program and track account engagement.
2. List building: Create a wish list of accounts (or get it from Sales aka "We want to target Fortune 500 companies) and upload it to LinkedIn or ABM platform.
3. Warm-up: Programmatic display ads promoting landing page, webinar or gated PDF. Track cliks, signs ups or downloads, mark them as «marketing-qualified leads» and send them to sales.
4. Activation (Marketing): Follow up with direct mail swags that contain branded t-shirts/mugs & a box of sweeties.
5. Activation (Sales): add decision-makers from these accounts to the multichannel outreach sequence.
I wish ABM was that easy 😂
Probably, this is the exact reason why 98% attendees of one of our ABM webinars told they are not satisfied with their ABM strategy.
I've audited 15 companies that run ABM that way.
Their conversion from accounts in the campaign to sales opportunity is always <1%.
But the worst thing?
Failed ABM programs ignite the war between leadership, sales, and marketing where everybody blames everybody for the lack of results.
Today I want to share with you a process of developing effective ABM playbooks, including:
5 pillars of a successful ABM playbook.
Pillars examples
Step-by-step process to develop an ABM playbook to generate new pipeline
Let's dive in.
Join our webinar Develop Your 2025 ABM Program in Two Weeks
During the webinar we'll show you how to plan a pilot ABM program in 2 weeks.
We'll show:
The step-by-step process you need to plan your pilot ABM program and the data you'll need to collect
Team, stack and reports to run a successful program
Examples of our account development playbooks (warm-up, nurturing and activation)
5 pillars of a successful ABM playbook
When working on an ABM playbook to generate new pipeline, I recommend answering these 5 questions.
1. ACCOUNT LIST BUILDING.
Questions: How do we define the right accounts that are likely to convert? What sources should we use to define them?
❌ DON'T DO
Accept a wish list of accounts from sales, because they are big enough and are in their area.
✔️DO.
Here are 5 sources that will help you select accounts that are likely to buy.
A. INTENT DATA.
Define key sources of intent and engagement to identify engaged accounts that should be moved to account qualification and research.
Split the sources.
Marketing:
• Webinars
• Website visitors
• Newsletter sign-ups/engagement
• Content hubs
• Content engagement
Sales:
• Content engagement
• Job changes / new hiring
• Funding
• Stack changes
• Press releases about key initiatives
• Review websites
• Questions in the community
Define a specific engagement threshold (what kind of engagement the accounts should demonstrate to consider they have a potential interest in our product?) and select the accounts that hit it.
B. DEMAND GEN PROGRAMS.
Analyze your demand gen activities: webinars, events, newsletter, thought leadership, podcast.
Are there any companies that actively engage with your content?
Are there companies where you have more than 3 people engaging with you?
Are there companies that engage with several demand gen campaigns?
They could be great candidates for the ABM campaign.
C. SENIOR EXECUTIVES' AND SALES' PERSONAL NETWORK.
In case your company doesn't run a demand gen program, and there is not that much relevant traffic, this step could be a great solution.
Analyze connections of your senior executives that fit your ICP, and ask sales to do the same. Next, ask how close is the relationship.
There will definitely be several companies they have a strong connection with. Save them to the account list.
D. ASSOCIATIONS AND COMMUNITIES.
The last source works extremely well for companies operating in targeting conservative markets.
One of our clients sells to enterprise companies in the HVAC sector. We've partnered with an HVAC association in that region to run a market research and exclusive event for their members.
The HVAC association helped with promotion and intros to target accounts, we did the rest.
E. SALES NAVIGATOR.
Build a list in Sales Navigator and go through accounts that fit your ICP and, at least, one of these criteria:
You have a good common connection (ex-employee of your client joined the account).
A specific business trigger occurred (e.g. hiring VP of Data)
Buying committee members have a specific keyword related to your solution in their About or Bio section (e.g. CISOs that have "data governance" keyword which is relevant for data governance solutions).
As you can see, even account list building requires a thorough collaboration between marketing and sales.
GET ACCESS TO A NEW FULL-FUNNEL ABM 2.0 COURSE
What's included with the course access:
12 modules covering step-by-step ABM strategy development: goal decomposition, ICP, account list building, ABM team, warm-up and activation playbooks, reporting, scaling ABM and building a cohesive ABM & demand gen function.
Short explanation videos and "how to" examples. We believe it's better one time to see a practical example then listen to the theory hundreds of times.
5 orchestrated and ready-to-use ABM playbooks and a detailed explanation
Report dashboard for 4 types of ABM programs: new revenue, pipeline acceleration, expansion and churn prevention
Live case studies and examples of the campaigns we implemented with the clients of Fullfunnel.io in the past few years
17 templates to simplify your ABM strategy launch: ICP, revenue analysis, intent data tracking, account warm-up cadence, customer research, account scoring and prioritization, ABM budget planning and forecasting, account planning, reports, personalized offers, and many more.
Planning & Presenting a Pilot ABM Program to Execs and Sales Framework
Minimal viable stack recommendation and guidelines on how to use it to avoid ramping up budget and being pressured to show ROI for the purchased $50k software
2. PERSONALIZATION.
Question: How do we personalize our offer?
❌ DON'T DO
Create a generic pitch you'll be sending to everybody.
B2B marketers often mess up with personalization in marketing, thinking that it is a mix of programmatic ads + liquid text in emails + a dynamic landing page.
This mix is an assumed personalization which is only a tiny part of a bigger personalization puzzle.
The real marketing & sales personalization is matching your marketing message and offering with the buyer's needs, goals, and challenges.
Here are the steps we usually take to match ABM with the buyer journey and achieve real personalization.
✔️DO.
a. Run account and buying committee research.
Figure out who might be involved in purchasing your solution, and what are their goals, challenges, and KPIs.
Example:
Target account runs data workflows in Salesforce and Excel. The company solves it by hiring Salesforce administrators.
Challenges:
- Incorrect and insufficient data and reporting
- Lots of manual work and coding
Buying committee structure:
- CEO - decision-maker
- Salesforce administrator - blocker
- CTO - influencer
- Client managers - champions & influencers
b. Understand the stage of the buyer journey.
Salesforce administrator mentions in the profile that she works with contractors to do custom coding to solve data issues.
This means that the company is already aware of Salesforce+ Excel data limitations and trying to solve them by hiring more admins and contractors.
c. Brainstorm content ideas to target the buying committee members.
Several content ideas:
- Videoclip with a customer who had the same issue and sharing why it's not sufficient to hire more Salesforce admins, and that it is better to create a custom data solution.
- Post showing the real cost of maintaining Salesforce + Excel setup and the mistakes made by incorrect data.
d. Brainstorm content ideas to move the account further in the journey.
When an account engages with the previous step, start targeting them with the content that moves them down the line in the buying process.
This content might include:
- Custom data solution cost vs maintaining the existing setup
- Examples of custom data solutions with the ROI companies get
- Case studies of switching from existing setup to custom data solutions
Add a call to action to learn more/book a call.
e. Develop personalized solutions.
Watch this episode of Full-Funnel Live with Jin Gilkey from Terminus where we show examples of personalization.
3. ACCOUNT ENGAGEMENT AND WARM UP.
Question: How do we create awareness among the buying committee members of target accounts?
❌ DON'T DO
Run programmatic display ads + automated email/LinkedIn outreach. We've analyzed 100+ ABM campaigns with that set up and saw that conversion to discovery is always below 0.5%.
✔️DO
Define channels where you can connect and engage with the buying committee.
Publish organic content from the previous step
Distribute that content to target accounts through ads, personal messages, tagging.
Involve target buyers in any content collaboration activity to get acquainted and build a relationship.
The real ABM success comes when marketing and sales teams split the buying committee and do multithreaded and multichannel engagement.
Example.
Marketing -> Insiders and peers.
SDRs -> Champions and influencers.
Why:
Validating account research insights and sharing insider information with sales
Understanding the buying committee structure
Generating intros for sales
This way we maximize chances to:
Create awareness inside target accounts
Collect new insights and validate existing ones to come up with personalized offers
Get introductions to target decision-makers or understand how to approach them.
Get our content discovered and shared in the inhouse chats
When it comes to warm up, we have covered multiple time different warm-up playbooks in our newsletter and blog.
The key point is that it should include personal interactions with the target buyers to build a relationship with them.
Here are 3 resources where we cover it in detail:
How to target and warm up B2B buyers if they are not active on social
How to engage strategic accounts. Fullfunnel.io and Alyce case studies
4. ACTIVATION.
Question: How do we activate target accounts?
❌ DON'T DO
Don't send just an email with your pitch or call & pitch your account, it destroys the whole playbook.
✔️DO
- Ad an account to the relevant retargeting group with niche case studies and customer stories from peers
- Send fully personalized direct mail swag including ideas on how the identified account& buyer challenges can be solved, or goals achieved.
- Suggest 1-1 debriefings
- Create personalized content hubs
5. NURTURING.
Question: How do we stay in touch and activate accounts that are not sales-ready?
❌ DON'T DO
If you didn't generate an opportunity, don't mark account as lost and forget about them.
✔️DO
Do periodical engagement and check-ins with the buying committee members
Add the prospect to a relevant retargeting sequence with nurturing content
Replicate the retargeting sequence in your email automation
Put the same content into a personalized content hub that also includes buyer enablement content and product information
Engage with their content or updates on LinkedIn
Tag in relevant threads or share relevant content
Invite to the relevant events
Connect and engage with other buying committee members
Track the engagement, and when you see a spike, ask about the current status and if anything changed.
A successful ABM playbook requires coordinated manual work of marketing and sales.
Don't look for shortcuts.
Make sure you have answers to the 5 questions I shared before launching any ABM program.
Listen to Full-Funnel Live - How to plan long-term marketing programs
*If you want to attend the next live episode, sign up here to receive an invite. Usually, we host them every Thursday at 4 pm CET (Central Europe) - 10 am ET (Eastern Time).
In the new episode of Fullfunnel Live we'll share with Vladimir Blagojevic how to plan long-term marketing and sales programs.
Tune in to learn:
How to structure long-term programs and align them with your team's capacity
How to present programs to get leadership buy-in
How to track program performance and what to report on if your program doesn't immediately generate revenue
How to align regional marketing programs with HQ
Core metrics marketing and sales should track together