Everyone Said ABM Was Solved. We Saw The Missing Piece

For most B2B companies, it takes more than a megaphone and a busy street corner to get the message out. 

Sure, awareness is key to your success. 

But how likely is it that a high-priority buyer will walk past at the precise moment you’re shouting your value proposition through a megaphone? And how likely are they to sit down and listen?

Suffice it to say, not very. 

In the same way, conventional ABM is unlikely to influence large enterprise deals. 

Getting enterprise buyers to listen isn’t about the number of people you’re in front of or how loudly you’re yelling through your megaphone. It’s about how well you forge meaningful connections with those with a seat at the table. 

It sounds simple, but it’s the furthest thing from it. 

And who can blame them? They’re the most sought-after prize in the B2B world.

The average enterprise buyer is combatting endless emails, countless cold calls, and a wealth of well-intentioned offers to “connect.” Breaking through their spam filters is an achievement in itself, but it’s probably not your end goal. 

Instead, you’re looking to capture (and keep) the attention of sales-shy buyers—a task that can’t be done in a silo. 

Every marketing touch hopes to get buyers to lift their gaze from the ground and see what’s in front of them: Your solution, in all its glory. 

Sometimes you successfully catch their attention. 

The right ad, at the right time, on just the right channel, resonates. The headphones come off. For a split second, you have their attention. 

Cue the celebrations.

But not just yet: Sales only follows up on a third (35%) of marketing-engaged prospects. Your hard-earned engagement becomes a passing glance that never evolves any further. 

It’s not a sales problem. It’s an endemic go-to-market issue.

Over half (53%) of companies experience a broken hand-off between marketing and sales. In other words, the majority of organizations struggle with alignment on some level. 

The marketing-versus-sales feud isn’t just a tired trope. It’s a real problem that, if allowed to fester, will affect your bottom line. 

Your average ABM tool can tell you the basics: Someone in your target account engaged with your ad. 

Maybe it was a pivotal buyer. Maybe it was Ted from IT. Sure, Ted’s a nice guy, but he isn’t quite who you’re looking to engage.

The larger your target accounts get, the more challenging it becomes to reach the right people with ABM tools. 

Let’s say:

• You’re selling a content creation tool to marketers 
• You only want to sell to accounts with over 1,500 employees 

At an organization of that scale, you’re looking at a marketing team with a headcount of around 103. 

Of those 103 marketers, you only need to reach the handful of people who are involved in the buying decision.

A traditional ABM approach would see you throwing ad after ad into the wind, hoping one just so happens to cross the path of someone in that group. 

From all that effort, you might get a few clicks. Someone might even fill out a form. Unfortunately, that engagement (and that email you snagged) is more likely to come from a junior content writer than a CMO. 

It’s an inefficient use of your marketing budget. Worse, it gets you no closer to engaging actual buyers.

Rather than hoping your ads happen to reach the right person, go straight to the source and work with Sales to identify the exact buyers they want to reach. 

Instead of targeting all 1,500 employees or 103 marketers, you target the 10-20 people you need to convert (a.k.a the buying committee).

Once you know who to look for, contact-level advertising can come into play:

• Contact-level advertising offers precision. Every ad has a purpose and an intention. Each has a carefully selected audience composed of potential buyers—not entire accounts.
• Traditional ABM leaves sales digging through low-quality leads, hunting for a buyer among a sea of unqualified prospects—a much less fun game of Where’s Waldo. 

No marketing strategy should hinge on hope or scavenger hunts, but that’s exactly what ABM asks you to do. 

On the other hand, contact-level advertising offers precision and visibility. You can reach the right folks and know in real time when you’ve left an impression, even if they never fill out a form.

At this point, you may be wondering how you know that a prospect has meaningfully engaged with these ads. 

You may also be thinking: “Where’s the form? How do I get their email? And why am I having an identity crisis?”

I get it. 

But the way we approach contact-level advertising at Influ2 is a bit different than what most teams are used to (and it’s very effective). 

ABM speaks to you in riddles and third-party intent data. 

It’s like being back in high school: Somebody said something about you, but no one knows who said it. 

Influ2 draws on first-party intent data to clarify the confusion. 

Instead of spending time sleuthing down the source of the gossip (the third-party account-level intent signal you get from tools like 6sense and Demandbase), you can cut directly to the chase. 

We show you exactly which of your targeted contacts saw and clicked your ads, without using cookies, IP addresses, or form fills.

And speaking of forms, well, let’s just say it’s not as effective as you might think. Across industries, the average form-fill rate is just 1.7%. 

When you rely on form-fills to denote interest, you allow so much potential to slip through your fingers. Here’s an example: 

• You get 10,000 impressions on an ad
• Those 10,000 impressions lead to 60 clicks
• Those 60 clicks result in one form fill

What about the other 59 people who clicked your ad?

Just because busy enterprise buyers don’t spend time giving you their information doesn’t mean they aren’t interested. No one intentionally clicks on an ad unless they’re curious about what it has to say.

The data agrees: The chance that a person will respond to your sales call or sales outreach doubles if they clicked on your ad the day prior. 

Now imagine if you could extend that improved receptiveness across the sales cycle—especially the long, drawn-out ones you’re dealing with when selling to enterprise organizations. 

No buyer journey is quite the same—you see that in action every day. For example, when you run out of shampoo and spontaneously decide to try a new brand. 

In the time you spend staring at the endless amount of options available at your local grocery store, two or three people have already grabbed one off the shelf. 

Eventually, you see a brand you recognize from an ad you saw recently. It looks familiar; you’ve heard of it. In the face of overwhelming options, that little bit of familiarity fueled your purchase decision. 

For enterprise buyers, the same principle applies: Everyone comes to the buying decision in their own time. You want to be right there with them, influencing that decision every step of the way. 

Contact-level ads are a great vehicle for doing so, as they allow you to stay top of mind (and relevant) by: 

• Mirroring the sales process: Give each prospect content that reflects their stage in the sales process.
• Curating the journey: Divide your contacts into groups based on data from your CRM (industry, persona, and so on), then design ad flows built to resonate. 
• Tracking each prospect’s activity: Set conditions to change ads when a contact has seen or engaged with an ad “X” number of times so prospects are constantly exposed to relevant content.

Pro tip: Follow our playbook for using contact-level ads at every stage of the buying journey, including examples of our own ads → The Contact-Level ABM Framework

I mentioned earlier that a prospect is twice as receptive to outreach after recently seeing a targeted ad. 

That extra receptivity could make all the difference at key moments in the enterprise sales cycle. When deal progression is an uphill battle, every little nudge matters—especially those that don’t look like nudges. 

First-touch or last touch, single-source versus multi-source—no matter how you slice it, conventional attribution models are a disaster because no single touch is 100% responsible for a sale.

At Influ2, we take a different approach and measure marketing-influenced revenue by tracking individual ad interactions. 

We know that Ally, Sr. Marketing Manager at Acme saw your ads 10 times a week ago, and clicked one the day before they replied to a sales outreach email, which turned into an open opportunity.

This allows us to connect impressions and clicks to pipeline progression and revenue.

But the insight isn’t limited to individual deal cycles. You can also zoom-out and see marketing’s overall influence on pipeline and revenue.

Not like it’s a competition or anything.

But when marketing teams notoriously struggle to prove their impact, that clarity means everything. Your contact-level advertising strategy was there, reinforcing sales every step of the way—that new enterprise logo is your laurel to wear, too. 

Much as the megaphone strategy might be fun, it fundamentally will not drive the meaningful connections that win enterprise deals.

For most go-to-market organizations, contact-level advertising is the missing piece. 

It’s how you catch the attention of heads-down enterprise buyers—and guide them through the buying journey until they’re ready to sign on the dotted line. 

• P.S. It’s also how businesses like StarTree boost conversion rate in pipeline generation by 3.17x and prove that sales and marketing can get along.