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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.
Do you have an upcoming AI product launch?
Chances are your best accounts are the ones you’ve already talked to.
Everyone else?
Cold pipeline. Discovery calls. The full sales cycle from intro to close.
It's slow. And it skips the warmest "cold" list you already have:
The people who said no in the past.
A closed lost opportunity isn't a closed door. Read the reason it was lost:
They picked the incumbent on a feature-parity bake-off
They had a champion exit mid-cycle and the project died
The budget got pulled in the Q4 reshuffle and the timing slipped
Procurement made it a 2-vendor finalist and you lost on a contract clause
The CFO put a freeze on net-new spend right as you were sending the order form
None of those were about the product.
Now you're shipping a new AI capability. Every one of those reasons just got weaker.
The incumbent doesn't have your AI feature. The new champion may have an AI mandate the old one didn't. The budget freeze ended 18 months ago. The procurement objections are about a contract that's been re-drafted twice since. The CFO is under board pressure to deploy AI capability somewhere this year.
The original pain point hasn't gone away. The AI capability is the new way to solve it.
That's the conversation.
Here's the cut for this segment, from page 7 of my recent ABM guide.
Three filters. Your RevOps team can pull the report on a Tuesday.
1. Lost date within the last 1-2 years.
Stale enough that the buying committee has shifted. Fresh enough that your team still has the context, the notes, the champion list, the AE who ran the deal. Volume matters: if your closed lost is huge, tighten to 18 months. If it's smaller, stretch to 3.
2. Lost reason isn't about the product.
Skip the deals you lost because the product didn't do the thing. Those don't come back without a roadmap conversation. Filter for the deals you lost on price, timing, champion turnover, contract terms, internal politics, or competitive bake-offs. These are the conversations the AI launch can reopen.
3. Projected ARR at or above your average contract value.
The original deal size was real. If a deal had been worth $5K when most of your customers are at $80K, the unit economics never made sense. Filter those out. Keep the ones where the math originally worked.
Three filters. One report. A cohort of 40–120 accounts depending on your volume.
That's your AI launch re-engagement list.
The play is different from a new-logo motion.
The original AE runs lead. They have the relationship, the notes, the champion intel. Re-assign if the rep has left, but the institutional memory needs to be on the call.
The outreach names the lost reason. "Two years ago you went with [competitor] because of [reason]. Here's what's changed." That sentence gets read because it's specific and earned.
The AI capability is the reason to talk, not the pitch. Lead with what's new in the market. Let the prospect connect the dots back to their original pain.
Exec sponsor matches do the budget conversation. Your CFO to their CFO. Your CEO to their CEO. Closed lost deals don't get re-opened by an AE working a sequence, they get re-opened when the executives reconnect.
This is the motion most teams skip because it feels like reaching back to old rejection. It isn't. It's reaching back to old qualified pipeline that already cleared most of the bar with you.
The thing nobody wants to admit about closed lost: the data quality is usually terrible.
Lost reasons in the CRM are often a single dropdown value that doesn't tell the real story. The AE who ran the deal may be gone, notes are sparse, or the champion's email is bouncing.
This is where RevOps earns its keep. Before the AI launch goes live, get them to backfill the lost reason field with notes from the deal record. If that's not possible, partner with the AEs who are still on the team to walk through their top 5 closed lost accounts and capture the real reason in 90 seconds each.
Bonus: If you use a call recording tool, upload the calls from the closed lost deals into ChatGPT, Claude, etc. and have it summarize the real story of why the deal was lost.
That 30-minute workflow turns a useless CRM field into a re-engagement target list.
This is the second of three segments inside the AI product launch guide I sent in May.
The full guide covers all three (best customers, churned, closed-lost), the cross-functional ownership table, and a six-metric measurement framework with target goals.
Still free and still no opt-in.
