Account-based marketing means choosing the companies you want to work with first, then focusing your effort on the people inside them. On LinkedIn, that changes the goal from reaching as many people as possible to reaching the right people at the right accounts.
ABM vs. Volume Outreach
- Volume outreach: send many connection requests and messages, hope some respond.
- ABM: pick a defined list of accounts, learn about them, and reach several relevant people with messages that fit their situation.
Volume looks busy. ABM is easier to measure, because you can see how many target accounts engaged.
How to Start
1. Define your ideal customer. Industry, company size, region, and the problem you solve. Be specific enough to exclude companies.
2. Build a target account list. Start small, a few dozen accounts you actually want. LinkedIn Sales Navigator lets you filter and save accounts.
3. Add relevance, not just fit. Look for reasons an account might care now: a funding round, a new hire, a technology change. Fit tells you who could buy. Timing tells you who to contact first.
4. Map the people. Identify the decision makers and the people affected by the problem at each account.
5. Warm up before you message. Update your profile so it explains who you help. Engage with their posts where it makes sense. HubSpot Academy has a free LinkedIn marketing course if you want a structured refresher, and it’s worth keeping your outreach within LinkedIn’s Professional Community Policies.
6. Send relevant messages. Reference something specific to the account. Keep it short. Ask one clear thing.
7. Coordinate with email. When LinkedIn and email work from the same account list, you see which channel is getting responses and avoid contacting the same person twice in different ways. Our automated sequencing runs across email, LinkedIn, and phone.
How to Measure It
- Number of target accounts engaged
- Reply and acceptance rates by account
- Meetings booked from target accounts
- Pipeline created from the account list
Results only mean something if your CRM is accurate, so check that account and deal data isn’t scattered across tools.
Quick Checklist
- Clear definition of the ideal customer
- Target account list built
- Timing signals added
- Contacts mapped per account
- Profile updated
- Personal, short messages
- Results tracked at account level
Closing
ABM works because it forces choices. A shorter list, better research, and messages that fit each account will often beat a larger volume of generic requests. LinkedIn outreach and ABM is one of the demand generation services we run for B2B teams. If you want help building the account list and the outreach around it, we can start there.
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