Introduction
Building a stack for account-based selling and marketing as a startup is hard. There are legitimately thousands of tools that solve at least a hundred different problems, so it’s really difficult to get a sense of what you need and what’s just nice to have.
The key thing to keep in mind is cost. Startups pre-ZIRP were able to build massive stacks and spend a small fortune because they had the cash to do so. But prudent operation is the name of the game here, and so we’ll be keeping things simple in this post.
This is what the ideal sales stack used to look like…
So, why are we using Account Based Marketing as our strategy?
As I explained in another post, ABM is an effective strategy for startups because it forces you to look your ICP dead in the eye. It stops you from wasting time on buyers that were never and will never be customers, and allows you to apply your capital effectively.
There was a time when mass-market selling worked. Just as there was a time when pumping a few thousand into Facebook ads would get you excellent returns. But we’ve moved past that - ABM might feel a bit naff or old school, but the principles are solid. I think it just needs a rebrand (which I’m sure we can write a blog post on sometime…).
What tools will we be using?
Now bear in mind that this stack is designed to be basic, so feel free to ad-lib a few other tools if you’ve got money to spend. Below is a chronological process for applying account-based marketing at your startup:
ICP Identification
Every good ABM strategy starts with an understanding of who your ICP is and what defines them. You can use firmographic data like the number of employees or funding, tooling data like whether or not they use Gmail or Outlook, or secondary information like who they sell to - but it’s important you know this beforehand.
Whilst you might know a few of the companies that fit this description, ICP identification tools like Clay, Apollo, and Cognism help you to map out the entire addressable market.
What would take a good portion of your day takes less than 5 minutes. With a paid subscription, almost all of the above data is searchable. As an example below, I’ve found 77 companies that operate as Marketing Services businesses, with between 51-200 employees, privately held, and specifically within London.
I can then go on to find suitable employees to reach out to, their contact details, what tech stack they use, and any other relevant information like job openings, competitors, or their main product line.
Contact Management
Otherwise known as a CRM, keeping on top of all the contacts you’ve just found is pivotal. Not only because you don’t want to lose the valuable research you’ve just done but also because it helps you see the total opportunity in front of you and what progress you’re making.
A typical listicle of CRMs would include the big guns: the HubSpots, the Salesforces, the Pipedrives. And while they’re great tools for some, they don’t all work well for startups:
Because they’re expensive. You do not need to be paying $1,000 a month. And as I’ll cover in the next step, you can actually use the same tools for outreach if you know where to look.
Because they have more bells and whistles than you need. We’re trying to build a sensible stack without bloat and a lot of the enterprise-focused CRMs offer exactly the opposite.
The tool we use at whomso is Attio. It’s perfect for us - we add in a list of companies we want to speak with, we get free contact data enrichments, and then we can easily understand their attributes and the communication we’ve had with them. I’ve not used it but Folk is an almost identical CRM.
The big benefit here is that they tend to focus more on communication strength and relationships than bigger CRMs that lean more towards volume. I’ve included HubSpot because I think - if you pare it back - it can do a similarly good job of measuring how well you’re being perceived by a customer, but my preference here is for one of the more modern CRMs.
Outreach
At this point, you’re going to want to do some prospecting. And at this very same point, you might be asking, “Where’s Smartlead/Lemlist/any other sequencer?” and to that, I’d say, “Don’t set up an 8-point sequence. Please. I beg you.”
Account-based marketing does not want sequenced emails. The point is that you approach the deal as if it’s the only one you have in the pipeline. And that, unfortunately, means writing a different prospecting email each time.
Fear not though, as there are plenty of tools out there that’ll help speed this process up.
I’ve included both Attio and Folk again because they have native email integrations. And from them, you can create neat, tailored emails that use all of the information you have on hand. Really helpful for crafting a message that is specifically written for the prospect you’re targeting.
Another good tool I’ve used to expedite emails before is Lavender. Lavender helps you write better converting emails directly from your inbox using contact-level data. The only sticking point here is that personalising per contact, rather than per organization, has the potential to muddy the waters of an ABM strategy. But as long as you’re aware of the salient points of your marketing and what it means to the company (vs. the prospect), then you’ll do just fine.
Personalisation
Once you’ve got a reply or some form of interest from your prospect it’s time to start personalising your marketing materials.
The way we do that within whomso is - unsurprisingly - with whomso. We include key resources we want to share alongside a video walkthrough and client logos that our prospect can most identify with. If the prospect has also asked for specific details beforehand then we’ll include those too.
Some ABM strategies would have you send out these pages in the initial email before you’ve even got a reply, but we steer away from that for the simple reason of deliverability. Cold emails with no replies are far less likely to be delivered if you’re including a link. So unless you want to buy more domains to ensure you don’t burn your main domain, we’d suggest waiting until there’s some show of intent.
Obviously, it’d be remiss of us not to plug whomso, but there are other, more manual ways of doing this as a startup. To acid test our idea before we built the main product, we actually used Notion - we included similar resources and reused components. While it did help us prove the hypothesis, it gave us very little in the way of analytics data and was generally still quite manual. But it can be done.
You could also try building landing pages within your website using Webflow or Framer or whatever you’re built on. The benefit of this is that it’s on your main domain, which adds a level of trust you may not get elsewhere. But again, it’s incredibly manual, and there are not a lot of ways to avoid that.
The summary here, though, is that you need a way to ensure your prospects know they’re being sold to as a market of one. In short, that you care about them as a customer. The most common touchpoint for buyers is your website, and so it follows that the links and content you send them should be contained within and personalised on a single page.
Analytics & Attribution
Finally, we’re looking at how we measure the prospects showing some intent.
If you’re getting replies over email and views on your personalised page, then you can make sense of that yourself. But if you’re being a bit more ambitious with your ABM strategy and have started to engage prospects on LinkedIn or even go so far as to advertise to them, then you’ll need analytics.
It’s worth mentioning at this point that I’ve opted not to include visitor identification tools like RB2B because we primarily speak to UK and EU customers. These tools are excellent but are not GDPR-friendly - if you’re US-based, then you can use them to identify site visitors without them logging in.
For product-first, European-based companies (like us), using a tool like June is great. It’s product analytics built for B2B SaaS that stores engagement and usage data at the company level, rather than the individual level. You can piece together individual data points to understand exactly how much interest is being shown and by whom, before you reach back out to discuss an upgrade.
If you’re not selling a product, then this might be a little less relevant so I’d suggest something like Mixpanel or good ol’ Google Analytics.
One tool I would always prescribe for anyone getting invested in the attribution of ABM campaigns is Segment. Segment allows you to create and standardize events, attributes, and properties on your website and product so that—whatever tool you’re using—the data remains the same. There’s nothing more challenging than having to decipher the different UTM parameters you’ve set up to make sense of where your user was acquired from.
Finally, if you’re wanting to make a bigger investment towards identification and attribution, then a tool like Clearbit would be a logical purchase. The HubSpot-owned tool offers a (supposedly) GDPR-compliant way to reveal visitors on-site and to notify you when target accounts are interested.
Now, I won’t proclaim to be an expert in GDPR, and I’m not 100% clear on how this differs from something like RB2B, but it does say it’s compliant. If you’re willing to look over the details, then this would be a real asset to anyone building an ABM strategy because you can measure intent without needing a reply to your email.
Summary
The tech stack for sales within your startup need not be confusing. It’s quite tempting to over-invest in the early days and to implement a complex lattice of tools and automations, but I’d argue that keeping it somewhat manual actually helps.
You become familiar with the messaging, the customer type, and the process far faster, and you can see the inefficiencies yourself. This way, you’re less likely to waste money on tools that don’t really solve a problem.
But there you have it! If you want any other recommendations or help, you can reach out to me at alex@whom.so any time, and I’ll gladly hop on a call.
