No sales prospecting strategy is complete without Account Based Marketing (ABM). According to Junto, 85% of industry professionals believe this approach generates higher returns than any other.
But like any winning strategy, you need the right tools to make it work. Introducing Captain Data and LaGrowthMachine — two platforms that go hand in hand to form the perfect ABM stack.
By combining Captain Data’s automation software with LaGrowthMachine’s multi-channel messaging, you can easily set up and scale account based marketing.
In this two-part guide, we’ll show you how to create and segment your prospect list with Captain Data, then find email addresses and launch a prospecting sequence with LaGrowthMachine.
But first, let’s go over the basics.
What Is Account Based Marketing?
Account based marketing, also known as key account marketing, is when you target high-potential prospects with personalized marketing messages.
Basically, you segment leads and contacts according to their revenue potential and shared characteristics, then grab their attention with timely, well-written messages.
Why do account based marketing? Because focusing your outreach and marketing efforts on specific accounts, rather than a catch-all approach, increases the ROI and success rate of outbound campaigns. 🚀
How Account Based Marketing Works
It starts with identifying high-potential targets and opportunities. This is relatively easy thanks to the amount of company data available online.
Company websites and social media profiles contain all sorts of insights — news, milestones, earnings, and more. All this data can be used to assess and score the potential of a target account.
In B2B sales, you can suss out whether a company might be open to new tools and services by answering these questions:
- How much revenue did the company generate in the past year?
- Has it raised any funds recently? Or received other significant investment?
- Is the company actively recruiting? What positions are already filled?
- Have there been any changes in leadership?
Targeting the right account can mean the difference between time wasted and a profitable new deal. Think about it: A company that just raised its Series B will have more budget to spend than a startup still figuring out its business model.
Once you’ve nailed the account targeting and research, all that’s left is to contact the right decision-makers as part of a personalized ABM campaign.
In sum, a successful Account Based Marketing strategy covers three steps:
- Targeting the most suitable accounts
- Engaging the right decision-makers
- Measuring campaign response rate
Now let’s implement these steps with Captain Data and LaGrowthMachine.
Source Prospects With Captain Data
Before launching an ABM strategy, you need a clear picture of your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) — the type of company most likely to benefit from your product or services.
1. Gather data on your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
This exercise helps identify the best prospects and their relevance for your business. Some points to guide your company research:
- Demographics: Geographic location, number of employees, industry/sector of activity
- Tools and technology: Software and resources currently in use (easily checked with technology lookup tool like BuiltWith)
- Maturity level: Current stage of development, funds raised, brand notoriety, etc.
Once you’ve identified the type of company to target, the next step is finding the individual decision-makers.
For this part you’ll be looking at job titles, goals, values, pain points, buying habits. You need this information to segment your contact list and tailor the outreach message. The more refined your search criteria, the more personalized and impactful your campaign will be.
Use the following data points to determine your ICP:
- Profession
- Hierarchy
- Length of time in company
- Frequently used keywords
- Most active channels (email, social media, etc.)
- Pages/people they follow and interact with online
<div class="cms-tips"><div>💡</div><p>Good to know: Download Captain Data’s free ICP targeting templates by following this link.</p></div>
2. Find decision-maker profiles on LinkedIn to build a contact list
There’s no secret — ask any marketer or growth hacker and they’ll tell you the same thing: LinkedIn (specifically Sales Navigator) is the best place for B2B lead data.
Unlike other sources, LinkedIn data is generally quite reliable. It’s in users’ best interest to keep profiles up to date for recruitment opportunities.
<div class="cms-tips"><div>💡</div><p>To become an expert in LinkedIn outreach, check out LaGrowthMachine’s ultimate guide to LinkedIn prospecting.</p></div>
Sales Navigator is the source with the most useful data for creating a B2B prospecting workflow. In short, LinkedIn is where you should go to find individual profiles that correspond to your ICP.
3. Refine your search results with Boolean filters
For best results, keep your audience small and segmented. Segments are smaller groups with similar characteristics so you can easily adapt your copywriting to each segment.
LaGrowthMachine recommends keeping lists at less than 100 contacts.
Segmentation might seem time-consuming but it’s worth it for more efficient and effective campaigns.
To find best-match profiles on LinkedIn, use Boolean search to refine the search criteria (i.e. the process of adding variables like AND, OR, and NOT to broaden or limit your searches).
Boolean search, also known as X-Ray search, is super useful in helping find the right targets. Consider it one of the most important aspects of your ABM strategy.
<div class="cms-tips"><div>💡</div><p>Good to know: Captain Data has a handy X-Ray Search template to guide your campaign set-up.</p></div>
Once you’ve decided how to refine and segment your contact list, the next step in scaling ABM is automating the list creation process.
4. Automate manual LinkedIn searches with Captain Data
To save time on the previous steps, set up a Captain Data workflow to automate the manual search for target accounts. Once set up, all you need is to add the data to your audience on LaGrowthMachine.
Here’s how to configure your automated workflow.
- Give your workflow a name to find it easily among your other campaigns.
- Select your Sales Navigator account. Enter the company search URL previously produced via Boolean search.
- List out all data points needed to reach your ICP via Sales Navigator (keywords, job title, location, length of time in the company). Remember to use the Boolean search previously created with Captain Data’s free template.
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- Determine the number of expected results (3 maximum) so Captain Data can extract profiles that correspond to your ICP.
- Give your audience a name before mapping the data (either copied from LaGrowthMachine or created on Captain Data). Your leads will be automatically created under that audience name in LaGrowthMachine.
- Finally, launch your campaign on autopilot to regularly retrieve new decision-makers from your company database.
<div class="cms-tips"><div>💡</div><p>Good to know: LaGrowthMachine cleans up any duplicate leads so you don’t have to. If a lead already exists in your contact database on LaGrowthMachine, you can choose to overwrite the data or only fill in the empty fields.</p></div>
Now that your prospect sourcing workflow is set up, the next step is to engage your audience.
Engage Prospects with LaGrowthMachine
1. Find email addresses
It’s time to match your freshly sourced prospects with email addresses.
While it’s possible to find professional email addresses with Captain Data, email sourcing is natively integrated into LaGrowthMachine using a third-party service. No need to look any further.
To activate the email search, check the "Enrich Leads" box when creating your campaigns. This also works for phone numbers and Twitter handles.
Next, match your audience to a campaign (i.e. the audience just created with Captain Data).
Select “Enrich Leads” for the audience to be automatically enriched with professional email addresses. While personal email addresses are possible, this isn’t recommended in Europe because of the GDPR.
💡 Note that LaGrowthMachine only provides email addresses it can verify. The success rate depends on whether data is available for a company’s email pattern and is about 60%.
Once you've enriched your audience with email addresses, it’s time to build a prospecting campaign.
2. Build an outbound prospecting sequence
There are two ways to prepare your outbound campaign. Either choose a workflow from 25+ scenarios designed by LaGrowthMachine.
Or, create your own sequence from scratch. Here’s how.
- Define your campaign goals (e.g. generate account creations, purchases, event signups, newsletter subscriptions, etc.)
- Choose the channel through which you want to reach contacts. LinkedIn and email are generally the most effective for European-based contacts, Twitter works well in the US.
LaGrowthMachine lets you send messages via LinkedIn, email, and Twitter.
- Map out different possibilities based on how contacts respond to your message (“If they don’t answer, I’ll reach out again X days later”, “If they click here, I’ll send another message”, etc.)
- Plan the prospecting actions for each stage of the buyer funnel with personalized content adapted to each target
- Automate CRM updates in real time
- Launch the campaign
With the ICP research already done, the next thing to work on is your email copy and its wording. For a campaign to be effective, you need to hook your contact with stellar copywriting.
3. Personalize and perfect your outreach message
Your message copy requires thought and attention. Here are some tips to get it right:
- Create a connection with your lead. Find a common ground to break the ice. This can be any sort of shared professional experience — events attended together, members of the same groups, a post on LinkedIn, etc.
- Put yourself in the target’s shoes. Don’t make it about you. Focus on them and how you can help or bring value.
- Keep it short. Deliver the essential information in a few lines. Nobody has time for long-winded outreach messages.
- Don’t forget about follow-up messages. These are the ones that get a reaction. A good follow-up will triple your response rate.
💡 Good to know: To scale your messaging, set up custom attributes for each ICP in Captain Data. These variables will automatically generate the name of the company, the sector of activity, and pain points. This way you can write a reusable introduction for each audience.
4. Measure and track campaign results
As with any sales or marketing campaign, a successful account-based marketing strategy requires testing, adjustment, and iteration.
Focus on how you can make the entire process scalable. This is the best way to reach a cruising speed that will generate long-term revenue.
Campaign success should be measured in terms of response rate. The more refined your ICP, campaign entry points, copywriting, and overall scalability, the higher the response rate.
As mentioned, keep your audience small and ultra-segmented (less than 100 contacts) for maximum impact.
Keep in mind that campaign settings need to be carefully adjusted when targeting a small audience. To avoid unnecessary confusion, only change one setting at a time.
LaGrowthMachine's dashboard tells you all you need to know about campaign performance in just a single glance.
As a guide, aim for a response rate higher than 3%. Anything below this can indicate a problem with your campaign settings.
Key Takeaways
A scalable account-based marketing strategy is one that combines speed and precision. Captain Data used in conjunction with LaGrowthMachine gives you the tools to achieve exactly that.
Source and segment your prospects with Captain Data, then enrich and engage them with targeted messages via LaGrowthMachine.
Focus on:
- Finding your ideal target via Sales Navigator using Boolean search, then automating this process with Captain Data
- Tailoring your message to each segment of your audience
- Building and perfecting your automated outreach sequence with LaGrowthMachine
And there you have it, the perfect combination for a winning ABM strategy!
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