ABM Orchestration: Aligning Sales, Marketing, and Intent Data

Imagine sitting in a restaurant where two eager waiters keep checking on your table.

One is taking your drink order while the other is asking if you’re ready for dessert—meanwhile, no one ever brought your meal.

Sounds ridiculous, right? 

And yet, that’s how many marketing and sales teams work. 

Marketing is busy chasing a few form fills while sales is left guessing which prospects are truly interested, creating a disconnect that costs you real opportunities. 

Especially when dealing with enterprise accounts, it’s more important than ever to nail that handoff between marketing and sales—and only 11% of companies are doing this effectively. 

Want to make a change? 

Break down those walls, move beyond the outdated MQL approach, and use intent data to inform timely touchpoints. That’s the magic of ABM orchestration.

ABM orchestration is all about bringing marketing and sales together when targeting accounts.

Instead of marketing throwing MQLs over the fence to sales, both teams are actively involved in guiding deals forward through every step of the sales cycle.

Here’s what it involves, in a nutshell:

• Zeroing in on the right people: As our CEO, Dmitri Lisitski puts it, “Targeting an account of 150,000 people is like putting a billboard in a small town—you have no idea who’s actually seeing it.” When marketing and sales efforts run in tandem rather than parallel, both teams target the right accounts and people within those accounts.
• Giving sales real intent data to work with: Good orchestration is about providing meaningful intent insights to the sales team. Sales needs to know what they should do next, and marketing can provide the information they need to make the best move.
• Supporting the entire customer journey: Marketing’s role shouldn’t be just to generate demand and hand off leads. When ABM efforts are orchestrated between teams, everyone can help fuel each step in the process—from generating initial interest to accelerating deals, and even helping your Customer Success (CS) team during expansion. When these teams are on the same page, handoffs are smooth, and prospects receive a consistent, engaging message.

Just think about this: companies with effective hand-offs and aligned audiences see three times more of their total pipeline influenced by marketing than companies with broken handoffs. 

In the world of enterprise accounts where a single deal can involve over a dozen decision-makers, getting it right matters. 

Both Sales and Marketing are engaging multiple people from one company. If your teams aren’t aligned, prospects end up receiving conflicting messages, which is confusing at best and annoying at worst. 

With an orchestrated ABM effort, every member of a buying group gets the same clear, targeted message at just the right moment. 

When a prospect clicks on an ad, it’s not just another number—it’s a strong intent signal that can tell your sales team what resonates with this person, and when to connect with them. 

For instance, here’s what an intent signal from Influ2’s contact-level ads looks like.

Want to remove the silos?

Use ABM orchestration to drive smarter, more effective engagement with potential customers.

If you have a disconnect between sales and marketing and wondering how to bridge the gap, I have some bad news: it’s not necessarily an easy road.

For this to actually work, leadership on both teams needs to be on board. 

Marketing will need to fundamentally change how they measure their work, and individuals on both sides will need to learn how to communicate openly and follow the same processes.

Is this tough at the start? Yes. 

But is it worth the effort? Absolutely.

Let’s talk about five steps to get started with ABM orchestration.

Tell me if this sounds familiar: marketing looks at the metrics they’re being measured on, such as MQLs, and sees great numbers. 

That looks like a win from the outside, but then Sales looks at their numbers, and they’re missing their goals.

Not only is this confusing for leadership, it’s frustrating for both teams and leads to distrust. 

So, what went wrong? 

While marketing celebrated over a few form fills, they missed the bigger picture. 

Those MQLs they passed over to sales never closed, or worse, were never really interested in the first place. 

And the places in the customer journey where they did impact a sale? 

Well, since attribution was only tracking the last touch, marketing can’t see how their program influenced a sale from further up the pike. 

Unfortunately, this is a reality in many marketing teams, and it can lead to leadership pulling budget because they don’t see the impact of marketing on actual revenue numbers.

So, if the old MQL-driven approach isn’t working, what can marketing and sales do to align on their ABM strategy?

Define your end goal together. Get Sales and Marketing into a room together (in-person or virtually) and talk about the direction you want to take. Ask critical questions like:

• What are our shared goals for revenue growth, deal acceleration, and expansion?
• What key success metrics do we want to track?
• How do we want marketing and sales to work together throughout the buyer’s journey?

For example, an ABM-aligned team might move their focus away from MQL volume and towards the number of marketing-influenced opportunities created within target accounts.

Set specific, shared KPIs. It might feel odd at first, but when Sales and Marketing work from the same scorecard, they can build a much higher level of trust and collaboration.

Define which shared metrics measure meaningful progress toward revenue, including:

• Opportunities created within target accounts
• Meetings booked from engaged contacts
• Pipeline influence (or how many deals have marketing touchpoints)
• Sales cycle acceleration
• Customer conversion rate

Pro tip: With Influ2, your team can create contact-level ad campaigns and influence deals at an individual level. Now, instead of Marketing celebrating form fills that may never convert, they track how they influenced deals throughout the buyer journey. Better yet, they can arm sales with intent data based on how individuals engage with the ads they see.

When Sales and Marketing align on their goals, both teams can keep marching toward the same destination, rather than spinning their wheels on different tracks.

While every step in this list is a joint effort between sales and marketing, here is where both teams need to get their hands dirty.

In the end, ABM orchestration means going after the same target accounts in a coordinated way.

So, instead of letting each team choose their audience separately (and ending up with “everyone” on your list), sit down together and deliberately choose the accounts that matter most.

Start by reviewing your current book of business to define your ideal accounts. Ask questions like:

• Which accounts generate the most lifetime value (LTV)?
• Which industries or segments are you gaining traction in?
• Which customers have the most success with our product?
• Where are you seeing expansion deals or repeat business?

For example, a SaaS company selling HR software might notice that mid-market financial services firms have the highest renewal rates and shortest deal cycles. Now, they have a clue on where to double down on their efforts. 

Doing this analysis together with your sales team can help you focus on accounts with the highest revenue potential, not just accounts that fit generic firmographic data.

Build a data-backed target account list. Once you’ve identified the common characteristics of high-value customers, you can use data tools like ZoomInfo, Apollo, or LinkedIn Sales Nav to narrow your search and find companies that match your ideal profile.

As you build this list, refine it with exclusion criteria, such as:

• Existing customers
• Companies that don’t align with your ICP
• Industries with historically high churn rates

Segment your target accounts. Building a target account list is good. But when you create specific segments within that list, you can tailor your messaging to each audience’s pain points and challenges.

How you choose to segment your target accounts is up to you. But here are some of the main ways some companies choose to segment their target accounts:

• Segment by industry or sub-industry (e.g., a separate segment for financial services vs. fintech startups).
• Segment contacts into role-based tiers, such as decision-makers, influencers, and end users.
• Segment based on company size, separating your messaging for small, medium, and enterprise-sized companies.

Pro tip: With Influ2, you can build targeted ad campaigns for specific segments of your target audience. That means you can create ads that speak to end users, managers, or procurement and legal folks who are involved in different stages of the deal. Not only do these ads target a general profile, but they also target specific individuals inside your target accounts. Then, both Sales and Marketing get visibility into which people in a company are interested, and when is the best moment to reach out.

By creating and fine-tuning this shared, segmented list, both teams have a clear roadmap of which accounts and contacts to focus on. 

In enterprise sales, a linear funnel doesn’t reflect reality. Buying decisions involve multiple stakeholders—often across departments—and the process isn’t always straightforward. 

If Marketing and Sales aren’t aligned on who is involved in deals and what happens at each stage, orchestration can’t happen.

Your buyer journey map is unique to your business, customers, and industry. Here’s how to build a map that’s detailed, but still flexible enough to fit the complexity of each enterprise deal:

Identify key personas in the buying committee. The best way to do this is to analyze past deals:

• How many people were involved in the buying process?
• What roles were involved?
• When did procurement, legal, or finance typically enter the conversation?
• Who joined the first sales meeting?
• Who signed the check?

For example, a B2B cybersecurity company analyzing their past deals might discover that the CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) was typically the final decision-maker. 

But along the way, they were also influenced by the VP of IT, and a team of IT security engineers had to validate product fit before procurement could start to negotiate the contract. 

By mapping out these roles and when they enter the sales conversation, Marketing can craft targeted content and Sales can personalize outreach for each stakeholder.

Define the stages of your buyer journey. Clear, shared stages ensure both Sales and Marketing know where prospects are and what actions to take next.

Again, this is something unique to your business and audience. But, in its most basic form, an enterprise buyer journey might look like this:

• Cold prospect: Has never engaged with your company.
• Engaged prospect: Has interacted with content, visited your website, or clicked ads.
• Outreached prospect: Sales has initiated contact.
• First sales meeting booked: Initial discussions are in progress. 
• Stakeholder and evaluation stage: When IT, finance, procurement, and legal get involved.
• Negotiation and contract review: Final pricing and approvals.
• Closed-won: Signed contract, time to celebrate!

To turn this into your own personalized customer journey map, you can customize these stages based on your typical deal cycle. For example, a SaaS product and a consulting service will follow a very different process. So, analyze and adjust.

Lean on Sales’ expertise to adjust this buyer journey over time. This isn’t a static document—it should evolve based on real deal cycles and sales conversations. To refine your buyer journey map, try this:

• Have your sales team ask prospects directly, “What does your typical buying process look like?”
• Host joint Marketing and Sales reviews to identify gaps (e.g., “Are we losing deals at a certain stage? Why?”)
• Use CRM data to track stage progression, and identify where deals tend to stall.

For example, a team doing this analysis may find that procurement teams are often brought into the conversation too late, delaying deals by 2-3 weeks. 

To prevent these slowdowns, marketing can target procurement teams earlier with specific ads, while sales can proactively provide legal and compliance resources earlier in the process.

Pro tip: Want to bring this map to life? With Influ2, you can design dynamic ad journeys that automatically adjust based on a prospect’s level of engagement or stage of the buying journey. For example, you might set up a campaign so that:

• Cold prospects see awareness-building ads
• Engaged prospects receive thought leadership content
• Prospects who book meetings get value-driven messaging

With this approach, each individual in a buying committee sees relevant messaging based on their specific journey, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.

For your ABM program to be well orchestrated, marketing needs to be involved in supporting the full journey, not just generating demand. 

Ideally, both teams have clear actions defined in advance, meaning Marketing can continuously support Sales, and Sales knows exactly when and how to engage with prospects that show interest.

Here’s how to do it.

Pinpoint key customer touchpoints throughout the journey. To align Marketing and Sales, you need to know how a prospect interacts with your brand before, during, and after becoming a customer. Try this:

• Review your CRM or analytics tools to track customer interactions—email opens, ad clicks, website visits, webinar attendance, demo requests, etc.
• Identify “high-impact” moments when marketing can prime the prospect and sales can step in (e.g., a prospect clicking on an ad could trigger a follow-up email or a sales call).
• Create a shared document that outlines each stage of the customer journey and the best response from marketing or sales at that point.

Define which intent signals trigger action from sales.

When your ABM strategy is well orchestrated, Marketing hands off engaged prospects to Sales whenever they show direct intent signals.

That said, it’s up to you to decide which signals should trigger what action. There are multiple approaches that work, but here are some steps you can take to define your triggers:

• Analyze past closed-won deals to find patterns—did most engaged leads click on a specific ad? Attend an event? Watch a full product demo?
• Rank intent signals from low to high (e.g., a whitepaper download is low intent, while clicking on a value-based ad is higher intent).
• Create a system that tracks intent signals and notifies sales when prospects are more engaged (hint: you can automate this for ads with Influ2).

For example, let’s say a prospect clicked on an ad, wandered around your website, and downloaded a product comparison guide. They’re showing high intent, which can be passed directly to sales for immediate action (such as a phone call).

Balance workloads and automate when possible. Your sales team only has a certain capacity to reach out manually after each intent signal. So, when you see their plates starting to get full (but before they’re overflowing), consider automating some sales outreach.

Here’s how to do it:

• Use automated outreach tools to handle initial content with a newly engaged prospect. This might be an email sequence from an SDR that gets sent out automatically when a prospect clicks on an ad.
• Lean on automation for low-value touchpoints, such as follow-up emails or scheduling reminders.
• Define which intent signals indicate a hot lead, and prioritize personal outreach for the most promising accounts.
• Review your team’s workload regularly—if sales is swamped, see if there are lower-intent prospects that can be moved to automated sequences.

Align Marketing and Sales to support the full journey—not just the top of the funnel—and you’ll pave the way for smoother, more successful customer experiences.

It’s no secret that Marketing teams can get disconnected from prospects.

They may talk to customers or listen to sales calls, but they don’t have as much direct contact as the sales team does, and their understanding of prospects’ pain points and challenges may suffer as a result.

On the other hand, Sales is often left unaware of the efforts being made to drive awareness, and how those impact real deals.

For ABM orchestration to be successful, your teams need open, honest, regular communication. 

Of course, every company will organize this differently. 

In some cases, it might mean marketing and sales report to a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). Or, it might mean setting up regular syncs between both teams. 

However your company chooses to do this, setting up channels for communication and data sharing is key to an orchestrated ABM program.

Set up regular sessions for marketing and sales teams to meet: Whether virtual or in-person, these meetings allow feedback to flow freely in both directions. 

Hold weekly or biweekly syncs where sales shares insights from the field—common objections, competitor mentions, trending topics—while marketing provides updates on upcoming campaigns and content.

When Marketing and Sales regularly share insights, it can lead to faster action that supports the sales cycle. 

For example, if Sales is finding that prospects don’t understand a new feature of your SaaS product, Marketing could build a case study that highlights a customer using that feature successfully, and promote it with ads to prospects who are near a purchase decision.

Build feedback loops for disqualified leads. Marketing works hard to send the right leads to sales. So when a lead is disqualified, knowing why is a key to improvement. 

Build lead disqualification reporting into your CRM, so that every time a lead is disqualified, the sales rep can mark why. Categories might include:

• Wrong persona (not a decision-maker)
• Bad timing (not ready to buy, budget constraints)
• No real interest (clicked on an ad but never engaged further)
• Competitive loss

This can help both teams refine their process. 

For example, if a large portion of disqualified leads are marked “Wrong Persona”, Marketing can refine their ad targeting and content to reach the right stakeholders.

Use the right tools to share data between teams. Whenever possible, automate data sharing with tools that integrate well. This can take an extra workload off team leaders, and help avoid miscommunication and lost insights.

In most cases, your CRM will be the hub of all sales data.

Try to make the right connections between marketing analytics tools and your CRM, and both Sales and Marketing will have access to the data they need to get the job done. 

For example, let’s say you want to promote a new feature of your product that’s primarily relevant to marketing managers. 

Using Influ2, you can pull data from your CRM to build a cohort based on current customers with a marketing management role. Then, you can send ads directly to those folks. 

When those customers engage, sales and customer success can see the intent signals in your CRM.

We talked to those companies in the 11% who have created highly effective handoffs between marketing and sales. When asked what they felt were key ingredients of successful alignment, they told us:

• Sales involvement in audience preparation
• Marketing programs aligned with the sales process
• Immediate targeting of outreach contacts

When these factors fall into place, up to 80% of engaged leads are pursued by sales, and marketing ensures that at least one-third of the sales audience is included in their targeting. This led to 29% of their total pipeline being directly influenced by sales. 

This is what’s possible with an orchestrated ABM strategy.

Want to get a headstart? Use the right tools to target specific people within accounts and get better intent data for your sales team.

With Influ2, you can create segmented campaigns for specific individuals and profiles, targeting the same people that your sales team is reaching out to and creating a clear, unified message across all channels.

Book a demo with our team to learn more about what Influ2 could do for your ABM program.