Enterprise Account Based Marketing (ABM) has become a cornerstone strategy for B2B SaaS and organizations looking to accelerate pipeline growth. In my last post, I talked about the importance of collaboration between Revenue, Sales, Creative, and Performance Marketing in the early planning stages of an Enterprise ABM campaign with a focus on account list creation.

In this post, I’ll expand on that topic and walk through the entire enterprise ABM campaign creation process: from developing account lists and pain-point messaging, to creative execution, channel strategy, reporting, and more.

The example campaign I mentioned in the last post comes from my time as ABM team lead at Unbabel, where we were tasked with doubling pipeline in the Financial Services industry for Q1 2024. With the high-level strategy in place, we worked closely with Revenue and Sales to finalize account lists and align on pipeline targets.

That’s when the real collaboration—and the real work—began.

Why Collaboration Matters in Enterprise ABM

At the start of any enterprise ABM campaign, account lists are front and center. To your C-level executives and Revenue leaders, they answer critical business questions:

Who are we targeting?
What’s the projected pipeline?
What’s the projected revenue?

Once these are clarified, Marketing can move forward to answer the next wave of questions:

What problems are we solving for our target audience?
What is our product offering?
Which channels will we use?
What’s the budget and timeline?
When will creative be ready?
Who from Marketing, Sales, and Success needs to be involved?
When can we expect results?

This sets the stage for the ABM framework that guides campaign success.

A Proven Framework for Enterprise ABM Campaigns

Over my career, I’ve seen enterprise demand generation and ABM campaigns succeed most often when following a clear, repeatable framework:

Audience
Pain Point
Messaging & Creative
Channel Strategy
Timeline
Results

Here’s how this framework translates into building successful enterprise ABM campaigns.

1. Audience

Account list development usually begins with Revenue leadership, coupled with input from AEs, Marketing Ops, and ABM stakeholders. Expect debates on maturity, buying stages, and prioritization but be careful not to get too lost in the weeds here. This part of the process needs to happen as quickly as possible so as to not lose momentum. Time is of the essence!

The key is to trust Revenue leaders to identify accounts with the highest potential for pipeline and revenue. Their expertise ensures your ABM strategy is grounded in reality.

2. Pain Point

One of the most valuable lessons I have learned in my ABM career has been to collaborate with Customer Success and Solutions Architecture teams as soon as possible.

If you’re going after net new accounts, find a similar account (think industry, revenue band, geography, etc.) and ask the Customer Success Manager and Solutions lead what’s going on with the account currently. There will be valuable insights you can apply to the account list you’re currently researching.

Product Marketing is your best resource in regard to ICP and pain points, but I’ve found in the past that they’re more focused on the product than the customer. Which is fine! It’s understandable! Customer Success and Solutions are going to be able to cut through a lot of the technical clutter to give you easy to digest answers to your questions.

Remember, marketing and sales messaging that acquires a customer isn’t always relevant to that customer when renewal time comes around.

That original marketing message that got them to fill out a demo form or get onto a discovery call with an AE may be completely useless to them when they’ve been an Enterprise customer for 5 years.

Understanding pain points is critical to effective ABM messaging. While Product Marketing can provide ICP frameworks, Customer Success and Solutions teams bring direct insights from the field—how customers actually use your product, what keeps them engaged, and what challenges remain.

At Unbabel, our Customer Success interviews gave us extremely valuable info for ABM campaigns. Click here to see the whole Google Slide deck.

Ask questions like:

What features drove the initial purchase, and are they still in use?![Insert Image]
Has the point of contact changed? If so, why?
Is the account a strong candidate for upsells or struggling with basics?
What does Success see as long-term potential?

This ensures your ABM campaign messaging resonates not only for acquisition but also for long-term retention and growth. It’s important to acquire an enterprise customer, but it’s arguably more important to acquire a customer that will be there in 1, 2, 3 or more years from now.

Remember, it’s cheaper to renew a customer than it is to acquire them.

3. Messaging & Creative

Before building creative, validate pain points with stakeholders. Then, take a collaborative approach to messaging by involving multiple perspectives across Marketing (Demand Gen, Product Marketing, Content, Digital, Customer Marketing).

You’ll need to collaborate on the approval and alignment of these developed pain points before moving onto messaging. Whether you’re doing that async through Slack or Teams channels, or in person on whiteboards, all relevant stakeholders must be aligned before beginning the next phase.

I’ve found that – as the theme keeps coming up and up again for the ideal approach to successful enterprise ABM campaigns – a collaborative creative approach is always best, at least when it comes to messaging. In the past, I’ve used Content Strategist, Head of Demand Generation, Director of Product Marketing, Digital Marketing Manager, Customer Marketing Manager, and more marketing team members to chip in with rough draft copy writing (that ultimately gets final approval from Product Marketing).

This diversity produces stronger, more testable messaging. Pair each message with creative assets and let performance data decide what works best. In ABM, let the best message win.

4. Channel Strategy

Example Enterprise ABM Expansion Strategy Brief

Channel strategy is where your ABM framework comes alive. Using historical performance data and validated messaging, you’ll design hypotheses for which channels to test.

I’ve developed loads and loads of strategy briefs in my time as a digital and account based marketer. The format you see here has changed a ton from my original brief template, and it’s going to change again as I continue to iterate on what works and what doesn’t.

And isn’t that the beauty of marketing? Using data and numbers to develop a story, bring that story to life with creativity and design, and then watch it all crash and burn as your audience gets their judgemental hands on it…

Kidding aside, this is my favorite part of the whole enterprise ABM campaign process: the strategy. Specifically, the Channel Strategy.

Consider:

Which paid channels will drive the most engagement?
What benchmarks determine scaling or cutting a campaign?
Which messages work best on LinkedIn vs. Display vs. nurture email?

Documenting these predictions allows you to refine as you measure results—turning strategy into a learning engine.

5. Timeline

With accounts, messaging, and channels in place, it’s time to build the campaign timeline. Perfection isn’t the goal—the timeline will shift due to bandwidth or priorities—but accountability is non-negotiable.

See the 1:1 enterprise ABM campaign that this Account Timeline and Deliverables screenshot is from here.

Now that you have your account list, your stakeholders mapped out, your message tight and approved, and your strategy and hypothesis documented and supported with data: it’s time to put pen to paper and start to build your campaign timeline. I don’t worry too much about being extremely accurate here… the timeline almost always shifts due to priorities, bandwidth, and unexpected headwinds.

Set SLAs (service level agreements) so every stakeholder delivers their part. Once the timeline is approved, the campaign is ready for kickoff. Example of an SLA sheet here.

6. Results

The final step is reporting—and it needs to be built into the process from day one. Share regular updates, especially in the early stages, then taper into async reporting (Slack, email, dashboards) once the campaign stabilizes.

Report not just on pipeline and ARR, but also on insights such as:

Which messaging resonates with specific audiences
Which channels drive engagement
Which content assets perform best

Too often, Marketing fails to market itself internally. Document your learnings in a searchable, central location (Google Drive, Notion, etc.) so they’re easy to reference for future campaigns.

Conclusion: Turning Strategy into Measurable Results

Building successful Enterprise ABM campaigns requires more than just account lists and revenue targets. It’s the combination of collaboration, process, and disciplined execution—from defining audiences and pain points, to refining messaging, channel strategy, and reporting—that creates measurable pipeline impact.

If you want your enterprise account-based marketing strategy to deliver results, focus on alignment, iteration, and capturing learnings along the way. That’s how ABM moves from theory into revenue-driving reality.

What’s Next?

In my next post, I’ll dive into the results of the GoCardless campaign:

What worked.
What didn’t.
How you can replicate the approach for your own ABM campaigns.

Have Enterprise ABM Questions?

Reach out below and I’d be happy to talk strategy, timelines, execution, optimization, reporting, and anything else you’re curious about.

My Email

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Building Successful Enterprise ABM Campaigns: Processes and Collaboration