The Marketing Operations Strategist - How to Run Account-Based Marketing Programs + My Take on a Compliance Question

Hi! I can’t believe it’s already August!

This week, we’re doing a deep dive into ABM, or account-based marketing — and no, I don’t just mean setting up 6sense or Demandbase…I mean coming up with the strategy and reporting. 😇 I’ve done so at both small and enterprise orgs, and I’ll try to save you some time by sharing my learnings.

Before we dive into the main content, please check out a quick word from our sponsors, who are kind enough to support the creation of this free-to-you MOPs content 💖:

FERMÀT had just closed its Series B and was scaling fast—new hires, a new office, and new go-to-market motions. But their internal systems weren’t keeping up. Chili Piper managed scheduling but couldn’t reliably segment leads. The tech stack lacked integration, the data was incomplete, and routing logic was inconsistent. 🫠 Read how FERMÀT replaced Chili Piper, cleaned up their enrichment data, and built a flexible GTM workflow that adapts to any inbound lead.

I’m not spending my mornings refreshing HubSpot dashboards anymore — my Zapier AI Agent does the daily check‑in for me. I’m starting to share some of my templates as I experiment! Check my automated Sales Pipeline Health Monitor agent here (in a template you can steal!).

Okay, now my guide on ABM! 👇

Tl;dr, the key takeaways I want you to focus on:

1. ABM is about accounts, but don’t forget about the contact level.
Even in 1:1 ABM, you’re still influencing specific people inside accounts. ABM ads, for example, can be great — but they can fall flat if they don’t speak to the specific persona, etc. Use both for the best chance at success.

2. CBM may work better in 1:Few and 1:Many motions, depending upon your targeting and audience.
It groups and targets personas with role-relevant messaging, triggered by intent signals such as website visits and content engagement. 1:1 personalization sounds great, but is really hard to pull off, even with AI (it isn’t quite good enough at drafting fully personalized messages IMO).

3. Tech will help you scale more quickly, but you don’t absolutely need it.
You can do all of the campaign types I mention manually, it’ll just be a bit slower. I recommend starting small and slow to test your hypotheses, and then scale (and consider purchasing tech if needed).

4. Executive targeting accelerates deals and increases ACV.
Using tools (or just doing research) like Boardroom Insiders to profile executives at large enterprise companies lets you create relevant messaging that earns buy-in faster.

5. Measurement must cover accounts and contacts.
Track both ABM-specific metrics (account coverage, stage progression, pipeline coverage) and CBM-specific metrics (contact engagement, buying committee penetration) to get the full picture.

6. Integration and workflow automation make ABM + CBM scalable.
Automating the flow from site identification → ad targeting → CRM sync ensures timely, relevant outreach without manual intervention. This is key to scaling your campaigns, once they’re proven out.

7. Reporting definitions matter.
Clear metric definitions and consistent calculation methods keep sales, marketing, and RevOps aligned on what’s actually working. Don’t just assume things are working, and compare your new tactics to the status-quo of previous campaigns to actually prove the results.

8. ABM maturity grows in stages.
You can’t jump straight to predictive, AI-driven orchestration. Start with ICP definition, tool integration, and small-scale campaigns, then layer on automation, optimization, and expansion.

9. Don’t forget to include Sales.
If you start a new campaign type and don’t have a pre-launch briefing or planning session with Sales, you are hurting your own chances at success. Make sure you explain the campaign content and persona to them, and help them craft follow-up playbooks to ensure alignment and success. Otherwise, Sales tends to leave these new leads behind, because they want to make their quota and are unclear on what to do with your new leads. The best ABM collaboration I’ve seen includes a campaign playbook channel for each campaign as well as an account channel for each tier 1 account.

By the way, the guide is a living doc for the community…please send any feedback you have!

Lately, I’m diving back into lead routing solutions, as Calendly is just not doing the trick anymore… 😅 Would love to hear any recommendations you have!

I’ve also been playing Alien: Isolation, which is a truly terrifying (yet so fun) game. 👽

New to marketing operations? On a team of one at your company? Shy/introverted? Wish you could ask a question to an experienced marketing operations professional, without them knowing who you are? Here’s your chance! Submit an anonymous question to me here and I’ll answer a new question in every issue.

Here’s my answer to a question from last week:

Thank you! 🥹

There’s a lot of pipeline desperation out there, and I get it — the economy has been strange for, what, years now? 🫠

BUT you are correct to be concerned. While the United State tends to lean more liberal when it comes to marketing consent, GDPR and CCPA can mean big fines — and a lot of orgs forget that if a person is a dual citizen of both the US and the UK, they can still file a violation as a UK resident. Any email with a marketing message technically requires consent. BTW, the “marketing message” piece is important because that means CS can’t send an email with a marketing message without consent either…this is often missed.

Your hunch about performance is also correct…where I see this behavior, I tend to also see terrible spam and bounce rates. There are a few reasons for this:

In a perfect world, you would only send sales emails to these folks, through a tool like Instantly (not your MAP). You could have sales send an email, sending those folks to a high value marketing asset (that pushes them to subscribe) — this is a bit of a gray area because technically the email contains a link to a marketing message, but it seems to slide under the legal radar because the marketing message isn’t in the email itself.*

*But, always go by what your legal person says at your company — I am not a lawyer or am I the decision-maker on liability there!

Either way, I like to keep these sales and marketing communications separate in both platform and subdomain, so Marketing can keep a better email sender reputation overall. That being said, sometimes companies are stingy, in which case you’ll have to see how far you can get with at least getting a subdomain and managing preferences separately within the same platform.

You could try to help educate your VP — you can use my guides here:

📤 The Complete Guide to Email Deliverability https://east-periodical-22f.notion.site/The-Complete-Guide-to-Email-Deliverability-1d646cd01a12803f8f0dd9a7a3067fc9?pvs=74

🤝✉️ Email Consent Compliance Guide https://east-periodical-22f.notion.site/Email-Consent-Compliance-Guide-1d846cd01a1280768113f8b36284f242?pvs=74

But you may only get so far, as it ultimately is up to them. What you could do, as a defensive mechanism:

So, to summarize — yes, you are correct. No, this is not best practice. However, depending upon your role at the company, you only may have so much sway — the best thing you can do is arm yourself with data to prove why this strategy is not working, and paint the picture for what might work better. See if you can get buy-in there.

Thanks for writing in! 😄

If you have a moment, will you let me know if you enjoyed this edition of the newsletter? Thank you!

Thanks for reading,

❤️ Sara