Build an ABM Program Live

Article at a Glance

What does a live ABM build look like?

It looks less polished than most people expect, and that's the point. In this session, Mason walked through building an ABM strategy from scratch with Hannah from Roundtable Learning, a company that creates custom VR and AR training content for Fortune 500 businesses. No pre-built answers or staged examples. Instead, you can see a solid B2B marketing plan come together in real time.

Where do you start when a company already has programs running?

With an honest inventory of what's happening. Before building anything new, the first step in any ABM strategy is mapping what currently exists (outbound, referrals, events, content, SEO) and assigning each program a primary purpose. Most teams discover they have more than they realized, and gaps become obvious once everything is organized.

How do you find the gaps in an existing ABM strategy?

By mapping current programs to the account progression model and seeing which stages have nothing behind them. Roundtable had awareness covered through outbound and referrals, but meaningful engagement and conversion were almost completely empty. That's where the ABM plays worth developing first became clear.

What does the account progression model look like in practice?

It's a map of how accounts move from never having heard of you to actively wanting to buy. In the live build, every existing program got assigned to a stage (more on these below!), and the stages with no programs became the immediate focus of the B2B marketing plan.

Can I use this to build my own ABM strategy?

That's what this is for. The ideal customer profile work, gap analysis, specific ABM plays—all of it is designed to be replicated. Follow the process with your own programs, and you'll walk away with a better picture of what to create first and why.

Knowing what ABM is and building an ABM strategy are two completely different experiences. You can read every framework and still sit down to create your own program and feel like something is missing. Usually, what's missing is a solid example to follow.

That's why this session exists. Instead of another slide deck about how ABM works in theory, we built one live, in real time, with Hannah from Roundtable Learning joining as a fantastic participant. Roundtable creates custom VR and AR training content for Fortune 500 companies, aka they’ve got long sales cycles, complex buying committees, a niche market, and big deals.

The goal was to show how to think through the decisions that come up when building an ABM strategy, so anyone watching could follow the same logic for their own B2B marketing plan. Below, we’re mapping out the process, ABM plays, gaps that surfaced, and how to run the same exercise for your own program.

Step 1: Start by Inventorying What's Running

The first question in any ABM campaign build isn't "What should we create?" It's "What do we already have?"

This is the step teams skip in their excitement to get to the fun stuff, like the campaigns and personalized outreach. However, skipping it almost always means creating things that exist in a slightly different form or missing obvious gaps that an audit would have caught immediately.

For Roundtable, the inventory surfaced fast. Here's what was running:

• Outbound sales. A strong sales team doing a lot of prospecting, the primary driver of awareness.
• Referrals. Happy customers generating some of the warmest leads in the pipeline.
• Events. Attending learning and development and XR space conferences to build face-to-face relationships.
• SEO and AEO. A growing content investment aimed at bringing in organic traffic.
• Video demos. Starting to play a role in showcasing what Roundtable builds.

That's a foundation, and it’s what most companies discover when they sit down and write everything out.

Once the inventory is done, the next step is assigning each program a primary purpose:

• Does this help people know you exist?
• Does it educate on the problem?
• Does it showcase the product?
• Does it book meetings?
• Does it keep accounts engaged until they're ready?

Every program gets one job, so you can turn a scattered list of marketing activities into the first version of an account progression model. Once that map exists, the gaps become impossible to ignore.

Step 2: Map Programs to the Progression Model and Find the Gaps

The next step is placing each program onto the account progression model. This is where the ABM strategy starts to take shape.

The six stages of the account progression model

The model maps how accounts move from never having heard of you to actively wanting to buy: 

1. Awareness
2. Initial engagement
3. Meaningful engagement
4. MQA (when an account is ready for a real sales conversation)
5. Active opportunity
6. Re-engagement for accounts that stalled somewhere along the way.

What Roundtable's map looked like

Outbound sales, referrals, events, and SEO were all doing awareness and initial engagement work. Video demos were starting to cover some meaningful engagement, but meaningful engagement as a whole was thin, MQA was almost completely empty, and re-engagement had nothing behind it at all.

The gap that showed up

That's not a criticism of what Roundtable was doing, as it’s actually the most common pattern that surfaces when teams run this exercise on their own ABM strategy. Accounts know the brand exists, but the middle of the progression is where things stall, and nobody knows why pipeline feels slower than it should.

That gap is exactly where the ABM plays worth building first live. Roundtable needed programs that took interested accounts and made them want to set up a call.

How to find your own gap

For anyone running this exercise, the gap you find is your starting point. Not the flashiest stage, but the one that’s empty. That's where the leverage is.

Step 3: Build One Play in Detail Before Expanding

Once the gaps are clear, the temptation is to fix all of them at once. Unfortunately, playing this game of ABM whack-a-mole is a great way to end up with five half-built programs and no results to show for any of them.

The better move is picking the highest-leverage gap and building one play all the way through before touching anything else. For Roundtable, that meant meaningful engagement. They needed to get Fortune 500 contacts who were vaguely aware of the brand to lean in and start a conversation.

The 4D framework as the build structure

Every ABM play gets built through the same four questions, known as the 4D framework:

1. Data. Who are we going after, and why are we reaching out?
2. Distribution. How are we getting in front of them?
3. Destination. Where are we sending them?
4. Direction. How are we measuring whether it's working?

Answering those four questions for one play, in full, before moving to the next, is what turns an ABM strategy from a list of good ideas into something the team can execute.

The Plays That Came Out of the Live Build

By the end of the session, several concrete plays had taken shape for Roundtable's ABM strategy.

LinkedIn Connection as an Early Awareness Play

Before you ever reach out to a target account contact, connect with them on LinkedIn. Email is good for reminding people that you exist, but responses tend to happen on LinkedIn. Getting connected early means that when a contact starts showing engagement signals later, the follow-up doesn't require a cold connection request at the worst possible moment. It's a small move that pays off over time.

Champion Tracking

When someone who knows and likes your work moves to a new company, that's one of the warmest possible signals in any B2B marketing plan. Roundtable was already using Apollo for some of this, which covers the automated side. For teams without that tool, a simple free workaround works well: build a list of customer contacts with bounced email addresses from the newsletter, check their LinkedIn, and see where they landed. It takes a little manual effort and costs nothing.

A quick-start guide by vertical is one of the best assets to send a champion who’s just landed at a new organization. Create a useful 90-day checklist built around their new role. You want this to be something they can share internally that opens the door to a conversation about what your company does.

High-Intent Page Engagement

When contacts from target accounts start visiting industry pages, product pages, or the schedule-a-call page, that's a signal worth acting on. The play here is easy: surface that behavior to sales and have them reach out with context. Make sure it’s a message that acknowledges what the contact was likely researching and offers something relevant.

The Conversion Play

For Roundtable, the conversion play that made the most sense was personalized video outreach: a short, specific video that speaks directly to the target account's industry and situation, with an invitation to have a conversation. The key to making this scalable is building standardized templates underneath the personalization. A consistent landing page structure, repeatable video script, and familiar sales deck are all customizable, but none have to be built from scratch every time.

Customer Expansion

The live session ended with a framework for customer expansion that's worth including here. Once Roundtable solves a training problem for one department, that same customer almost certainly has similar problems in other departments they haven't thought to bring up yet.

The play here is to proactively surface those adjacent problems before the customer realizes they have them. Solve one thing, and the next thing to solve tends to become visible almost immediately. That's how you turn a one-time engagement into a long-term relationship.

Take the Build and Make It Yours

Roundtable is a company with a specific market and gaps. Your company is different, but the process that surfaced those gaps works the same way regardless of what you sell or who you sell it to.

The most successful ABM teams took the time to understand what they had, found the gap that mattered most, and created something focused enough to move accounts forward. Grab our ABM Program Planning Template to run the same exercise for your own B2B marketing plan and figure out where to start!