Account Based Marketing for Firms Too Small for an ABM Team

Nobody prints 5,000 wedding cards and hands them out at the railway station. You write the guest list first. Two hundred names, each one chosen. Then you print exactly that many cards, write each name by hand, and deliver the important ones in person.

Most B2B marketing works the railway-station way. Send to thousands, see who replies, sort the good from the bad afterwards. Account based marketing turns that round. You choose the companies first, and everything you send is made for them.

The big software vendors have made ABM sound like something only a 50-person marketing team can run. It isn't. A founder-led firm with a spreadsheet and three hours a week can run it well, and for firms that sell large projects to a small number of buyers, it is often the better way. This piece covers what account-based marketing is, the three types, a five-step strategy you can start this month, and how to tell whether it is working.

What is account-based marketing?

Account-based marketing (ABM) is B2B marketing aimed at a named list of companies, rather than at a market. Sales and marketing agree on the list together. Every email, message, piece of content and call is written for a particular company, and often for particular people inside it.

The simplest way to see the difference is to look at what each approach starts with.

Neither is better in general. If you sell a ₹20,000 service to thousands of small firms, ABM is too slow. If you sell a ₹15 lakh project and only 300 companies in India could ever buy it, broad lead generation wastes most of its effort on companies that never could.

The three types of ABM

ABM comes in three sizes. Most small firms should start in the middle.

• One-to-one. One company at a time, with work made only for them: a short audit of their situation, a proposal before they ask for one, a visit. Right for the five or ten accounts that would change your year. It takes days per account.
• One-to-few. A group of 10 to 50 companies that share a problem, such as mid-size IT services firms in Pune that just hired a sales head. You write one message for the group and change the opening line and the example for each company. This is where most small B2B firms get the best return for the time.
• One-to-many. Hundreds of accounts, reached through ads aimed at their employees and lightly personalised emails. This is where ABM software earns its fee. Without it, one-to-many ABM is mostly lead generation with a new name.

Account based marketing strategy: five steps a small team can run

1. Pick 30 accounts, not 300

Start with your ideal customer profile: the kind of company that buys from you, stays and pays on time. Then add one more filter: a reason to buy now. A company that just raised money, opened a new office, hired a sales head or launched a new product has a problem this quarter that it didn't have last quarter. We covered where these signals come from in the piece on intent data.

Thirty is enough for a one-to-few programme run by one person. Put them in a spreadsheet with one row per company and a column that says why it is on the list, with a date and a link.

2. Research each account before you write a word

For each company, spend 20 minutes and write down four things:

1. What changed. The signal, in one line.
2. What that change probably costs them. A new plant needs suppliers. A new sales head needs pipeline in 90 days.
3. Who decides. The person who owns the budget for what you sell.
4. What you can say that nobody else will. A comparable project, a mistake you've seen others make, a number from their own public filings.

If you can't fill in line 4, the account isn't ready. Move it down the list.

3. Map the buying group, not just the buyer

In a mid-size company, three to six people usually have a say in a large purchase: the person who owns the budget, the person whose team will use what you sell, someone in finance, and often the founder or managing director. Lead generation reaches one of them. ABM tries to reach most of them, with a different message for each.

The budget owner hears about the outcome. The user hears about how the work will run. The finance head hears about cost and risk. LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the easiest way to find these people and see that they are still in the job.

4. Reach them on two or three channels, in order

For a small firm, a good account-based marketing sequence looks like this over three weeks:

• Week 1. Follow the budget owner and one colleague on LinkedIn. Comment on something they posted, only if you have something useful to say. Send the first email to the budget owner, built on your line 4.
• Week 2. A second email with something they can use: a short note on how others in their position have handled the same change. Connect with the user on LinkedIn.
• Week 3. A third email that asks a plain question. If they reply, offer a call. If they don't, a short message to the user or the founder, mentioning that you wrote to their colleague.

Keep LinkedIn outreach by hand; we explained why in the piece on LinkedIn automation. And check every email address before the first send, because a bounce on a 30-company list costs you a whole account. The email verification piece covers how.

5. Hand over the moment someone engages

ABM fails most often at the hand-over. Someone replies, or three people from the same company read your article in a week, and nobody acts for four days. Decide in advance who calls, and within how many hours. In a founder-led firm this is usually the founder, and the answer should be "the same day". The piece on speed to lead explains why the first day matters so much.

Account based marketing examples

These are the kinds of programmes a small B2B firm can run. They are illustrations, not client results.

• An IT services firm picks 25 mid-size manufacturers that announced a new plant this year. Each one gets a one-page note on the three systems a new plant usually needs in its first six months, with that plant's city and size in the first line.
• A recruitment firm picks 20 funded startups that have posted more than ten sales roles in a month. The email to the founder names the roles and offers a view on which two will be hardest to fill.
• A consulting firm picks eight family-run companies where a second-generation director has just taken over. It runs one-to-one ABM: a short written review of the company's public information and a request for 30 minutes with the new director.

In each example, the list decides most of the result. The writing matters, but a good email to the wrong company is still the wrong email.

Do you need ABM software?

Not to start. Platforms such as Demandbase, 6sense and Terminus are built for one-to-many ABM across hundreds or thousands of accounts. They show which companies are visiting your site, run ads aimed at their staff, and score accounts by activity. They are priced for large marketing teams, usually in dollars and on annual contracts.

A small firm running one-to-few ABM needs four things:

• A spreadsheet or your CRM, with one row per account and one per person.
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator, or careful manual search on LinkedIn.
• An email tool and a verifier.
• A steady source of accounts with a fresh reason to buy.

The fourth is the hard part. The others take an afternoon to set up.

How to measure account-based marketing

Don't count leads. Thirty accounts will never produce the volume that a broad campaign does, and if you judge ABM on leads you will stop it after a month. Measure these instead:

• Reach. In how many of the 30 accounts have you reached at least two people?
• Engagement. In how many has anyone replied, accepted, or read and forwarded?
• Meetings. How many accounts have agreed to a call?
• Pipeline. What is the value of proposals open with the chosen accounts?

Give it one full quarter. A good one-to-few programme on 30 accounts that turns three of them into proposals has usually paid for itself, because each deal is large.

Where we fit

The first step, the list, is the one most small firms can't keep up. Finding 30 companies with a fresh reason to buy takes hours of research every week, and the signals go stale fast. Our prospect research service does that step for you. Every morning you get companies in your market that show an early buying signal, each one confirmed on its own website, with the person who owns the budget and an email we have checked. One in three companies that pass a database's filters turn out to be the wrong fit, and those never reach your list.

If you want the outreach run as well, our B2B lead generation service runs the whole channel.

Frequently asked questions

The wedding list is the hardest part of the wedding, and nobody hands it to the printer. ABM works the same way. The emails and the LinkedIn messages are the cards. Get the 30 names right, with a reason each one should hear from you now, and the rest is careful handwriting.