The Contact-Level ABM Framework: Drive Revenue with Precision Targeting

At Influ2, we’ve been running a successful contact-level ABM program for over seven years. In that time, we’ve tested every possible ad type and worked with a wide range of content, including podcasts, webinars, playbooks, whitepapers, reports, and case studies. We've experimented with channels, refined our ICP multiple times, and continuously reshaped how we measure ABM success.

Our current program is an advertising-driven account-based marketing framework that covers every stage of the buyer’s journey. And today, we’re revealing it all — ad examples, landing page ideas, and the data triggers needed to automate it.

This ABM framework walks you through every step of building a program from scratch, so feel free to apply any part of it to your own campaigns.

A successful ABM framework relies on core components that align sales and marketing teams while securing buy-in from customer success. It starts with ensuring all teams work toward the same goals by focusing on the same well-defined target audience.

The foundation of any ABM program is ensuring marketing and sales teams are aligned in targeting the same high-value accounts – and the right contacts within those accounts. A common challenge arises when these teams pursue different individuals within the same accounts, unintentionally working against each other rather than reinforcing the sales process.

To avoid this, it’s crucial for sales and marketing teams to collaborate early on, defining the target audience together and ensuring account-based marketing and outreach efforts directly support revenue growth.

Collaborate on the ICP

The first step is defining an ICP based on historical data and shared insights across teams. This process should include an analysis of past closed-won deals as well as lifetime value metrics.

For example, if your company develops sales automation software, your ICP might be based on historical data showing that your most loyal long-term customers are North American tech companies with 500+ employees, a strong outbound motion, and existing Salesforce or HubSpot implementations.

Make a list of target accounts

Once the ICP is set, compile a list of key accounts that fit your criteria. To prioritize the most promising opportunities, consider using additional intent signals, such as:

• New senior management: When a company hires a new executive, they’re often open to revisiting processes and investing in new solutions.
• Recent funding: Companies that secure funding usually allocate budgets for new technology and process improvements.
• Hiring new people: Job postings in relevant fields can indicate a company’s shifting priorities and readiness to invest in your solution.
• Champion moves to a new company: If a previous advocate at a customer account joins a company that fits your ICP, they can become a valuable internal champion.

Map out key contacts within target accounts

Defining the ICP together also helps sales and marketing teams engage the right decision-makers within target accounts. The goal is not just to pursue an account but also to engage the right contacts within it.

Conducting internal research on seniority levels and job titles can help identify key influencers – those who are not only likely to convert but who will also stay with the company long enough to drive long-term success. This insight improves targeting precision and increases the chances of securing lasting deals.

To engage stakeholders at different stages of the buying journey, account based marketing campaigns require a variety of content types. At Influ2, we’ve tested many formats over the years, and the following have been the most effective:

• Value propositions: These focus on showcasing the unique benefits of your solution and how it addresses specific pain points. They clearly communicate why your product or service is the ideal choice for a target account. Formats for this content include landing pages, blog posts, videos, and other short-form pieces that directly target pain points.
• Trust content: Thought leadership materials – such as case studies, playbooks, webinars, podcasts, articles, whitepapers – position your company as a credible source of information in the industry. This type of content builds trust and lays the foundation for more personalized outreach. Two types of trust content are especially important at every stage of the buyer’s journey – case studies and playbooks. The former demonstrates how your solution has delivered measurable results for similar companies, while the latter provides step-by-step strategies to help prospects implement your solutions.
• High-impact content: Using ads that feature your SDRs' faces can create a strong, personalized impression, influencing key buying decisions in a more human-centered way.
• Ad hoc content: This type of content is used for timely promotions, such as event invitations, seasonal campaigns, or announcements about new feature releases.

The two key channels that form the foundation of this ABM framework are:

• Advertising: This plays a critical role throughout the entire sales cycle—from pipeline generation to customer expansion. Advertising not only drives engagement but also provides valuable intent signals. Engagement signals like clicks and impressions help gauge prospect interest and inform email outreach.
• Email: Managed by SDR and AE teams, email is an essential component for converting engagement into conversations. By using ad engagement data, sales teams can identify when prospects are most interested and strategically time their outreach. For example, if a prospect clicks on an ad, an immediate follow-up email can capitalize on their interest while it’s still fresh. The messaging from the ad also creates a natural touchpoint for personalized email outreach.

Your account-based marketing strategy can expand to include additional channels that support a multichannel, multi-threading approach. Social media, cold calls, and direct mail — especially physical gifts — are powerful tools for capturing attention and building personal relationships with top-tier accounts.

Building an effective ABM strategy requires the right tech stack to manage advertising, align marketing and sales efforts, and automate personalized outreach. Below is a breakdown of the core tools we use for our ABM program.

Advertising tools

We use Influ2 for contact-level advertising. It enables us to reach prospects across various ad channels, including Google, Bing, social media, and display networks. 

Unlike account-based advertising, which aims to engage the entire account, contact-level targeting delivers precise messaging directly to decision-makers. Additionally, custom ad journeys in Influ2 allow each buyer to move at their own pace, rather than forcing an entire account through a predefined path that may not be relevant to all stakeholders.

Sales enablement tools

Integration between Influ2 and CRM systems, such as Salesforce, helps bridge the gap between marketing and sales. Audience data is sourced directly from the CRM, allowing marketing teams to segment prospects based on factors like account ownership, outreach timing, job titles, industries, and locations.

CRM data also plays a key role in personalizing ad journeys. Triggers like changes in account status, pipeline stage progression, or booked demos ensure that each prospect sees ads relevant to their level of engagement. Once a prospect interacts with an ad, their engagement data is pushed back into the CRM, providing sales teams with valuable intent signals to optimize outreach timing and messaging.

Sales communication tools

Sales engagement platforms, such as Outreach, help automate and streamline email outreach. These tools integrate with email systems, offering advanced templates, tracking, and analytics features that enable SDRs to personalize communications at scale.

Direct mail tools

Direct mail is an effective way to gain the attention of busy, high-value buyers. It adds an additional level of personalization and relevance, providing the sales team with a solid pretext for follow-up communication. Options like dimensional mailers or boxed items that require a signature upon delivery can create a memorable experience for recipients. Platforms such as Sendoso or &Open ensure smooth and timely delivery.

There are some tried-and-true metrics that have helped generations of ABM specialists measure their program (and they remain relevant and important). However, what’s even more important is to get a bigger picture by doing deeper analysis of marketing influence.

Traditional performance metrics include:

• Coverage: The percentage of targeted accounts we successfully reach.
• Engagement metrics: Impressions, clicks, unique visits, visit duration.
• Activity metrics: Spend, outreach touches, sales-accepted leads, opportunities.
• Pipeline and revenue metrics: Pipeline growth, deal velocity, average deal size, win rates, retention rates, lifetime value (LTV).

Beyond these standard ABM metrics, a more nuanced approach focuses on marketing influence. Influ2 tracks individual ad interactions, allowing direct attribution of impressions and clicks to pipeline progression and revenue. Instead of analyzing the specific source of a conversion, this method evaluates how marketing efforts shape the entire buyer’s journey.

So these are just a few insights on what you’ll need to prepare to implement this account-based marketing framework. Now, let’s dive into the framework itself.

While personalizing content for different personas is important, it’s equally crucial to provide a relevant experience based on the prospect's journey stage and level of engagement.

You can divide your ABM program into three distinct journey stages: pipeline generation, pipeline progression, and post-sale expansion. Each stage can be enhanced by ad hoc initiatives like event promotion or seasonal campaigns. This ensures that you support the entire sales cycle, helping sales close more deals and promote post-sale expansion to maximize revenue.

The pipeline generation stage is further broken down into distinct steps, including prospects warm-up prior to outreach, SDR outreach, and additional supporting campaigns for account executives.

The SDR engagement cycle lasts for three months, during which prospects are actively targeted with customized content and outreach. If they don’t convert within this period, they transition into a three-month nurture phase. This stage maintains engagement through thought leadership and trust-building content but at a significantly lower intensity.

• Trust content + Value propositions. At the beginning of the pipeline generation stage, you can launch a broad range of creatives, such as value propositions and trust content. The goal is to identify the pain points and build trust with those who are unfamiliar with your product.

• High impact ads. Trust and value proposition creatives can be reinforced with personalized high impact ads featuring sales reps. These ads show the SDRs' faces and include a friendly, tailored message directed at prospects the SDRs are talking to. This strategy helps build a direct connection, so prospects are already familiar with their assigned SDR even before they receive an email from.

• Value propositions based on technographics. A separate set of creatives are those targeting our competitors’ users based on their technographics. The creatives for this cohort of prospects show how your product solves prospects’ pain points that your competitors don’t, focusing on the value. This is also a pre-set automated campaign where targets are added to a campaign based on data pulled from the CRM.

Data from CSMs, like job changes and past engagement, can help you reconnect with past champions — those who loved your product but have since moved on to new roles. These campaigns can run alongside your main pipeline generation efforts.

Whenever a former fan of your solution starts at a new company, they’re automatically added to a designated cohort within your ABM program. You can also get a notification when they leave their previous company and land a new role. That’s your cue to research their new position and account: if both qualify, you can engage them directly. If only the account qualifies, consider a referral program to leverage their existing connection with your brand.

At the same time, don’t forget to engage other key decision-makers at their new company with persona-based content and broader, account-wide creatives. This way, you’re maximizing your reach while keeping past champions in the loop!

• High impact ads ("Putting a face to the name"). As buyers' awareness grows, the ads become increasingly personalized. This includes advanced high impact ads that help strengthen the connection between SDRs and their prospects. We refer to this group of creatives as "Putting a face to the name," as they not only become more personalized but also align closely with the messaging SDRs use in their emails. To trigger this campaign, you might use criteria like “contact status equals reaching out” or “sales outreach is active.”

If a prospect responds to an SDR's email and converts to pipeline, that’s ideal. They can then move on to the next stage of the ad journey, where they'll see more ads featuring their account executive and other tailored materials (we’ll talk about those later in the “Pipeline progression” section).

However, if they continue to ignore the outreach, they are shifted to the “last push” phase. This transition is triggered when “time without response equals 15 days.”

• High impact ads ("Last push"). At this stage, the ads still focus on maintaining the 1:1 connection and feature the SDRs' faces, but the messaging becomes more urgent, aiming to reignite interest. A friendly prompt like, "Hi, am I getting lost in your inbox?" often works well, nudging prospects to reconsider if they've missed something important (which, of course, they have).

CRM data from account executives is crucial for running time-sensitive campaigns. These efforts target specific individuals who previously interacted with your team but where the opportunity either fell through or needs a more personalized push.

• High impacts (Closed-Lost due to budget restrictions). At the end of the fiscal year, you can run a campaign targeting prospects lost due to budget constraints. These campaigns aim to keep your solution top of mind as companies plan their budgets for the upcoming year.

• High impacts (Closed-Lost due to a functionality gap). Similarly, if a deal falls through due to a functionality gap, you can retarget those prospects once that feature is added to your platform. For instance, we ran an ad announcing our new revenue-centric version, Influ2 V2, to prospects who had expressed interest but needed a more advanced solution than our V1 offered.

Not every account will be ready to buy right away — and that’s okay. The key is to stay top of mind so that when they are in-market, your solution is the first they consider. Consistent ad exposure helps keep your brand on their radar.

If an account doesn’t convert within an initial pipeline generation cycle (typically around three months), it should transition into a nurture phase lasting several months. During this stage, focus on maintaining engagement in a non-intrusive way — through brand awareness messaging, educational content, and case studies that build trust.

After the nurture cycle, any accounts that still haven’t converted should re-enter top-of-funnel engagement efforts, ensuring they remain aware of your solution until the timing is right.

Once a prospect enters the pipeline, the next step is guiding them toward a successful sales conversation. A contact-level ABM program is essential not only for generating pipeline but also for nurturing prospects through to meaningful sales engagements.

At this stage, ads should become more personalized, introducing them to the sales reps they’ll be meeting. This approach helps build familiarity and increases meeting attendance.

Show-up campaign

• High impact ads. To reinforce engagement, consider running a “Meeting Show-Up” campaign targeting prospects who have booked a demo. Triggers for this type of campaign could include actions like “meeting scheduled.” These ads act as gentle reminders while also strengthening the connection between the prospect and the sales team.

• Trust content. At the same time, prospects should continue seeing value-driven content relevant to their stage in the journey. This could include case studies, testimonials, and reviews from companies in similar industries, as well as playbooks outlining step-by-step ways to achieve the best results with your product.

If a prospect doesn’t show up for a call, they transition to a different set of ads designed to remind them why they booked the call in the first place. One way to do this is by reintroducing the product's value in a concise format, such as a 1-minute product demo video. The trigger for this would be “meeting no-show” from your CRM.

• High impact ("New features"). Implementing a post-sales account based marketing program can further optimize product usage. Contact-level ads can be used to promote new features to existing customers, helping them get the most out of your product. Meanwhile, sales and customer success can use ad engagement signals to prioritize customers most interested in your offerings.

• High impact ("Let's do more"). You can also run adoption campaigns for customers if you see that they’re not using the product to its full potential. These ads feature a dedicated CSM, inviting clients to explore ways to optimize their usage and achieve more with your product.

• Trust content. To strengthen your adoption program, run trust content alongside high-impact ads. Case studies from similar companies are particularly effective in re-engaging customers, demonstrating the value of your product through tangible, real-life results. Adding the designated CSM's face to the creative adds a personalized touch, enhancing the connection with the customer.

Another key element of this ABM framework is running ad hoc campaigns tailored to holidays and events. One of the most common use cases for these campaigns is engaging pre-qualified attendees with targeted ads before and after events.

• Pre-event promo (Booth). Before attending or participating in an event, you can run a pre-event promo to introduce your team to pre-qualified participants and invite them to connect. Ad creatives can highlight fun incentives at your booth, offering an extra reason for people to stop by and meet your team.

• Pre-event promo (Speaking session). If someone from your team is speaking at the event, be sure to promote it. The ads should include details like the time, location, speaker, and topic they'll be discussing.

• Post-event promo. After the event, you can segment the audience based on interactions during the event. All attendees can receive an ad with a recording of the speaking session, while those who connected with you at the booth can get a personalized ad inviting them to continue the conversation. For those you didn’t meet, a more general follow-up ad can be shown.

We hope these examples spark your creativity and inspire new ideas. Keep in mind that you should adjust this ABM framework to suit your specific goals and challenges.

As you implement these practices, feel free to revisit this guide anytime for reference. You can also download the full ABM framework overview as a PDF using the "Download" button above.