ABM Lessons From 4 Practitioners Who’ve Done It

Article at a Glance

What makes these ABM lessons different from typical ABM advice?

They come from practitioners who are actively running programs instead of consultants talking about what should work in theory. Hannah, Payton, Greg, and Adam have all built ABM campaigns inside companies, made tradeoffs, and figured out what holds up when the rubber meets the road.

How do you get channel managers bought into an ABM campaign without wrecking their metrics?

Lead with empathy instead of authority. The teams that win at this don't force channel managers to change how they work. Instead, they give them options. Isolating ABM campaign data so it doesn't contaminate existing reporting, or layering ABM audiences onto existing campaigns to test impact gradually, are both approaches that work better than asking someone to blow up a motion they've spent years building.

How do you build a target account list that reflects your best customers?

Start with the CRM. Every department will have an opinion about who the ideal customer profile should be, and most of those opinions will be different. The data cuts through that. Looking at which customers stayed longest, expanded most, and were profitable is more useful than asking five teams to agree on a description.

How does organic social fit into an ABM campaign?

Better than most people think. The key is using social to create warm moments that sales can act on, like showing up authentically when a target account brand has a viral moment, turning that engagement into a handoff opportunity, and building a content strategy around what's resonating with the right personas. It's not a replacement for direct targeting, but it's a powerful complement to a broader business marketing strategy.

How do you prove LinkedIn ads are working if nobody is clicking on them?

By measuring influence instead of clicks. The average LinkedIn click-through rate is around 0.4%, which means almost nobody clicks. However, that doesn't mean the ads aren't working. Connecting LinkedIn ad impression data to CRM data surfaces the companies and deals that were influenced without a click, giving sales the context they need to prioritize outreach toward accounts that know the brand.

There's a version of ABM advice that lives entirely in slide decks and diagrams. It’s clean, logical, and completely untested by the reality of a channel manager who refuses to touch their CPMs or a sales team that's skeptical of anything marketing has ever suggested. That version of ABM sounds great, but it’s not very useful when you're trying to build something.

This post is the other version. Four practitioners—Hannah Forson at BambooHR, Payton Christopher at Delivery Solutions, Greg Rokisky at Calendly, and Adam Holmgren at Fibbler—each sharing what they learned from running ABM campaigns inside companies with constraints and people pushing back on them along the way. No hypotheticals or advice that only works if you have an enterprise budget and a team of twelve.

Just four sets of lessons from people who figured things out the hard way, and were kind enough to share what they found.

Lesson 1: Buy-In Isn't a One-Time Conversation

When Hannah started layering an account-based approach onto BambooHR's existing marketing motion, she ran into a challenge that doesn't get enough attention in ABM circles: channel managers who were worried about what a new ABM campaign was going to do to their metrics. 

Honestly, that's a fair concern. If someone has spent years building a paid media program with healthy CPMs and strong form fill rates, and a new initiative suddenly tanks both, that person has a problem, even if the ABM is technically working.

The approach that moved things forward was leading with flexibility instead of authority. Sometimes that meant adding ABM audiences to existing campaigns to test impact gradually, other times it meant isolating the ABM campaign so channel managers could exclude it from reporting if needed.

A great ABM example of this was a holiday executive campaign. Most B2B companies pull back spend over the holidays, but executives don't take the same time off as everyone else, and the market is a lot less noisy. Setting it up as a completely separate campaign meant channel managers could point directly to it when stakeholders asked questions, without feeling like their numbers were being held hostage by someone else's business marketing strategy.

The deeper lesson is one worth carrying into every ABM campaign: people need to feel proud of their work. When channel managers feel like they helped build something and can see their contribution in the results, that's when momentum builds. Buy-in is something you earn continuously by treating the people around you like partners instead of obstacles.

Lesson 2: Build Your Target Account List From Data, Not Opinions

When Payton and her team arrived at Delivery Solutions, they asked a simple question: who is your ideal customer profile? Unfortunately, they got a different answer from every department they asked. Everyone was confident, but nobody agreed.

This is one of the most common starting points for an ABM campaign and one of the most dangerous. When the target account list gets built on a collection of opinions instead of data, you end up going after accounts that look right on paper but don't behave like your best customers in practice.

What Payton did instead was go straight to the CRM. The data told a story: enterprise retailers with high location counts and complex integration needs were the customers that stayed longest, expanded most, and delivered the most value. That became the foundation of the target account list.

One piece of the build that stood out was the role of the customer service team. The people submitting tickets, managing implementations, and interacting with the product day-to-day don't have buying power, but they have internal influence. Getting in front of them and building a business marketing strategy that speaks to their specific role created a path to the decision makers above them that cold outreach to executives rarely does.

Lesson 3: Organic Social Is an Underrated ABM Play

Organic social and ABM don't seem like natural partners. ABM is built on targeted, guaranteed delivery to specific accounts. Organic social is the opposite: you post something and hope the right people see it. Greg's approach at Sprout Social reframed that tension entirely, and the result was one of the more creative ABM examples to come out of any of these conversations.

The play was straightforward in concept, yet clever in execution. When a brand on Sprout's target account list had a viral moment on social, the team would show up authentically in that conversation. It was a timely, cheeky comment that gave the brand their flowers publicly.

That single interaction could then get handed off to sales as a warm outreach opportunity. The cold call becomes "Hey, we just gave you a shoutout on social, and it got a great response". A very different conversation than a generic pitch email. On LinkedIn, the approach went deeper: tagging content by persona and brand, monitoring what was resonating, and letting that data shape the content calendar. When a piece of content performed well with the right audience, it fed directly into the ABM campaign strategy.

The insight worth stealing here is about the nature of one-to-one content. Most teams think of it as private, like a personalized landing page or custom deck built for a single account. Greg's version was one-to-one for the account but one-to-many for the audience. A social breakdown of why a target brand's moment worked is relevant to that brand, and also useful to everyone else watching. That's a business marketing strategy that earns attention instead of just demanding it, and it's one a lot of B2B brands are leaving on the table.

Lesson 4: LinkedIn Ads Work Even When Nobody Clicks

Adam built Fibbler out of personal frustration. He was running LinkedIn ads, believed they were working, and had absolutely no way to prove it to his board. The average LinkedIn click-through rate is around 0.4%, meaning the overwhelming majority of people who see an ad never click on it. So if you're only measuring clicks, that looks like failure…but it’s not. It's just the wrong measurement for what LinkedIn ads do.

What Fibbler does is connect LinkedIn ad impression data to CRM data, surfacing the companies and deals that were influenced by ads without a single click. Someone sees an ad, doesn't click, types the company name directly into LinkedIn later, and eventually ends up in a sales conversation. Without that connection layer, the ad gets zero credit for any of it.

Plugging that data into the account progression model means sales can prioritize outreach toward accounts that are brand-familiar, changing how those conversations start and how fast they move.

The tactical detail worth pulling out for anyone running their own ABM campaign is the super title problem. Broad LinkedIn title targeting (anything that qualifies as a "super title" in LinkedIn's system) pulls in massive irrelevant audiences almost instantly. Targeting specific titles and actively excluding super titles produces a far more focused program with useful data on the back end. 

The ABM budget goes further, the signal is cleaner, and the CRM insights that Fibbler surfaces become actionable instead of just interesting. As Adam put it, if you keep building and measuring LinkedIn ads for clicks, you're optimizing for the wrong thing.

What These Four Lessons Have In Common

None of these practitioners had a perfect ABM campaign from day one. What they all share is a willingness to work with the reality in front of them instead of waiting for ideal conditions.

That's the through line across every strong ABM campaign. Not a perfect strategy or an unlimited ABM budget, but a clear-eyed view of what's working, a respect for the people involved, and enough flexibility to adjust when things don't go as planned. The textbook version of ABM is useful, but the practitioner version is what drives pipeline.

Real Programs Beat Perfect Plans

Whatever stage your ABM campaign is at—just getting started, stuck in the middle, or scaling something that's working—the move is the same. Build something real, pay attention to what's happening, and adjust from there. Grab our ABM Program Planning Template to map out your own program and start making progress before everything is perfect!