In this article, you’ll get a masterclass in growing your software company using Account Based Marketing (ABM), complete with real-world examples from top CEOs. These leaders have successfully implemented ABM tactics to acquire high-value users and significantly boost revenue. You’ll get the 6 part playbook to launch your own Account Based Marketing (ABM) strategy, supported by over 40 case studies you can use as inspiration. These examples were collected directly from CEOs at Founderpath events, from companies with combined revenues well into the hundreds of millions.
The 6 Part Playbook For Account Based Marketing (ABM)
Account Based Marketing is a strategic approach that aligns sales and marketing efforts to focus on a targeted set of high-value accounts. Instead of casting a wide net, ABM concentrates resources on engaging key decision-makers within specific organizations, creating personalized experiences to drive conversions and revenue. This playbook breaks the process down into six actionable steps.
- Identify High-Value Accounts: Define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) based on firmographics, technographics, and revenue potential. Use data to build a focused list of target accounts that represent the highest potential value for your business.
- Research and Map Key Accounts: Once you have your list, dive deep into each account. Identify the key decision-makers, influencers, and potential blockers. Understand their business challenges, strategic goals, and internal politics to tailor your approach effectively.
- Create Personalized Content and Messaging: Develop content and messaging that speaks directly to the pain points and needs of each target account. This goes beyond just using a person’s name; it involves creating bespoke assets, case studies, and outreach that resonate with their specific industry and challenges.
- Execute Coordinated Campaigns Across Channels: Align your sales and marketing teams to deliver a unified message across multiple channels. This includes targeted advertising (like on LinkedIn), personalized email sequences, direct mail, and social media engagement, ensuring a consistent and compelling experience. Brian Yam of Paragon emphasized this by creating separate, dedicated campaigns for product and engineering leaders, as they care about different things and different messaging resonates with each.
- Nurture and Build Relationships Within Accounts: Engage with your target accounts through value-added interactions. This isn’t just about selling; it’s about becoming a trusted advisor. Share relevant industry insights, provide solutions to their problems, and build genuine relationships with key stakeholders over time.
- Measure, Analyze, and Optimize for Revenue: Track your progress using ABM-specific metrics like account engagement, pipeline velocity, and deal size. Analyze what’s working and what isn’t, and continuously optimize your campaigns to improve performance and maximize your return on investment.
40+ Examples of Account Based Marketing (ABM) in Action
Strategy 1: Identify High-Value Accounts
- Markus Stahlberg of N.Rich explained their focus on a “High Velocity ICP,” which is the cohort of opportunities that convert into revenue the fastest, combining deal size, win rate, and sales cycle length to identify the most valuable accounts to target.
- Phil Rader at SaaScend detailed a process of using a data provider to identify the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and constantly fine-tuning it to understand the true buyers and the messaging that resonates most with them, a foundational step for scaling from $1M to $100M ARR.
- Guy Rubin from ebsta highlighted that their top-performing sales reps are ruthless about focusing on ICP opportunities, achieving win rates over three times higher by concentrating on their best-fit accounts.
- Sri Swaminathan of Factors.ai, after pivoting, focused heavily on defining their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) for their signal-based sales and marketing platform, enabling them to scale from $200k to nearly $2M ARR by targeting companies spending on LinkedIn ads.
- Kyle Vamvouris from Vouris explained that the foundation of a repeatable sales process is defining the target market to ensure sales reps aren’t wasting time on poorly matched leads, a key step in tripling a client’s ARR from $400k to $1.2M in 11 months.
- Sindre Haaland of SalesScreen, a company now at an $8M run rate, emphasized the importance of a top-level strategy to align all vectors of the company, starting with a clear definition of who they are selling to in order to drive efficiency.
- Alison Murdock of Trusted CMO advises that foundational marketing starts with identifying product-market fit and a clear point of view on the customer, which helps companies effectively create and define their market before scaling.
- Wishpond’s CEO, Ali Tajsekandar, detailed their pivot from a local product search engine to a full marketing automation suite by continuously refining their target customer, eventually scaling to serve over 2,500 businesses and reaching a $7M run rate.
- Stefan Smulders of Expandi bootstrapped his company to over $8M in revenue by focusing his LinkedIn automation tool on a very specific user profile and using content marketing to attract that ideal customer, generating over 1 million free clicks from Google.
Strategy 2: Execute Coordinated Campaigns Across Channels
- Demandbase’s CEO Chris Gohlke defined Account-Based Marketing as laser-targeting accounts with coordinated marketing programs across advertising and site personalization, a strategy that helped them grow to over $100M in ARR by aligning sales and marketing efforts.
- Paragon’s Brian Yam shared his blueprint for using LinkedIn Ads, where they build highly specific account lists based on their ICP and create dedicated campaigns for different personas like product vs. engineering, contributing to their growth to mid-seven figures in ARR.
- Samit Aurora of SalesPanda grew his bootstrapped company to $400k ARR by using a deep account-based marketing approach, mapping every executive from target accounts on LinkedIn and nurturing them with newsletters and ads before initiating outreach.
- Vladimir Blagojevic from Fullfunnel.io explained their strategy of using LinkedIn to engage the entire buying committee within target accounts—not just decision-makers—by sharing posts, commenting, and connecting, leading to 61 inbound five-figure opportunities in their first year.
- Whale’s CEO, Gary Vanbutsele, explained that a key part of their sales playbook is creating consistency across the team by documenting every process, which enables them to effectively execute coordinated outreach and scale revenue.
- Andre Zinkevich of Full Funnel explained their ABM process starts with aligning executives, sales, and marketing on goals and bottlenecks, then auditing past campaigns to create a customized plan, which has helped them grow to a projected $700k in revenue.
- Manny Medina of Outreach.io described their ABM approach where marketing generates 50% of the pipeline and outbound efforts generate the other 50%, a balanced strategy that has propelled them past a $6M monthly run rate.
- Spencer Farber at Cliently combines personalized video messages, postcards, and emails in coordinated workflows to engage prospects, helping them grow from zero to $8k MRR in just eight months.
- Sean Leonard of Active Demand uses a multi-channel strategy including partner webinars, content marketing, and paid ads focused on competitive keywords to attract marketing agencies, helping them grow 30% year-over-year to over $2.4M in ARR.
- Mailigen’s CEO, Janis Rose, uses Facebook video ads to drive targeted traffic through a sales funnel of content, webinars, and strategy calls to land higher-ticket clients, a key tactic in growing to a $1.5M run rate.
Strategy 3: Move Upmarket and Land Larger Deals
- David Kyle of QA Symphony detailed their strategy of moving upmarket by targeting larger, global 5,000 organizations. They focused on verticals like financial services and e-commerce, landing major clients like Barclays and Amazon and growing revenue from under $500k to a $20M run rate.
- Todd Olson, CEO of Pendo, intentionally moved upmarket by adding an enterprise sales group to target larger transactions. This strategy shifted their top 20 customers to all be north of $100k ACV and helped triple their revenue to a $1.2M monthly run rate.
- Tim Hampson from SalesSeek explained their strategic focus on acquiring larger organizations and customers, which they identified as their primary growth driver. This approach allowed them to expand average deal sizes from single users to over 100 users per account.
- Kyle Racki of Proposify shared how they moved upmarket by focusing on a “high-touch” segment with an ARPU of $789, which grew 98% in 2020. This segment now accounts for 20% of their total ARR from just 2% of their logos, helping them reach a $7M run rate.
- Armando Biondi, founder of AdEspresso, explained their growth trajectory, which involved strategically moving upmarket. After being acquired by Hootsuite, they quadrupled revenue to nearly $20M by identifying new commercial motions and targeting higher-value customer segments.
- Pat Sullivan of Ryver introduced an enterprise version of their product to target larger companies needing features like single sign-on. This move upmarket was a key part of their strategy as they approached the $1M ARR mark.
- Chad Brown from Orangedox described their pivot to an enterprise-based product after identifying a commonality among their paying business customers. This shift is projected to 10x their revenue by focusing on account-based marketing use cases.
- Aneto Okonkwo of Chatdesk uses a “foot in the door” approach, starting clients with a small, low-cost service like social media moderation. This allows them to build trust and gather insights, which they then use to systematically upsell clients to higher-value services, tripling their ARR in the last year.
- Stephen O’Keefe of Conveyor shared how they strategically increased their LTV by moving upmarket from individual corporate trainers to larger corporations. This shift in customer focus helped reduce their monthly revenue churn from 15% down to 7%.
Strategy 4: Land and Expand within Existing Accounts
- George Elfond of Rallyware explained that once they establish themselves in a niche industry, they expand by introducing new product offerings and forming strategic partnerships. This “land and expand” model is key to their accelerating growth, now above $7.5M ARR.
- Randy Frisch of Uberflip described their viral expansion model within enterprise accounts. They land in one business unit, and because their product is a front-facing experience, other departments see it and inquire, leading to organic internal referrals and a doubling of their ACV to over $60k.
- Susan Hunt Stevens at WeSpire uses a “land and expand” approach with Fortune 500 clients. They start with a pilot in one department covering about 10,000 employees and then expand by adding more seats and upselling their four distinct modules, achieving 125% net revenue retention.
- Pierce Ujjainwalla of Knack, a bootstrapped email creation platform, drives expansion by offering a tiered product suite. After landing a customer, they upsell them from their basic template product to their more robust “Builder” and “Enterprise” products, which include user-based pricing, growing to a $3.6M run rate.
- Andy Rossmeissl from Faraday.ai focuses on expanding within accounts by identifying new customer lifecycle stages to optimize. They might start with lead generation and then expand to optimizing for LTV the following year, a strategy that has helped them grow to a multi-million dollar run rate with 60 brands.
- Michael Burns at vFairs detailed a “land and expand” strategy where they moved from selling discrete, single-event licenses to annual, multi-year platform deals. This shift in messaging and packaging allowed them to increase their ACV by 60%.
- Sati Hillyer of OneMob employs a “seed and grow” model, starting with a small department of 25-50 reps within a large enterprise. After demonstrating success and value, they expand across the organization to other departments like account management and support, helping them double revenue year-over-year.
- Robert Wahbe of Highspot explained their expansion is driven by adding new geographies, divisions, and personas within an account. A customer might start with sales in the US, then expand to Europe, and then add their services and support teams, fueling their 130% net revenue retention as they passed $50M ARR.
- Kyle Porter from SalesLoft lands new accounts by serving one customer-facing role, like SDRs, and then expands to other roles like field reps and account managers. This multi-persona expansion is a key driver of their 120% net revenue retention, helping them grow to a $50M run rate.
- Doug Bewsher of Leadspace executes a land-and-expand strategy by starting with one business unit, like the Azure team at Microsoft, and then growing into other divisions. This focus on internal expansion is a key reason their net revenue retention is consistently in the “hundreds.”
- Haresh Patel from Mercatus, a platform for private equity funds, uses a land-and-expand strategy where they start with one team, often in renewable energy, and then expand to sister groups in real estate, infrastructure, or oil and gas, helping them double their ARR to $12M.
- Jason Weingarten of Yello drives expansion through usage-based upsells. As customers conduct more interviews or attend more events through the platform, they move up pricing tiers, a model that has helped them grow to over $28M in ARR.
- Derek O’Carroll at Brightpearl moved their pricing model from per-user to being based on GMV and order volume. This allowed them to capture more revenue as their retail customers grew, tripling their average order value and helping them reach over $12M in ARR.
- Tomer Tagrin from Yotpo leverages a multi-product suite to expand accounts. With 47% of their 4,000+ customers using more than one product, they successfully cross-sell from their initial reviews platform to loyalty, SMS, and visual UGC products, helping them pass $40M in ARR.
- Andrew Field, CEO of PFL, grows accounts by expanding the number of programs a customer runs. A client might start with a top-of-funnel program and then add funnel acceleration, renewals, and events programs, a strategy that helped them double revenue to a $28M run rate.
- Pierce Ujjainwalla from Knack explained that their enterprise customers expand through a user-based pricing model, allowing them to grow as more team members are added to the email creation platform. This expansion is a key driver of their 70% year-over-year growth, pushing them to a $3.6M ARR.
Conclusion
You’ve just learned how top SaaS founders leverage Account Based Marketing to drive millions in revenue. By identifying high-value targets, executing coordinated campaigns, moving upmarket, and mastering the land-and-expand model, these CEOs have built scalable growth engines. The key is to shift from a wide-net approach to a focused, personalized strategy that treats high-potential accounts as individual markets. To put these tactics into action and track your own growth, consider using Founderpath to get a real-time valuation and insights into your key SaaS metrics.
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