ABM basics: Building effective ABM lists
A core component of your ABM strategy must be to create the right list of target accounts with the right indicators to run smart, effective ABM...
Did you know that 76% of marketers using ABM see a higher ROI compared to any other marketing strategy? Focus. Personalization. Results. That’s what Account-Based Marketing brings to the table for SaaS companies. Yet, many SaaS companies hesitate to adopt ABM because of its complexity.
At Kalungi, we’ve helped SaaS companies drive meaningful growth and build stronger customer relationships with ABM. Whether you’re just starting or looking to fine-tune your current approach, this guide will take you step by step through everything you need to build and execute a successful ABM strategy.
Ready to turn your ideal accounts into long-term customers? Let’s dive in.
SaaS Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a targeted growth strategy where marketing and sales teams collaborate to identify and engage high-value accounts with highly personalized campaigns.
Instead of starting with a broad pool of prospects and hoping some will convert, ABM begins with a laser-focused approach: identifying high-value accounts that are the best fit for your product or service, even if they’re not ready to purchase today. ABM is more about targeting the right companies, not just more companies.
Unlike broad campaigns that cast a wide net, ABM narrows the field to a small, carefully curated group of potential customers. These accounts may not yet know about your product, but they check all the boxes of your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). From there, the strategy is iterative: you refine and expand your target list by identifying other accounts that share similar traits, learning more about your prospects with each step.
But identifying the right accounts is just the beginning.
The real power of ABM lies in creating deeply personalized, impactful experiences for every touchpoint in the customer journey. This means crafting messaging that speaks directly to each contact’s unique challenges, aspirations, and business objectives. By addressing their specific fears and dreams, you incentivize them to engage with you and move through the sales cycle.
The process doesn’t end at conversion.
Once your high-value prospects become customers, ABM helps you turn them into advocates. Encourage them to share their success stories through testimonials or referrals, helping to grow your customer base organically. This creates a virtuous cycle where satisfied customers become your strongest marketing asset.
In short, ABM builds meaningful relationships with the accounts that matter most to your business. It’s a strategic, personalized approach that turns prospects into partners and revenue into long-term growth.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) brings precision to your growth strategy.
For B2B SaaS companies, ABM is a bridge between lead generation and account expansion. It unifies teams around a shared goal: delivering value-driven, relevant experiences that address the unique challenges and goals of your target accounts.
Here’s why ABM is essential for SaaS:
In a SaaS, growth often hinges on scalability and precision. ABM provides both.
By treating key accounts as markets of one, you’re able to deliver a level of personalization and relevance that traditional marketing strategies often lack. And as you refine your approach, ABM becomes more than a tactic; it becomes a growth engine that fuels not just revenue but also brand loyalty and advocacy.
Whether you’re targeting new markets, penetrating specific industries, or expanding existing relationships, ABM is designed to deliver consistent and sustainable growth.
While ABM shares some similarities with outbound marketing, they are not the same. ABM is a comprehensive and highly targeted strategy that blends both inbound and outbound approaches to achieve its goals. Instead of relying solely on one method, ABM unites the best of both worlds to engage high-value accounts with a personalized, coordinated effort.
Traditionally, ABM has been associated with outbound sales strategies, which focus on direct outreach to key accounts. However, a modern ABM framework expands beyond this to include inbound elements like tailored content, thought leadership, and strategic digital engagement. This hybrid approach ensures that your target accounts are nurtured throughout their buyer journey, no matter how they enter your funnel.
For SaaS companies, the advantage of ABM lies in its adaptability. It doesn’t require dismantling your current marketing and sales strategies. Instead, it integrates seamlessly with your existing demand generation efforts and enables you to maximize the use of shared resources, data, and technology.
The key distinctions of ABM in a SaaS context include:
In essence, ABM is a sophisticated, account-focused strategy that leverages the strengths of both inbound and outbound tactics to create a unified, impactful approach.
Follow these 7 steps to execute an effective B2B SaaS ABM campaign:
An effective ABM campaign starts with clarity on who you’re targeting. Instead of casting a wide net, focus on identifying accounts that are the best fit for your solution and hold the highest potential for value creation. This step lays the foundation for everything that follows in your ABM strategy.
Many companies enjoy having massive audiences because of the potential that they have, and the revenue that can be unlocked if they can be properly outreached to. However, in marketing, especially with B2B SaaS companies, when you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one because you produce generic messaging that doesn’t really speak to any group of people.
At Kalungi, we like to use a framework called the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) for our B2B SaaS clients. This framework is designed to identify companies (not people or contacts) that would be a great fit for your product based on a set of criteria.
Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) ensures your efforts are directed toward accounts that:
We typically break these criteria into Filters and Signals. Filters are the criteria that are “make-or-break” or are entirely necessary for a company to be a good fit, while Signals are “nice-to-haves” and wouldn’t be a deal-breaker if a company didn’t qualify for them.
Need help refining your ICP? Let Kalungi guide you through the process—contact us today for a discovery call.
We recommend using a two-tier framework for identifying your ICP:
Once your ICP is defined:
By investing time upfront to create a robust ICP, you set the stage for a targeted, impactful ABM campaign tailored to your B2B SaaS needs.
Identifying the right companies is only half the battle. The next step is pinpointing the individuals within those organizations who will drive the purchasing decision. Without this, even the most carefully curated target account list won’t yield results.
Every organization has a mix of decision-makers, influencers, and blockers. Reaching out to the right person—armed with messaging tailored to their role, responsibilities, and pain points—can significantly increase your chances of success.
Use your ICP as a foundation to develop personas—detailed profiles of the key players within your target accounts. Consider the following questions to shape these profiles:
Create a document outlining the following attributes for each persona:
With detailed personas in hand:
By deeply understanding the key players in your target accounts, you ensure that your efforts are laser-focused and have the greatest chance of resonating with the people who matter most.
To execute an effective ABM campaign, you need a targeted, accurate, and up-to-date list of accounts that match your ICP and personas. The method you choose to build this list will depend on your resources, budget, and time constraints.
Here are the most common approaches, along with their benefits and challenges:
Buying a list can deliver thousands of contacts quickly. This method is suitable if you need a large volume of leads in a short amount of time. However, there are significant drawbacks:
A tailored, hand-curated list ensures precision and relevance. Here are some ways to manually build a list:
Example: If your SaaS product targets mobile mechanics, you could use Yelp to find businesses in this niche, then manually extract their contact details from company websites or social platforms.
Tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator provide a cost-effective and dynamic way to build high-quality lists. These platforms allow you to:
This service is much cheaper than purchasing a list, but can generate a similar or even better outcome than purchasing a list if you have the time and bandwidth to ensure that the list is high-quality.
Linkedin also arguably has the best B2B outreach contact database available. Sales Navigator gives you access to a more advanced lead search. However, on its own, LinkedIn has limited company information, making it difficult to ensure that contacts have a good fit with the Ideal Customer Profile.
By investing time and resources into developing a precise account list, you’re laying the foundation for a successful ABM campaign. With the right accounts in your sights, you’ll maximize efficiency and boost your campaign’s effectiveness.
Once your ICP and personas are defined, the next step is crafting content that resonates with your target audience and addresses their needs at every stage of their journey. Effective content builds trust, demonstrates value, and moves prospects closer to a decision.
Here are the types of content we’ve created for our most successful ABM campaigns:
To create impactful content, align it with the three key stages of the buyer’s journey:
At this stage, your goal is to educate your audience and make them aware of your solution without pushing a hard sell. Content should focus on industry challenges, trends, and thought leadership to establish credibility.
Content examples:
Here, prospects are evaluating their options. They know their problem and are actively seeking solutions, so your content should help them understand why your product is a fit.
Content examples:
At this point, the focus shifts to building urgency and reducing friction in the decision-making process. Content should offer clear next steps and reassure prospects they’re making the right choice.
Content examples:
To ensure consistency and effectiveness:
With a well-structured content strategy, you’ll be able to educate, engage, and convert your prospects, creating a seamless journey that aligns perfectly with your ABM goals.
Reaching your target audience effectively demands thoughtful delivery through personalized messaging, optimized channels, and well-timed cadences.
In outbound ABM, the challenge lies in engaging prospects who may not be familiar with your company or even recognize that they have a problem. Success hinges on breaking through their skepticism with value-driven, tailored communication.
Your messaging needs to grab attention quickly and establish relevance immediately. To do this effectively:
Your prospects engage with content differently depending on their preferences and roles. Use multiple channels strategically to maximize impact:
A structured cadence ensures you remain persistent without becoming overwhelming. A good cadence strikes a balance between maintaining top-of-mind awareness and respecting your prospect’s time.
Effective Cadence Tips:
Refining your outreach approach is an ongoing process. A/B test every element of your messaging and cadence to discover what resonates most with your audience:
Data-driven adjustments will help you fine-tune your strategy, ensuring your outreach becomes more effective over time.
By using personalized messaging, leveraging the right channels, and optimizing your cadence, you’ll build trust and relevance with your target audience, ensuring your ABM campaign delivers meaningful results.
You’ve figured out your ICP, personas, messaging and cadence and someone responded with interest! What do you do now? It’s great that you’ve targeted, outreached, and messaged effectively to gain interest! Now you have to do the hard work of guiding them through the customer journey towards a sale.
But converting outbound leads into paying customers requires patience and a long-term approach. Unlike inbound leads, outbound prospects often have longer sales cycles. They may show initial interest but require time to secure budget approvals, resolve internal constraints, or move beyond a competing solution.
Success lies in nurturing these relationships strategically to guide prospects toward a sale. At Kalungi, we like to do this by becoming a resource for our leads.
Position yourself as a trusted advisor rather than just another salesperson. This means sharing valuable industry insights, helping them evaluate solutions (even if they aren’t yours), and addressing their challenges. By offering support without pressure, you establish credibility, build trust, and keep your brand top of mind when the time comes to make a decision.
Retargeting ads are a powerful way to maintain visibility and nudge prospects further down the funnel. You can do this by placing a “pixel” on the resources from 3rd party platforms such as Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn. These pixels cookie your viewers and allow you follow them around the internet, serving them ads across millions of different sites.
These ads can highlight case studies, customer testimonials, or special offers to keep engagement high.
On top of just getting your logo and message in front of prospects again, retargeting ads generally perform very well, when compared to their traditional counterparts. In fact, a recent MarketLand article explained that retargeting ads often have Click-Through-Rates of “0.30%-0.95% - which is 3-10x higher than the industry average.”
Email nurturing campaigns are essential for maintaining and deepening relationships with interested prospects. Automated sequences can deliver relevant content at the right time, ensuring your leads stay engaged throughout their journey.
Email nurturing allows you to engage leads without constant manual intervention, ensuring your touchpoints are consistent and impactful.
Nurturing outbound relationships requires empathy. Understand that prospects may need time and space to make decisions. By respecting their timeline and providing continuous value, you position yourself as a dependable partner, not just another vendor.
By cultivating these relationships with care and precision, you create a pipeline of well-nurtured leads ready to convert into long-term, high-value customers.
Referrals are one of the most powerful tools in your ABM arsenal. Happy customers can advocate for your brand in a way no marketing campaign ever could.
They’ve walked the same buyer’s journey as your prospects, experienced the value of your solution firsthand, and can provide the trust and credibility that drives conversions.
Your existing customers are your best salespeople. They can validate your value proposition through testimonials, case studies, and direct referrals. Prospects trust the word of a peer far more than traditional marketing claims, making referrals an invaluable part of the ABM process.
To generate referrals effectively, you need to know when and where to ask. Mapping the customer journey helps identify key moments when customers are most satisfied and likely to advocate for your brand. This can be after a successful onboarding, a major milestone, or when a customer achieves measurable results.
Referrals aren’t a one-time event. To maximize their value, cultivate a culture of ongoing advocacy. Engage with customers regularly to ensure they continue to see value in your solution, and keep them informed about new features, updates, or successes that reinforce their decision to choose your product.
Simplify the process for customers to provide referrals. Whether through automated referral programs, easy-to-share links, or simple email templates, lowering the barriers makes it more likely that customers will participate.
The key elements of a successful referral program are:
By nurturing your ABM-sourced customers and turning them into brand advocates, you not only extend the lifecycle of your marketing efforts but also build a network of trust that fuels sustainable growth. Every happy customer becomes a bridge to new opportunities, multiplying the impact of your ABM strategy.
At Kalungi, we use a strategic blend of resources to create a robust and actionable list of target accounts. By combining existing data—such as purchased lists or event attendee records—with tools like LinkedIn and Sales Navigator, we develop a comprehensive view of our market.
This approach allows us to leverage the breadth of general market data alongside the precision of real-time insights from LinkedIn.
Here’s how our process works:
This method allows us to target accounts with precision, prioritize efforts based on the highest potential opportunities, and create campaigns that are both strategic and impactful. By using a combination of broad and granular data sources, Kalungi ensures that our SaaS ABM campaigns deliver measurable results.
Ready to see how a tailored ABM strategy can unlock growth for your SaaS company? Contact Kalungi today for a discovery call and start turning your target accounts into long-term customers.
Brian is the CEO of Kalungi. Brian has successfully led B2B SaaS clients in all aspects of marketing growth as a fractional CMO. He also has an MBA from the UW Foster School of Business with a focus in finance and marketing.
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