I finally switched from lead gen to account based marketing for our SaaS product

For the last 2 years I was all in on lead gen, running tons of webinars and gated content. But after a Q1 review last March, our CEO pointed out that 80% of our closed won deals came from just 15 accounts. That got me looking at ABM more seriously. I started targeting specific accounts at a few Fortune 500 companies with personalized content and direct outreach from our sales team. The difference was huge - we closed 3 deals worth about $120k total in the next 6 months, whereas lead gen was barely covering our ad spend. Now I'm wondering if anyone else here made the jump and what tools you use for tracking account engagement?

3 comments

3 Comments

morgan_ramirez2mo ago

My 12 person startup saw ABM slash our sales cycle from 90 days to 30 by focusing on IT directors at 5 companies.

nina_jenkins2mo ago

Wait, was that 5 total companies across the whole sales cycle? Like, you only reached out to IT directors at 5 different companies and closed them in 30 days? I'm trying to picture how that works with a 12 person team, because you'd have to know those 5 companies pretty well ahead of time. Like, did you already have warm intros to their IT directors, or was this cold outreach that just worked really fast?

umamartin29d ago

Right so you're telling me @morgan_ramirez with 12 people only needed 5 companies to hit their number in a month. Sounds a bit too neat doesn't it. Cold outreach to IT directors at 5 random companies and they all just happened to close in 30 days with no warm intros or prior relationships. Maybe if you're selling something everyone already wants for free, but in enterprise sales that timeline usually means you were already deep in the pipeline before the ABM experiment started. Otherwise you're basically saying your sales cycle was just the last month of an existing 90 day process.