ABM campaign step by step: from a list of companies to the first conversation

The spreadsheet has three thousand rows and the ABM campaign starts on Monday. Someone has added a "priority" column, and someone else has typed an "A" next to companies they met at a conference. Two weeks in, half the list has had an invitation and nobody remembers who wrote to whom. The first reply comes from a company that has just signed with a competitor.

That is how a first account-based campaign often goes at a firm that has grown through referrals until now. In the campaigns I've seen, what usually went wrong was the order: the list gets built before anyone asks who is actually buying this quarter, and the plan ends at the first touch. Below I set out the steps the way I would run them myself at a B2B services company of 20 to 200 people that sells software delivery or IT consulting.

How an ABM campaign differs from an ordinary one

An ordinary campaign starts with an audience and hopes the right companies will raise a hand. An account-based marketing campaign starts with the companies. You know each one by name and why it made the list. Inside each of them you talk to several people, because the decision rarely sits with one.

You notice the difference in your day-to-day work straight away. The list is short and closed, so every company gets the time it takes to understand what is going on there. You write about their situation. A company counts as a win once a conversation has started.

Sounds simple. The hard part is the first step: picking companies so that your team spends its hours on the ones that might actually buy this year.

Choosing companies: who is buying this quarter

John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute worked this through for services where companies rarely change supplier. A company changes its main provider, such as its bank or law firm, around once every five years on average¹. Over a whole year only about 20% of business buyers are in the market, and in a single quarter something like 5%¹. The other 95% aren't looking right now.

Put that next to a real market. In 2024, according to Eurostat, the Netherlands had 1,087 computer programming and IT consultancy firms with 20 to 49 people and another 567 with 50 to 249². That's about 1,650 companies. If they are your market, roughly 80 of them are buying in any given quarter.

So a list for an ABM campaign needs two filters. The first is fit with your ideal customer profile: industry and size, for example. The second is timing, meaning whether the company has a reason to talk today. That could be a job ad for a role connected to what you sell, or a new investment. Sometimes a website nobody has updated in years is enough. I'd rather work forty companies with a reason than three thousand without one.

Buying signals go stale. A job ad from last week means something quite different from one posted six months ago, when the role may well have been filled already. Refresh a signal-based list every week, or within a month it looks like any other database again.

The buying committee: who you are really talking to

Say you chose the companies well. You write to the CEO, the CEO replies "interesting, send me the details", and then nothing. The decision is made by a whole committee, and you have spoken to one member of it.

A Gartner survey of 632 B2B buyers, run in August and September 2024, describes buying groups of five to 16 people across as many as four functions³. Forrester puts the average at 13 internal stakeholders and nine external participants who influence the decision⁴. At an 80-person company the numbers will be smaller. The principle holds: several people shape the decision.

Those people often disagree. In the same Gartner survey, 74% of B2B buyer teams showed what the researchers call "unhealthy conflict" during the buying decision³. Groups that reached consensus were 2.5 times more likely to report a high-quality deal³. The most useful finding for anyone writing messages comes after that. Tailoring content to the buying group as a whole improved consensus by 20%, while content focused on what matters to one individual had a 59% negative effect on it³.

Two practical rules follow. Split the committee between the people on your team, so your CEO talks to their CEO and your expert to their head of IT. Then write about the company's problem as each of them sees it from their own desk.

Finding the names is the quick part. If you use Sales Navigator for it, I've written about what it costs and what to do once you have found the people.

LinkedIn: buyers look you up before they reply

Plenty of buyers would rather skip the salesperson. In the same Gartner survey, 61% of B2B buyers preferred an overall rep-free buying experience, and 73% actively avoided suppliers who send irrelevant outreach⁵. A year later, a new Gartner survey showed the other side: 69% of B2B buyers prefer to validate AI-generated insights with a sales rep⁶.

The first message, then, has to be on target and read like a note from someone who has actually looked into the company. Write each one to a single person, about a single matter they will recognise as theirs from the first sentence. Before they reply, they will open your profile. If they find a few posts there with practical knowledge of their industry, you stop being a stranger, and your message gets read differently.

LinkedIn's own help pages set a few rules worth knowing. A free account can send up to five personalised invitations, each note limited to 200 characters, while Premium members can add a note to every invitation, with up to 300 characters each⁷. LinkedIn also prohibits bots and other unauthorised automated methods that add contacts, send messages or comment on posts, and members who use such tools risk having their accounts restricted or shut down⁸. Automated sending also produces exactly the irrelevant messages buyers avoid.

I use this order because the person has seen your name twice before the first message arrives. First you react to a post by the person you want to talk to, so your name isn't new to them. Then you send an invitation with a short note that gives one specific reason. The first message waits until they accept: one observation about their company that they can use straight away, and an offer of a short call in which you don't pitch.

Weighing this against paid ads? I've compared LinkedIn ads with a campaign run from your team's own profiles, including what each costs.

Why campaigns fade in week four

In the campaigns I've run, momentum usually dropped around week four. Week one went well: invitations went out and a few people accepted. Then things went quiet. Some companies were still waiting for a second message. Nobody had invited the second person on the committee yet, and the team had client projects to deliver.

B2B purchases stall on their own. Forrester found that nearly all (91%) of purchases stall at some point in the process⁹. If your campaign stalls with them, nobody is in touch when the topic comes back to life on their side.

What helps is a fixed sequence. Every company goes through the same steps, and every step has a due date and content ready to send, from a second message that comes at the topic from a different angle to a first contact with another person on the committee. Then the campaign stops depending on someone finding a spare hour on Friday to work out what to write.

Don't expect results after a month, either. In their report on B2B advertising for the LinkedIn B2B Institute, Les Binet and Peter Field point back to an earlier analysis, The Long and the Short of It: long-term advertising effects on sales only start to dominate short-term effects after six months. In LinkedIn's own survey, published in the same report, only 4% of B2B marketers measured impact beyond six months¹⁰. These figures are about advertising, so treat them as an analogy. Before the start, decide when you will judge the campaign, after a quarter for instance, and write it down.

How to measure ABM before revenue shows up

A few weeks in, the board asks what the campaign has produced, and this is where it gets awkward. In Gartner's 2024 Tech Marketing Benchmarks Survey, respondents with knowledge of ABM named measuring attribution (39%), measuring overall ABM success such as ROI (36%) and a lack of people (36%) as their top three challenges¹¹. The respondents were technology marketers, so at a 50-person services firm the proportions may look different.

In a small campaign revenue arrives months later, but you make decisions about the campaign every week. You need measures that move sooner:

• at how many companies on the list you are talking to at least two people on the committee,
• how many companies moved to the next step this week, and how many have been stuck for more than two weeks,
• how many people replied, and how many replies turned into a booked call,
• how many calls took place, and after how many of them you booked a second call.

You can collect these numbers from week one. They tell the board whether the campaign is alive long before the first contract.

A plan for the first 90 days

If I were working out how to run an ABM campaign from scratch, I would go in this order:

1. Week 1. Describe your ideal customer profile in one paragraph and list the signals that, at a company like that, mean a reason to talk.
2. Week 2. Pick 30 to 50 companies that fit and have a current signal. Note next to each one why it is on the list.
3. Week 3. Find two or three people on the committee at each company and share them out among your team.
4. Weeks 4 to 12. Send each company its next step on the due date, and bring in the second and third people on the committee as the first ones accept. Publish one post a week that you can later send to someone, and replace companies that drop out with new ones that have a fresh signal.
5. Every week. Look at the measures from the previous section and ask one question: which companies have stalled, and what is their next step?

The easiest place to begin is the first item, this week. The paragraph about your ideal customer profile takes about an hour, and the rest of the plan can be filled in while the campaign runs.