LinkedIn Account Based Marketing: The Ultimate Guide (2024)

Why do companies do not meet their sales goals?

Well…

If you ask Sales, they’ll say:

“Marketing sends us bad leads!

If you ask Marketers, they’ll say:

Sales can’t close the wonderful leads we send them!”

This is the eternal Marketing – Sales Alignment problem…

marketing sales alignment with linkedin abm

But…

What if I told you that LinkedIn Account Based Marketing (ABM) can put an end to this?

That Marketing and Sales can be perfectly aligned?

This what you are going to learn in this complete LinkedIn ABM tutorial.

I will show how to build a system where your Sales will never complain about leads quality again.

Let’s dive in.

What is LinkedIn Account Based Marketing?

LinkedIn Account-Based-Marketing (ABM) is a sales-oriented marketing approach. Marketing teams doing ABM focus on the quality of leads, not the quantity. They work hand in hand with Sales teams to convert targeted lists of accounts into customers.

LinkedIn ABM flips the classic inbound marketing funnel.

linkedin account based marketing funnel

In the classic marketing approach, you tell your marketing team:

“Go get some leads!”

Then, they adopt a classic inbound strategy where they generate Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) for Sales.

  1. Generate traffic (content/ads/events)
  2. Capture contact details or get demo books (with forms)
  3. Pass the MQL to the Sales for a qualification call
  4. The Sales decides if the MQL is a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
  5. If lead is SQL, the Sales can close him.

What usually happens here is that Sales receives tons of unqualified leads from Marketing.

You can notice that having 2 definitions for qualified leads (MQL vs SQL) is already a sign that Marketing and Sales are not aligned on what is a qualified leads.

inbound linkedin marketing funnel


Marketing is generally judged by the CEO on the number of MQL they generate.

So they focus on quantity, not quality.

With Account Based Marketing, the funnel is different.

You tell your Marketing Team:

“Go get these leads!”

The goal is to really reduce the time your Sales spend on calls with unqualified leads.

ABM focus on quality:

  1. Marketing & Sales map together the accounts they want to close
  2. Sales and Marketing coordinates their efforts to get meetings
  3. Sales are only getting meetings with qualified leads

ABM is basically a system built to guarantee that MQL = SQL.

linkedin account based marketing funnel

Sounds too good to be true?

Actually, it’s not.

You just saw how great this system seems to be.

I will now show you exactly how to execute Account Based Marketing with LinkedIn.

Keep reading.

LinkedIn Account Based Marketing: How to Get Started?

LinkedIn Account Based Marketing need some setup if you want to get started with it.

You need 2 things: get all co-workers onboard and LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

1. You Need Everyone Onboard

First thing, you need to understand about account based marketing with LinkedIn:

It’s not another fancy technique you are going to test during 2 weeks and give up.

You need your whole Sales & Marketing Team + Executives to be agree to put effort in this strategy.

how to organize linkedin account based marketing

Without these 3 parts engaged, it will be really difficult to implement LinkedIn ABM in your company.

That’s why I’m taking the time to explain everything in details.

If you are reading this, you will, for sure, be the person that need to convince your co-workers to get onboard.

You will also need to open the wallet.

2. Get a LinkedIn Sales Navigator License

The LinkedIn outreach and LinkedIn ads techniques I am going to show you absolutely require a LinkedIn Sales Navigator subscription.

linkedin account based marketing with sales navigator

This tool will be essential to be:

  • Search for Accounts
  • Build your Accounts Lists
  • Find Decision-Makers
  • Build Super Targeted LinkedIn Ads

This tool will allow you to get access to the full power of LinkedIn Database.

Plus, LinkedIn has made some efforts in the last years to specifically adapt it to ABM.

If you want to know more on Sales Navigator features, I’ve made a complete tutorial on how to use them.

Now that you are all set, let’s dive into the details of LinkedIn ABM Strategies.

The first step?

Find the accounts you want to close.

Let’s dive right in.

LinkedIn ABM Targeting: Find Accounts and Decision Makers

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a killer tool for ABM targeting.

Still, you need to know a little bit a theory first and put some thought into your strategy before getting your hands on it.

Your next move?

Map the account you want to target and divide them into tiers.

(Wait, what the heck are tiers?)

More on that in this part!

1. Define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Really Important: here customer means company, not a person.

Before you are getting your hands on LinkedIn’s super rich database, think about the account that would be perfect clients for your product or service.

icp account based marketing

If you lack inspiration, why don’t you just look at your existing clients?

They are the perfect data sample you need if you are willing to scale.

In order to build your ICP, you can take many signals into account.

You have static signals:

  • Activity
  • Geography
  • Industry
  • Size
  • Growth rate
  • Size of a specific department (IT or Sales for examples)
  • Use of specific technologies

And dynamic signals:

  • Fundraising
  • Launch of new product
  • Opening of a new country
  • Etc…

You are obviously going to have a wide variety of accounts here.

Every account won’t have the same importance.

Some accounts will be given a higher priority.

Plus, some accounts will need to be approached differently than others.

But don’t worry…

The ABM Tiers System is here to help you handle this challenge

Let’s see how it works.

2. Prioritize Accounts With The ABM Tiers System

When you’re doing Account Based Marketing with LinkedIn or any other tool, accounts are usually split into 3 tiers.

linkedin account based marketing tiers system

This tiers define the importance of the account for your company and more importantly which strategy you’re going to apply to close them.

More on that in part 5 😉

For now, let’s see how accounts are usually split.

Tiers I: Must Have

Definition: These are top accounts that your business absolutely need to close to be successful. They are usually big enterprises, big logos that would look wonderful on your website.

tiers 1 account based marketing

Approach: You don’t have a second chance to make a good impression with these guys. That’s why your best Sales and Top Executives will be in charge to do manual outreach and create relationships with their decision-makers.

Tiers II: Should Have

Definition: These guys are you core clients, it’s usually easy to close them, they are the base of your revenue and you know you can scale by closing more of them.

tiers 2 account based marketing

Approach: You have a good experience closing these guys. You can let your SDRs contact them in a personalized way, along with marketing efforts to get meetings.

Tiers III: Nice To Have

Definition: These guys are low hanging fruits. You will not become a billion dollar company with them, but they bring additional revenue you don’t refuse. They are really easy to close.

tiers 3 account based marketing

Approach: You can adopt a mass prospecting strategy. You don’t want to bother spending too much time personalizing emails.

You have a clear idea of what your tiers should look like?

Let me tell you…

You’re halfway there!

Now let’s see how to find accounts and build your tiers into Sales Navigator.

3. Build Your Accounts Lists with LinkedIn Sales Navigator

The first step to start doing Account Based Marketing on LinkedIn is to find companies on LinkedIn Sales Navigator using the Account Search.

The LinkedIn Account Search will allow you to explore the LinkedIn database with many filters like:

  • Headcount
  • Geography
  • Industry
  • Growth
  • Keyword
  • Hiring
  • Funding Events
  • And More…

Using the Sales Navigator search filters, you can build a qualified account list in just 2 minutes.

linkedin sales navigator account based marketing targeting

Once your search results look relevant to you, you can add these account into an Account List.

To do that:

  1. Tick the checkboxes
  2. Click on “Save to List”
  3. Click on +

how to create an account on linkedin sales navigator


Then give a name to your list.

Once you account list is created, you can find it in the Account List tab.

There you can see:

  • Account Details
  • Account Maps
  • Dynamic Filters (Funding, Recent Management changes)

You can also add notes to accounts.

account list interface sales navigator

You can repeat this process for Tiers 2 and Tiers 3 to finally get 3 accounts lists.

build abm tiers on linkedin sales navigator

Perfect.

You know how to create account list.

Now, let’s see how to find the right decision-makers inside these company.

4. Find Decision-Makers with The Lead Search

Here is the process:

  1. Go to Lead search
  2. Open the Account List Filter
  3. Look for your Account List

You will see in the options all the account lists you already created.

account list filter sales navigator

Then do the following:

  1. Select your Account List
  2. Use the job title filter to find your buyer personae

All these people that are working in the companies in your account list and whose job title contains the keywords you entered will appear.

find decision makers into accounts with linkedin sales navigator

You can use LinkedIn Sales Navigator Boolean search in this field to get really curated search results.

(Advanced Technique: check the link to learn more about it)

With this technique, you can easily get all the CEO’s, founders, VP, Heads Of whatever department you need, in just one click.

Now, you can do the exact same process for Tiers 2 and Tiers 3 but….

Be careful!

Your buyer personae and the job title might change depending on the company.

job title targeting linkedin abm

For example, with cybersecurity, companies don’t hire someone especially for this before they reached a critical size.

In startups, it might be the CTO who handles cyber security among other things.

So for Tiers 2 or Tiers 3, you might want to search for “CTO” instead of “cybersecurity“.

Ok so,

You have your account.

You have your decision-makers.

Now it’s time to get contact details!

It’s super easy.

Let me show you this in the next part.

5. Export LinkedIn Search into a CSV and Find Emails

Once you get your decision-makers you have two options:

  • Save them into a lead list
  • Extract them into a CSV with Evaboot

Even if you save them into a list to recheck them later, you can also extract this lead list as a CSV with the tool.

export leads from linkedin sales navigator

All the process is detailed in this video.

Evaboot will do 2 things:

  • cleans the data (emojis, capital letters, etc…)
  • filters the unqualified leads out of your search results.

If you’ve already use Sales Navigator, you know 20% of your search results don’t really match your filter (wrong title, wrong industry, wrong company size, etc…).

filter leads from linkedin sales navigator


Evaboot detects them for you so you don’t have to spend 3 hours opening every profile to double check them.

At the end of the process you will get a clean CSV like this one:

linkedin sales navigator search export csv


After your list or search is extract, you add the emails in your file by clicking here:

how to get emails from linkedin sales navigator

Evaboot will find and verify the emails of your prospects in a just a few minutes.

Your file is cleaned, filled with emails, ready for outreach!

But you didn’t see the best part yet…

You can automate this process to find new lead on autopilot with Sales Navigator.

Let me show you.

Automate LinkedIn ABM Targeting with Saved Searches

Everyday, new companies create their company pages on LinkedIn.

You don’t want to miss them.

You need to add them in your Tiered Account Lists as soon as they appear

But how to do that?

Well…

You can use Saved Searches!

1. Save your Account Searches

Saved Searches will allow you to detect if new companies of leads match your search filters.

Here is the process:

Start by saving your account search:

automate linkedin account based marketing

Then give a name to your saved search.

Once you search is saved, LinkedIn will automatically detect if new companies match your search filters everyday.

They will send you a weekly update with the new results they found.

linkedin abm automation

That’s a great way to put your ABM lead generation on autopilot.

You don’t even have do the research work twice.

New qualified accounts will come to you every week.

If you click on the green number, you are going to see all the new account that match your search filters.

new accounts linkedin sales navigator

Congratulations!

You have just generated new opportunities without moving a finger.

That’s one of the many superpowers you will learn into this tutorial.

Keep Reading.

2. Add New Decision-Makers to your Campaigns

You now need to repeat the process we describe just above:

Create a new account list and then go to the lead search to find the new decision-makers to contact.

find decision makers with linkedin sales navigator

You can now repeat this process to feed your Sales pipeline with new opportunities every week.

Ok we covered a lot…

But there is so much more to see!

Now that you become a master of LinkedIn ABM targeting.

Let’s make you the king of ABM outreach.

ABM Tiers I Outreach: The 1 to 1 Relationship

As mentioned in the last part, your outreach strategy will change depending on the the Account Tier.

Let’s start with the big fishes: Tiers I

tiers 1 linkedin account based marketing outreach strategy

In this tiers, you are targeting busy top executives and you don’t have several chances to make a good first impression.

No automation involved here, you want to have your most experienced Sales or your CEO to do manual outreach.

Ready to get started?

Here’s how to proceed…

1. Build Account Maps with Company Pages

LinkedIn will automatically generate accounts maps for every account but you are free to modify them by drag & dropping people inside it.

First time you visit the page, LinkedIn will recommend a default account map that you can modify.

linkedin account map

Once again, the tiers system is used here, but this time for people.

(Tiers into Tiers? Come on…)

That’s actually a good way yo get a clear view of who you can target into the account when you do manual outreach.

Basically, here’s how it works:

  • Tiers 1: decision-makers
  • Tiers 2: influencers
  • Tiers 3: operational

Having this tiers available, you can go for several strategies:

Direct Outreach: you send messages directly to the top executives but you get low chances they reply.

The Bottom Up Technique (my favorite): You started by interacting with Tiers 2 and Tiers 3 people to identify the best Tiers 1 decision-makers to contact. Then you use these interactions as a leverage to get a reply.

bottom up outreach linkedin abm strategy

If you want to know more about this technique, I detailed it into the Advanced ABM Strategy Chapter.

2. Get Account Insights

In the second section of companies, you will get useful information about the company growth:

  • Number of employees
  • Growth rates (last semester, last year, last 2 years)
  • Insight about where the employees are moving

company growth insight linkedin page

You can use these information to see if the company is growing and potentially build a sales pitch around that.

growth rate by department linkedin company page

If your product or services aims for a specific department, you can access growth rate by department with the “Distribution & Headcount” tab.

new hires linkedin account page

In the new hires tab, you can access the number of hires per month divided by regular hires and senior management hires.

job-openings-linkedin-company-page

To have more information on department growth, you can also access the job openings by department to detect if a company is willing to grow a specific department in the next month.

3. Use Alerts for Event-Based Outreach

With the alerts section, you can get many information about your targeted account:

  • Mentions of the company in the news
  • Alerts on Growth
  • New Decision-Makers
  • Job change
linkedin sales navigator alerts for account based marketing

You can use this information in your LinkedIn prospecting messages to create personalized and event-based messages.

In this section, you are going to learn how to target decision-makers into a list of targeted accounts.

To wrap this up:

For Tiers 1 outreach, you need:

  • Send the right message
  • To the right person
  • At the right time
  • You don’t have a second to make a good first impression

That’s why we go with manual outreach here

For Tiers 2, it’s a little bit different…

Let me show you.

ABM Tiers 2 Outreach : The Semi Automated Approach

With Tiers 2, you want to help your SDR maximize their efficiency by using outreach automation.

Your messages need to be personalized so you need to write personalized icebreakers and integrate them into the automated outreach.

linkedin abm outreach strategy tiers 2

You can use any LinkedIn prospecting tool you want.

In this tutorial, I’m going to use LaGrowthMachine as I personally use and find it really efficient.

1. How to Automate your ABM Outreach Campaigns

Outreach tools will allow you to automate your emails and LinkedIn messages sending.

The organization of Tiers 2 outreach will depend on the skills of your SDR.

If your SDR are good at copywriting, enrichment, and automation, they can take care of the full process themselves.

fullstack abm process

If you prefer to have an expert dedicated to the technical part of prospecting, you can hire an Outbound Manager/B2B Growth Marketer.

Your process will look like this:

sdr and outbound manager process for abm

In this one, SDR focuses on the human side (handwritten replies, cold calls) of prospecting whereas Outbound Manager focus on the programmatic side.

You have picked a system?

Good.

I won’t make a full detailed tutorial on how to automate your LinkedIn prospecting efforts here as I have already done it in this article.

(You have the link above)

Let’s see how to set up your LinkedIn automations:

Start by uploading your lead list in your outreach tool

If you use LGM, you can take them CSV you get with Evaboot and upload it here:

upload lead list on lagrowthmachine

Then you will have to match the column.

match column

Create an audience.

create an audience on lagrowthmachine

Create a campaign.

create a campaign on lagrowthmachine

Select a template

select a template on lagrowthmachine

The message editor will allow you to write your text and to add personalized variables based on the data you have uploaded in Step 1:

  • Name
  • First Name
  • Company Name
  • Industry

You can be creative and use any variable to personalized your messages.

design your cold outreach sequence

Here is an example.

In this message, I used the name of the first extraction that users launch on Evaboot to add it on my message.

By mentioning the name of the extraction, I signal to the user that I really care about their experience.

add custom variable in your outbound messages

You can have amazing results by adding personalization to your messages.

Here are the reply rate I have with the message above.

lgm screenshot

That’s for the technical part

But the most important?

Writing messages that get replies (at scale)

Let’s see how to do this…

2. Personalize your Messages at Scale

Copywriting for LinkedIn cold outreach is a real skill that you develop with experience.

I’ve personally come up with this technique that I really like to use to structure my messages.

rabt formula for outreach

I call it the RABT Formula:

  • Reason For Outreach
  • Ask your Question
  • Backup with Data
  • Tease your Solution

In an email it gives this template:

RABT Cold Outreach Template

Hey {first_name}

{Reason for outreach: simply explain why you reach out and why you thinks it’s relevant to have a conversation}

{Question: ask a question to qualify your prospect, ask him if he has the problem your company is solving}

{Backup with data: explain why you think it’s relevant to ask this question given the data you gathered: testimonials, case studies, researches}

{Tease your Solution: say you can solve the problem in a way but don’t go into too much details, if your prospect is interested he will ask}

Best,

JB

Here is an example of a message that get 28% reply rate.

example rabt formula outreach

The thing here is that Question, Backup, and Teasing can totally be static.

But you want your Reason for Outreach (RFO) to be dynamic and change depending on who your contact.

So here is the job your SDRs must do.

For every decision-makers in your Tiers 2 file, add an “Reason for Outreach” columns:

icebreakers for linkedin account based marketing

Then visit the LinkedIn profiles and websites of these people to find some information you could use as RFO

It could be something like:

“I was scrolling on LinkedIn and came across your latest post about how difficult it is to really align Sales and Marketing Teams.”

So the whole email will look like this:

RABT Example (Tiers 2)

Hey John,

RFO: I’ve came across your latest LinkedIn post about how difficult it is to really align Sales and Marketing Teams

Question: Have you already try to implement Account Based Marketing in your company?

Backup with data: We implemented this system for one our of client last year (similar to your business).

They grew their closing rate by 20%: {link to the case study}.

Tease your Solution: If you are looking to maximize the efficiency of your sales & marketing team, this is definitely the way to go.

Our Agency is specialized in implementing ABM. So if this system has picked your curiosity: feel free to reach out to me.

Best,

JB

In this message, you could totally replace the RFO with:

“I noticed your company is currently recruiting 3 marketers and 2 salespeople. I was wondering how you plan to organize your lead pipeline with this growing team.”

Or:

“I visited your LinkedIn company page and noticed that your Marketing Department doubled in size this year. I was wondering if this rapid growth comes with new scaling challenges.”

If you add these ROF in the message without changing the rest, the message still works.

That’s precisely what we are going to automate with LaGrowthMachine.

Like you saw before you can insert custom variables with this tool.

So, when you import your file. Add your ROF in {{Custom Att1}} variable.

upload file to outreach tool

Add {{Custom Attribute1}} at the beginning of your message.

insert your icebreakers into your messages

This way, you can send tons of ultra-personalized messages on autopilot.

Every lead will receive the message with the personalized ROF you designed for them.

Now,

We got a last strategy to cover:

The tiers 3 outreach.

ABM Tiers 3 Outreach: Fully Automated Approach

You don’t want to spend too much time on these accounts. They’re “nice to have”.

The Fully Automated Approach works exactly like the Semi Automated Approach, except you don’t write personalized ROFs for everybody. You only write one ROF for everyone.

linkedin abm tiers 3 outreach strategy

If your Sales Team have still some bandwidth even after handling Tiers 1 and Tiers 2, you can use this technique to get even more meetings with smaller businesses.

Here is an example of a campaign I’ve run on Sales Navigator users.

linkedin abm message template

The Reason for Outreach is pretty generic and works well for this target. I don’t need to personalize every ROF to get replies.

If you want to add some personalization in your email, you can use the data you have extracted from LinkedIn like:

  • Industry
  • Size
  • Company

You can include these variables into your emails to show your prospects that you have made some research on him.

RABT Example (Tiers 3)

Hey John,

I’m reaching out because my agency recently start working with several companies like {{Company name}} in the {{Name of the Industry}}.

Question: Have you already try to implement Account Based Marketing in your company?

Backup with data: I asked this question because we implemented this system for one your competitor last: {Name of a competitor}}.

They grew their closing rate by 20%: {link to the case study}.

Tease your Solution: If you are looking to maximize the efficiency of your sales & marketing team, ABM is definitely the way to go.

Our Agency is specialized in implementing ABM. So if this system has picked your curiosity: feel free to reach out to me.

Best,

JB

These variables can obviously be added in the Tiers 2 messages as well if you want to combo handwritten RFO with custom variables.

Account Based Marketing & Inbound: Can They Work Together?

Yes.

Your SDRs and Sales have already too much work handling Tier 2e

You can decide to target Tier 3 with Inbound Marketing.

In this tactic, you can go back to the classic marketing funnel (but only for Tiers 3).

  1. Generate traffic with Contents or Ads
  2. Capture contact details or let people book a demo

Here’s a system to make your Account Based & Inbound marketing hand in hand.

combine linkedin account based marketing and inbound marketing

They have several missions:

  • Doing qualification calls helps avoid sales getting meetings with bad leads
  • Close Tiers 3 accounts
  • Call back qualified leads that leave their contact details
  • Detect Tier 1 and Tier 2 accounts among the inbound leads and pass them directly to the Sales or the Executives.

Inside Sales and SDR are really two different jobs, and you don’t want to have your SDR doing’ both.

  • SDR do Prospecting
  • Insides Sales do Qualification Calls

If your Inbound strategy works well, you will surely end up with Tiers 1 and Tiers 2 account booking demo directly from the website without being prospecting. Make sure to optimize the copy and the visuals on your landing pages for conversions to increase your demo bookings.

how to manage inbound leads with linkedin account based marketing

In this case, Inside Sales do the qualification calls and then:

  • Pass Tiers 1 leads to Top Executives
  • Pass Tiers 2 leads to Sales
  • Close Tiers 3 leads himself

You know how to organize your strategy to contact every tier!

But something is missing…

We talked a lot about Marketing role in LinkedIn ABM but did not see so much details yet.

Let’s see this in the next part!

LinkedIn Ads Hacks for Super Targeted ABM Campaigns

LinkedIn Ads are super efficient if you have the budget to use them.

Thanks to Evaboot, you can use LinkedIn Ads to run X-Ray target campaign to help SDR’s maximize the number of meetings they get.

1. Synchronize SDR and Marketing Campaings

The goal of LinkedIn Account Based Marketing is to make Sales and Marketing cooperate.

As a Marketer, you can use LinkedIn Ads for two things:

1. The Warmup Ads

The goal here is to run ads BEFORE the SDR’s start sending emails to maximize email replies and connection request acceptance rate on LinkedIn.

warmup linkedin ads account based marketing

If your leads has been in contact 3-4 times with your brand before you send them a message, they will much more likely to reply to your outreach campaigns because they will think:

“hmm… I’ve already heard that name before, let’s see what they have to say”

PRO TIP: You can even mention the ads you’ve shown your prospects in your first prospecting messages as an icebreaker.

2. The Cover Ads

You also want to run ads on leads WHILE SDR’s are sending messages to them. This way, you stay top of mind in their head.

A lead has opened your email but did not reply?

If he sees your ads, maybe it will make him send a response

The lead has replied to your email but is not convinced yet?

Being in contact with your brand everyday will increase the trust he gives to your brand.

cover linkedins ads abm targeting

Basically, you are playing with Mere-Exposure Effect.

The mere-exposure effect is a psychological phenomenon by which people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them

Plain and Simple.

The more contacts you have with your prospects, the more likely you are to close them

3. The Wake-Up Ads

You can use this type of Ads campaigns to stay top of mind among people that:

  • have not replied to SDR campaign
  • have replied that it was not a good timing

If they are still in contact with your brand after prospecting, they will get back to you more naturally.

wakeup linkedin abm targeting


You won’t need to be pushy and send them LinkedIn follow-ups too often to see if now is a better time to make another meeting.

2. LinkedIn Ads Account Based Targeting

In this part I will show you exactly how to build a linkedin abm campaign that target exactly your outbound audience.

This is really simple.

Let’s start:

Just create a new LinkedIn Campaign, select audience an list upload:

linkedin ads abm targeting

LinkedIn recommend uploading at least 1,000 companies (maximum 300,000 companies).

To match your list to companies, we require at least one of the following:

  • Company name,
  • Company website
  • Company email domain
  • LinkedIn page URL

Including additional fields such as industry, city, state, country, or zip increases the accuracy of the match.

For the most accurate match, include the LinkedIn Page URL for companies in the template.

linkedin ads upload template

This is most easiest way for LinkedIn to find the company in it’s database.

This operation is easy if you create on account list on LinkedIn and extract it with Evaboot because we will scrape all the necessary information.

Once you got your file, you can upload it here:

upload file linkedin abm targeting

Now you have your account list ready.

Let’s add the decision-makers.

To do that, click and Narrow to add other filter to this audience.

job title targeting linkedin ads

Select Job Experiences > Job Titles.

select job title abm targeting linkedin ads

Select the job titles you want to target.

Here, you’re telling LinkedIn that you want to displays ads to people that are working in your company list AND have currently one of the targeted job title.

job title suggestions linkedin ads

and BOOM!

The same persons that your SDR will contact by email will now see your Ads

You now have everything you need to run efficient ABM LinkedIn campaigns.

We could have stopped there honestly…

But I had still some secret to share with you.

Let’s see some advanced ABMS tactics.

Advanced LinkedIn Account Based Marketing Strategies

In this part, I am going to reveal pro tips that can get your LinkedIn account based marketing strategy to the next level.

Ready to get started?

Let’s dive in…

1. Create Account List Through CSV Upload

This strategy can help you save tons of time if you use other database than LinkedIn to find accounts

With a Sales Navigator Team account, you can create account list through CSV upload.

If you give LinkedIn some information about the company:

  • LinkedIn Account Page URL
  • Website
  • Company Name
  • Address

LinkedIn will be able to find these account into its database if the company has created a company page on LinkedIn.

Once your account list has been uploaded, you can look for the decision-makers using the ABM research method we saw in part 3.

2. The Bottom Up Outreach

This tactic is mostly used to contact Tiers 1 Accounts.

Remember the account map we saw in part 5?

We are going to make the most the most out of it…

Sometimes, you can hesitate to reach out directly to an Enterprise Top Executive.

bottom up outreach strategy

They are super busy and it’s a really fight to grab some time in their calendar.

That’s when The Bottom Up Technique comes to play.

You can start by contacting people lower in the hierarchy to help you:

  1. Identify the right Top Executives to contact
  2. Set up a meeting with them

When you are building your account map, you can contact Tiers II and Tiers III people to ask them who is the right decision-makers to contact to introduce your product or service.

how to use account map for linkedin account based marketing


This allows you to target the right decision-makers and get a super relevant icebreakers mentioning the name of the employee that sent you to them.

Here is an example of message you could send to Tiers II and Tiers III

Message to send to Tiers II & Tiers III

Hey <first_name>,

I’m trying to find the right contact at <account_name> to talk about your talent acquisition challenges.

Do you know who are they best to contact for this matter?

Best, JB

After getting a few replies to these messages, you can contact the Tiers I using a template like this:

Message to send to Tiers II & Tiers III

Hey <first_name>,

I asked <Tiers II name> who to contact to talk about talent acquisition challenges at <account_name> and she gave me your contact.

<insert pitch>

Best, JB

By creating the connection, you show to the Top Executive that you don’t come from nowhere: you have already one foot in the company.

3. The Fullstack Business Developer Squad

You can’t complain on lead quality if you generate them yourself.

So, why don’t your Sales take care of their own lead generation?

That’s the tactic used by Lemlist.

I find it pretty smart and simple.

fullstack business developer framework

Instead of having Growth Marketers, SDR & Sales, they simply make their Business Developers take care of full funnel.

  • ICP Definition
  • Scraping
  • Enrichment
  • Copywriting
  • Closing
  • Account Management

They even push them to develop their own personal brand by starting YouTube channels or publishing on LinkedIn.

sdr creating content


You can then divide your Fullstack Business Developer Squad between different geographic zones or industries so they don’t end up contacting the same account.

They build and maintain a Tiers system for themselves.

It’s easy to be lax on lead quality as a Marketer when don’t have to cope with the consequences of your actions.

fullstack business developer learning cycle

Here, if the Business Developers are not doing the targeting correctly, they will end up suffer from the consequence themselves by spending time on calls with the wrong people.

That’s make a major difference.

If you don’t hit your quotas, it’s basically your fault.

You can’t accuse marketing to send you bad leads as you generate them for yourself.

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