The Enterprise Ad Strategy That Actually Moves Deals Forward

If you’ve ever gone for a long run, you know that it’s easy to start off with a lot of energy, and just as easy to lose steam as time goes on. 

Unfortunately, working with enterprise deals can feel like the longest marathon of your life.

Teams chasing enterprise deals are navigating endless layers of stakeholders, juggling long sales cycles, and constantly battling for attention in a crowded market.

Marketing runs ads, gets a list of engaged accounts, and hands them off to sales. Meanwhile, sales is left wondering: who’s actually interested? Who do I talk to first?

The reality is that traditional advertising to target accounts doesn’t stack up when dealing with the complexity of enterprise deals. 

But you know what does? 

Contact-level advertising.

According to one survey of long-term ABM practitioners, the greatest pain points they’re experiencing today are a lack of buy-in from sales (35%) and issues measuring results (62%).

Another study found that 85% of B2B marketers struggle to connect marketing performance to business outcomes.

Marketers are spending big bucks on ads hoping to generate demand, but sales teams are left with leads that don’t convert. 

The reality is that enterprise deals are a different beast, which is precisely why account-level ads fall short.

Are the G2 grids looking more and more crowded to anyone else?

And the above picture just shows CRMs. 

Meanwhile, every category in G2 is swamped with options. Plus, dozens of new products are launched every single day. 

All this adds up to one big challenge for B2B marketers: facing the competition.

You’re competing with everything from startups to enterprises, and your competition ranges from people who have zero budget to people who have millions of dollars in budget. Making sure you’re standing out from those—it’s a huge challenge.

Faced with so much ad noise, it’s no wonder your audience doesn’t respond to generic ads. If your message doesn’t feel relevant, it simply gets lost in the mix.

Traditional advertising is good for awareness, but falls flat when it comes to moving enterprise deals forward. 

Why? 

Because most ad platforms let you target accounts or profiles, but not specific people within those accounts.

I’ve had SDRs tell me that their normal workflow for ABM tools is just deleting the notifications. They wouldn’t even look at them because at some point, knowing that someone from a company clicked on an ad is useless.

Unless someone fills out a form (a less likely occurrence with enterprise-level deals), you can’t connect faces with those clicks. Ultimately, without knowing exactly who’s engaging, sales can’t act on the intent signals that ABM tools provide in any meaningful way.

Everyone in enterprise knows that deals can take a year or more to close.

Enterprise cycles, however, aren’t complicated solely because they’re long—they’re also extremely layered. 

To successfully close the deal, you’re navigating a web of stakeholders across different teams, each with their own priorities.

A VP of IT cares about security and compliance. The CFO is focused on cost. Legal is looking at contracts and terms. End users just want a tool that makes their jobs easier. 

A one-size-fits-all ad campaign can’t possibly speak to all these concerns at once.

There is a new trend where marketing is being measured on revenue and pipeline rather than strictly traditional metrics like MQLs. A lot of organizations are pushing to measure marketing on actual pipeline and revenue impact, and that’s how you get larger budgets.

Here’s the problem though: the longer the sales cycle, the harder it is to tie real revenue to marketing’s efforts. 

Multiple people in a buying group may have read an article, engaged with a LinkedIn post, or seen an ad over a period of months or years, but unless they come directly through inbound—such as a filled form—it’s nearly impossible to track marketing’s influence on the deal.

The final nail in the coffin: misalignment between sales and marketing. 

What’s the main message your sales team is using to target cold leads? Is that aligned with the message that marketing is using in their ad campaigns? 

If not, these efforts run in separate lanes rather than supporting each other.

Marketing runs ads to generate MQLs, but if sales can only see which accounts interacted with ads (not which people), then how can they turn that into something actionable?

Without knowing which ads resonated with which people, sales teams are left shooting arrows at a target blindfolded, unable to match their outreach to what really matters to their audience.

The end result is wasted budget, missed opportunities, and unnecessary friction between two teams that should be working together.

Deals don’t close at an account level—there are individual people behind those decisions. That’s where contact-level advertising changes the game. 

Instead of casting a wide net, it enables you to target, engage, and influence individual decision-makers throughout the sales cycle.

Narrowing your focus from a broad account-level view down to the decision-makers inside those accounts can help you deliver relevant messages to them at the right time. 

In an enterprise deal, you need to influence the right people—real decision-makers who are part of your buying group.

Most ABM tools let you target profiles based on titles and seniority, but they don’t tell you exactly who you’re actually reaching.

With a contact-level advertising platform like Influ2, you have a deeper level of reporting to see which contacts are engaging and how deals are influenced.

Rather than send ads into the ether and guess at the influence they may have had, you can see specific data that shows which individuals engaged with your ads, and how that influenced pipeline and revenue.

As one user puts it:

One size does not fit all in enterprise sales. 

With unique needs and concerns, it’s impossible to create messaging that resonates with everyone. 

With contact-level advertising, however, you can build persona-driven campaigns, tailoring ads to different decision-makers within the same buying group. 

This means you can:

• Create customized messaging based on role, seniority, and stage in the buying cycle.
• Deliver hyper-relevant ad creatives that resonate with each persona.
• Scale personalization across multiple stakeholders.

More than that, with Influ2, you can create journeys within each campaign. 

With journeys, you can go even deeper than persona-driven messaging and also map your ads to each stage of the buying journey using data from your CRM.

For example, for new prospects, you might show ads focused on building brand awareness and educating them.

Once a prospect moves forward and your sales team is actively working to close the deal, you might show them case studies and use-case content to help build trust and address any objections.

You can also use contact-level ads to help revive stalled deals by showing prospects who’ve gone M.I.A re-engagement ads. For example, we show ads featuring the AE that the prospect has been talking to, so there’s a level of familiarity or ads that reaffirm our value.

Simply outline the stages of your buyer journey, choose how prospects move through those stages (using CRM data and sales activity), and align your ads with prospect engagement. 

Now, instead of high-level ads that target a general audience, you can narrow your focus and send out ads that actually move the needle.

With the right engagement data, you can solve one of the biggest gaps in enterprise sales—knowing when to reach out.

Let’s say marketing and sales are working on a division of Salesforce in EMEA. That could be 50 people. 

Even if you align with sales on targeting that buying group in that region, you might start from different ends of that list. 

Plus, there’s no way for sales to know who is engaged in that buying group, because you can only see an account-level engagement score.

This situation may be all too familiar. 

Here’s the opposite scenario with contact-level ads:

• Marketing and sales align on an account. 
• They identify the individuals in a buying group, and target them with contact-level ads. 
• As the prospects engage with those ads, sales gets a notification with exactly who engaged, and what messaging resonates with them.
• Sales can follow up with a message that’s relevant to each prospect. 

Now, instead of chasing cold leads, sales can focus on warm prospects who are already showing interest, and personalize their outreach to match the message that got them to click.

With contact-level ads, the precision of intent signals are actionable for sales.

Marketing is often relegated to the world of top-of-funnel awareness while being judged based on pipeline created or revenue influenced. 

So the question for these teams is: how do I prove my influence on revenue?

Account-level advertising requires someone to fill out a form (something that only 2% of prospects do) to credit marketing’s contribution to a deal.

So if someone clicks your ad and visits your website, ABM tools can’t track that engagement unless that person fills out a form.

That causes underreporting of marketing’s influence on deals because ad impressions and clicks influence deals, even if it’s indirectly.

With Influ2’s contact-level advertising, you’re able to tie ad clicks to pipeline without form fills because you specify who you want to target. Our technology ties ad engagement to those specific people, giving you more accurate and complete performance data.

Here’s a helpful diagram that shows how contact-level advertising catches the data ABM tools miss.

Here’s how one user explained their experience: 

All of this sounds great in theory—but how does it work? 

To simplify, we’ve divided this into three main sections:

• Pipeline generation
• Pipeline progression
• Post-sale expansion

Traditionally, marketing hands off leads to sales and hopes for the best. 

With contact-level advertising, however, sales and marketing work together from the start—not just to identify target accounts, but also to pinpoint the key decision-makers within them.

At the end of this exercise, you’ll end up with a carefully curated wishlist of high-value contacts that both teams are aligned on.

Here’s where it gets interesting: sales reaches out to these contacts directly while marketing reinforces their efforts with highly targeted ads. 

This leads to a more coordinated approach, higher conversion rates, and deals that feel seamless from start to finish.

To influence deals at the top of the funnel, you can use contact-level ads to:

• Serve role-based messaging to decision-makers.
• Promote brand awareness among executive leadership.
• Track who engages and provide sales with real intent signals.

In the early stages of a new deal, marketing can support outbound sales by giving them instant feedback on who’s ready to talk within a target account.

Now that this collaboration is in progress, marketing is no longer sending leads over to sales and waiting for them to follow up. 

Both teams are focused on the same wishlist of people. Sales has the intent data they need to prioritize those leads,but as enterprise deals progress, things tend to get more complicated.

You have to go through procurement, legal—and deals can take months to close. Your success depends on how well you manage that, which requires heavy lifting from marketing and sales.

Here are some specific ways contact-level ads can help a deal that is already in progress:

• Re-engage stakeholders at key moments with personalized ads.
• Support sales teams by reinforcing value props with targeted messaging.
• Keep your brand top-of-mind without relying on email or calls alone.
• Bring awareness to other stakeholders who will be part of the buying group later on.

While enterprise deals may still feel like they’re moving at a glacial pace, contact-level advertising keeps the entire buying group engaged, right up to when the contract is signed.

Winning a deal is just the beginning. 

For enterprise companies, expansion and upsells are critical growth levers that often get overlooked in marketing campaigns. 

In one survey, a third of companies reported that upselling made up 20-30% of their company revenue.

Let’s say we have a new feature we want people to adopt. I can take the list of users and champions from our CRM—these would be the decision makers of an upsell or the main users of this new feature. 

Then, I can add these contacts to my Influ2 campaign, and the ads would only go to them. I don’t have to target the entire account, only the specific people within it for whom the ad is relevant.

Here’s how it works:

• Want customers to adopt a new feature? Target end users.
• Need to get buy-in for an upsell? Show ads to key decision-makers only.
• Looking to drive renewals? Reinforce value with well-timed messaging.

Contact-level ads fit seamlessly with other expansion strategies, allowing marketing to collaborate with sales and customer success to grow accounts and boost retention.

Enterprise sales cycles are long, complex, and full of roadblocks. 

With contact-level advertising, marketing and sales can finally work together to shorten sales cycles, reduce wasted effort, and improve contact rates with real decision-makers.

Here’s what you can expect from using contact-level advertising within your enterprise marketing strategy:

• Accelerated sales cycles: Engage the right contacts early and consistently, so decision-makers are already primed for sales conversations.
• Reduced cold outreach: Warm up prospects with ads, and your sales team can start with engaged, informed contacts instead of cold leads.
• Improved reporting & attribution: Gain clear visibility into how marketing influences deal progression with contact-level insights. 

Ready to see the impact of contact-level advertising on your enterprise deals? Book a demo with our team today.