I launched an ABM campaign for a $29 tool

Before I even thought about scaling this campaign, I felt like the right thing was to go through it, beginning-to-end with just one target account. Then, figure out what worked or was worth it based on the time investment.

Here's every step I took:

1. Decided which company to target first

December 16, 6pm - 6:28pm

I'm currently guessing at PersonaBox's ICP and target personas, but my hypothesis for ICP is as follows:

• B2B SaaS companies
• Have Account Executives (selling to enterprises)
• Publish content on their website at least somewhat frequently
• Not too big or have strict requirements - companies like Datadog have to have their reps go through specific channels for every tool they want to use
• I have some connection to it that might make reachout feel more genuine and the messaging easier to write

I quickly jotted down a list of 10 off the top of my head:

Browserbase

Supabase

Descript

Figma

Slack

Warp

Snyk

Sentry

Twilio

Ultimately, I decided on Browserbase because it checked a few boxes:

2. Individual buyer research and personalized emails

December 16, 6:24pm - 8:23pm

For personas, I started with who they had: AEs/Sales of course. But then I looked at their blogs/case studies/etc. and found that they seem to spread the content creation around from Chief of Staff to growth, to developers.

I ultimately landed on five contacts (roughly 10% of the company):

Then, I just started writing the emails to lay the groundwork for the messaging.

I think the strategy worked well because from the emails, I could easily create the landing page copy, the LinkedIn DMs, and the cold call scripts.

3. Decided on channels

December 16, 8:23pm - 8:54pm

I knew I wanted this to be a multi-channel approach, so I quickly just chose three: LinkedIn, email, and phone. I looked into LinkedIn ads, but the minimum contact list for targeting was 300 contacts so I quickly disqualified that tactic.

I was able to use Clay to get their email addresses and Freckle.io to get their phone numbers for free. I will say the quality of phone numbers that have gone on Clay have been seemingly higher than what I got on Freckle, but Clay no longer allows phone numbers on free plans.

4. Personalized asset / offer

December 17, 6:30pm - 10:14pm

I wanted something that would make it feel like I truly understood their business, had a strong hypothesis on how we could help them, and could demonstrate that PersonaBox takes into account your branding.

I had been testing the new LinkedIn carousels feature with Browserbase's website when I realized, why don't I just show that? So, I brought a whole bunch of code from the app over to the marketing site and piped the actual product experience with their actual generated posts into the landing page.

They can go to the landing page and get a snippet of the live experience they'd get when they set up and try out PersonaBox for themselves.

View the Browserbase ABM page

Here are some examples of the posts I created for them:

6. Personalized LinkedIn DM & Cold Call Scripts

December 18, 12:05pm - 1:16pm

I took the email content and pretty easily converted it into a LinkedIn DM and cold call script personalized for each person.

7. Execute

December 18, 1:17pm - 1:45pm

I sent off a LinkedIn connection request to each person, then I gave each a call, then I shot them each their personalized cold email.

How it went & results so far

Let's discuss this in two phases:

1. 1How it went from an execution perspective for me
2. 2How it went from a results perspective

From an execution perspective

Overall, for execution, I would give myself a B- given the effort.

From a results perspective

Overall, for results, I would give myself a B- given the effort.

I wasn't able to "close the deal", one major reason is I did a poor job of clarifying his question first, but overall, getting an "interesting, maybe too early" from one of the five target prospects in one hour feels like a strong result I can build on.

I've taken his feedback and am implementing it in the product as we speak.

Conclusion

Ultimately, soup-to-nuts, the campaign took me 8 hours. I got some great feedback I can action on and a potential lead down the line. And, now I have a framework to run this for the next companies much more quickly. My guess is I can spin the next one up in 4 hours and I'd bet the third one in 3 hours. Let's say I dedicate my evenings to these campaigns, I bet I can churn out five a week without losing product development time.

And, importantly, these types of initiatives soothe my soul more than spray and pray.