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Beyond the Newsletter with Fractional ABM
Beyond the newsletter, I occasionally work with B2B SaaS teams, typically Series A through C, who are building or rebuilding their ABM motion with or without a full-time person in seat. If you're in that situation, or heading toward it, reply to this email.
Happy to talk through what you're working on.
The ABM programs I've seen, including some I've inherited, aren't broken because of bad tactics.
They're broken because nobody's aligned on why the program exists.
That's the first thing I'd fix.
If you get brought in to run a broken ABM program, or you're being asked to fix one you already own, the first 30 days aren't execution. They're diagnostic.
You're not fixing tactics yet. You're building the map.
Here's the order I'd work in.
Day 1–10: Define ABM. Align it to a business priority.
The most common thing broken in an ABM program is that nobody at the GTM leadership table can define what ABM means for the business.
Marketing says one thing. Sales says another. RevOps has a third definition. The CRO is watching all three and losing patience.
Get everyone in a room (scary, I know), Marketing, Sales, SDR leadership, RevOps, and answer one question: what business outcome is this ABM program driving?
Not "what's the ABM strategy." What's the business need the strategy exists to serve.
Examples: expanding into a new vertical. Expanding into a new geographic market. Taking the product up-market. Driving cross-sells from the existing base. Driving retention on strategic accounts.
Any one of those is a valid answer. What's not valid: "we’re doing LinkedIn ads."
Until you have this alignment, everything else you do is guesswork.
Day 10–17: Audit the target list against that priority.
Once you know why ABM exists, look at the accounts being worked. Ask two questions:
Does this list actually match the business priority you just defined?
Is it sized to what the team can execute? (Most inherited lists are 3x too big.)
If the answers are "no" and "yes," rebuild the list before you do anything else. The best-executed motion against the wrong accounts produces zero pipeline.
Day 17–24: Install the operating rhythm with sales.
The tactical stuff is downstream. The thing that actually determines whether ABM works is whether marketing and sales are in a real recurring conversation about the motion.
Week 3 is when you install that rhythm.
For every sales team you're working with, put a weekly or bi-weekly sync on the calendar. Add a quarterly retrospective on the performance data.
Inside those syncs, you're aligning on the fundamentals: target accounts, the personas, the use case, the messaging, the KPIs. Once those are set, the syncs shift into execution mode: holding sales accountable on engaged accounts, sourcing feedback from sales on what's actually working, sharing wins fast so the team stays energized.
This is the discipline most broken ABM programs are missing. Not the tactics. The rhythm.
Day 24–30: Audit the channel and tactic mix.
Most inherited ABM programs are running LinkedIn ads and calling it ABM.
That's not ABM. That's a paid campaign against a target list.
Real ABM is about knowing where your personas actually live and building a channel and tactic mix around them. Sometimes that's LinkedIn. Sometimes it's an industry community. Sometimes it's the two tradeshows that matter in your vertical. Sometimes it's a podcast your buyers actually listen to.
Ask your ICP where they spend their time. Ask sales who they hear from. Ask customers who they trust. Then map the channel strategy around those answers.
That removes the guessing game and the wasted budget, the two things that keep broken ABM programs broken.
The first 30 days aren't glamorous. There's no dashboard launch, no campaign announcement, no shiny new tech stack.
What you get instead is a defensible map of what's actually broken, what's actually working, and what should get built next.
That map is the thing most inherited ABM programs never get, and it's why they stay broken.
If you're stepping into a broken program right now, or planning to, hit reply. I'd love to hear what you're diagnosing and where you're stuck.
