ABM Tactics for Hard to Reach Audiences: The Expert Playbook

Enterprise decision-makers, budget-wielding executives, and other VIPs ignore 99% of marketing.

They won’t budge with dry outreach or generic messaging.

In this guide, I’ll break down advanced, actionable ABM tactics for hard to reach audiences that most experts recommend.

I have discusses it all: from how to use tools to nail your target account list (TAL) to what to do if you’re unsure about the prospect’s address (for direct mail/gifting purposes), to how to accurately measure and attribute the pipeline with ZenABM.

Read on…

ABM Tactics for Hard-to-Reach Audiences: Quick Summary

• Nail Your TAL: Define ICP with precision, disqualify aggressively, map stakeholders with Clay + enrichment tools, and use intent data (or ZenABM for company-level engagement) to spot timing.
• Deep Research & Personalization: Mine annual reports, press releases, exec social posts; tailor ads and outreach using ZenABM’s intent signals for account-specific personalization.
• Multi-Channel Orchestration: Blend LinkedIn engagement, InMails, email, calls, and ads. Use an ABM stages framework (e.g., Identified → Aware → Engaged → Considering → Selecting) to align outreach.
• Direct Mail & Gifting: Cut through digital noise with thoughtful gifts, puzzles, or e-gifting. Personalization = higher response.
• Value First, Sell Later: Lead with thought leadership, exclusive roundtables, audits, or case studies. Offer something bespoke before pitching.
• Measure Everything: Track engagement, pipeline per dollar, ROAS, velocity, and stage progression. ZenABM gives dashboards tying ad engagement to CRM revenue impact.

1. Nail Your Target (ICP & Account Selection): Foundation of Any ABM Strategy

The foundation of account-based marketing success is choosing the right targets.

So your TAL should be perfect, because after all, your list is your strategy in account-based marketing.

Define ICP Rigorously

To perfect your TAL, start by defining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) with absurd clarity using filters like company firmographics, pain points, tech stack, buying signals, and whatever else you can think of.

Remember that having more disqualification criteria is better than having more qualification criteria.

You can start by analyzing your best current customers and finding common traits (industry, size, problems solved) to hone your ICP.

Also, consider the thoughts of the sales team while defining your ICP and even the TAL. I mean, account-based marketing is all about the sales and marketing teams agreeing on one target account list.

Once the ICP is determined, use tools like Apollo, Clay, or even LinkedIn Sales Navigator to make a rough list of companies that match your ICP.

Identify the Stakeholders/Buying Committee

Also, identify the key stakeholders (buying committee/DMU) inside each account early.

Many B2B purchases involve multiple stakeholders from different departments, making it essential to map all relevant decision makers.

You can use tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator for finding key stakeholders or mapping buying committees at an account.

You can also use Clay for the same:

• Clay’s LinkedIn integration 

  • Pulls data on employees at a given company.

  • Let’s you filter by seniority (C-level, VP, Director, Manager) or function (Marketing, Sales, IT, Finance).

  • Often used to map out buying committees in ABM.

• Clay + Apollo / Clearbit / ZoomInfo connectors

  • These enrich a company’s domain with direct people data: names, job titles, emails, and LinkedIn URLs.

  • You can configure Clay to say: “Give me everyone at acme.com with titles containing ‘VP Marketing’ or ‘Head of RevOps’.”

  • Each provider has its own coverage; Clay centralizes them.

• Clay’s built-in “Find People at Company” action

  • This is Clay’s own wrapper around the above data sources.

  • Input: company domain or LinkedIn URL and some other filters:

  • Output: list of stakeholders with role, level, email (if available), and LinkedIn profile.

  • You can watch the full tutorial from the Clay University:

Utilize Intent Data and Timing

If you have access to intent signals (e.g. Bombora, 6sense) or even just Google Analytics and marketing automation data, watch for signs an account is “warming up,” like site visits, ad views, social interactions, etc.

Tracking this engagement helps you identify where an account is in the buying cycle, so you can time your outreach for when it’s most relevant.

By the way, for deanonymizing accounts visiting your site’s important pages (demo, pricing, trial signup), you can run LinkedIn text ads (these have extremely low CTR, so they create awareness but are dirt cheap!).

Then you can use ZenABM to see which accounts had a good amount of impressions:

A clever way to deanonymize site visitors, right?

Especially, when most IP-matching wrappers are hardly accurate:

So, yeah, accounts showing such intent-signals (first-party or third-party) are the hottest ones that you should go after first. I’ll discuss more about this in the coming sections.

Bonus Step: Steal Your Competitors’ Customers

You can also add competitors’ customers in your TAL (don’t forget to check if they match the ICP). And Clay can help with that:

• Click “+Add column” → “Use AI”
• In the Prompt section, add instructions for Claygent to find you a list of companies mentioned on the competitor’s website, mainly the case studies or testimonial pages. Save yourself time and use the prompt below, and click on ‘Generate my prompt.'”#CONTEXT#
  You are tasked with extracting structured data from the website of /Domain. The goal is to identify companies that have been featured in case studies or mentioned in testimonials on the site.#OBJECTIVE#
  Extract and return the names of 5 customers of #Domain as a comma-separated list.#INSTRUCTIONS#
  1. Use the #Domain to locate the company’s official website and relevant web pages that list their customers.
  2. Search for sections like “Case Studies,” “Our Customers,” “Clients,” or similar headings that often list company clients.
  3. Extract up to 5 customer names from these sections.
  4. Ensure that the extracted names are verified as the company’s customers through contextual clues or mentions in official sources.
  5. Return the names as a comma-separated list (e.g., “Customer1, Customer2, Customer3, Customer4, Customer5”).#EXAMPLES#
  Example Input: “example.com” Example Output: “Customer1, Customer2, Customer3, Customer4, Customer5″#REMINDERS#
  – Only retrieve information from legitimate company sources or verified partners.
  – Do not assume customer names from unrelated or unverifiable sources. Keep the response concise, free of extra commentary. Return “No customers found” if no information about customers is available.”
• Select “Fields” in the output format and click “Generate,” and then “Accept” to run the prompt.
• Make sure you’ve selected “Fields” in the “Output Format” section. Click on “Save and Run” to view the list of companies for each competitor.
• You’ll now see a list of companies featured on your competitors’ websites.To prepare for advertising and later outreach, enrich the list by adding key decision-makers and their work emails.

A Real Example: Steve’s TAL Building Playbook

Steven Brady built an account-based marketing campaign to reconnect with ex-Square colleagues who now fit his ICP.

Using LinkedIn Sales Navigator, he pulled ~50 first-degree connections, tracked their social intent with Trigify, and sent that data into Clay via webhook. Clay enriched each lead with 20+ attributes (title, industry, verified email), which then powered lead scoring, personalized messaging, campaign routing, and CRM updates.

The workflow:

• Create a targeted list of ~50 ex-Square connections via LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

• Track social intent signals with Trigify, monitoring LinkedIn engagements against trigger keywords.
• Push Trigify data into Clay, enriching each lead with 20+ fields (profile details, industry, headcount, verified email).
• Use enriched data for lead scoring, tailored outreach, campaign routing, and CRM updates.

Result?

Steve said this TAL set the path for his most successful account-based marketing campaign ever!

2. Deep Research & Personalization

For a hard to reach audience, you definitely need to gear up with research and personalization.

I’m talking about diving into stuff like annual reports, press releases, their CEO’s last three LinkedIn posts, and that podcast interview the target CIO gave last month.

Your goal is to uncover trigger events, pain points, and personal insights that will make your outreach impossible to ignore.

For instance, know that the target account just acquired a smaller company?

That’s a talking point. Their CTO posted about a cybersecurity challenge?

That’s your opening to pitch how you solve it.

Start by building detailed profiles for each account and the stakeholders within:

• professional background,
• likely challenges in their role,
• and even personal interests if available.

GumGum, for instance, figured out that T-Mobile’s CEO loved Batman, and they made him a comic about TMobile!

LinkedIn is a goldmine for such research: what content do they share? Any common connections?

Social media can reveal vital personal info and what’s top-of-mind for them based on their posts and activity.

You can also build specific tools, like an ROI calculator related to their industry, or industry reports and how your solution can help them.

Lastly, don’t shoot generic or different types of ads again and again on the same account.

And don’t shoot a generic pitch into the DMs.

Personalize them with ZenABM.

ZenABM tracks company-level LinkedIn ad engagement for each ad campaign. So, you can tag each campaign with its intent (specific offer, feature, etc., being advertised by that ad), and ZenABM will group companies with similar intent together.

This way, you’ll know if an account is interested in your feature A or B, and you can start showing them even more BOFU ads.

Plus, now your BDR outreach will be more personalized.

They’ll know exactly what the account is interested in.

Userpilot did something similar:

Pro Tip: You can even go for 1:1 personalized ads on LinkedIn (yes, recently launched) that allow you to customize the intro text of Sponsored Content using profile fields like first name, job title, company name, and Industry.

3. Orchestrate Multi-Channel Touches w.r.t ABM Stages

Hard-to-reach audiences aren’t chilling in one channel waiting for you.

To engage them, you need to orchestrate a symphony of touches across multiple channels – all harmonized with the same personalized message.

Here’s how to play it:

First, have your sales folks (and execs, if possible) connect with target buyers and actually engage on LinkedIn.

No, not by pitching inMail right away, but by building rapport.

• Follow their posts.
• Drop insightful comments (not generic “great post!” fluff, but meaningful takes that get noticed).
• Share content that addresses their industry pains.

When it’s time for direct outreach, go for Sponsored InMail (now Message Ads)

Why?

LinkedIn InMail is a high-quality, low-frequency channel. It carries more weight than yet another email in their inbox.

Then go for cold emails and cold calls.

Here’s the outbound sequence that Becc Holland (CEO of Flip the Script – a sales enablement platform) suggests:

And, of course, run LinkedIn ads in parallel, and check progress with ZenABM.

In fact, you can set up an ABM stages framework to map each account’s buying journey.

It will help you decide what kind of marketing touches are needed and when, and when you should finally do a BDR outreach.

Here’s Kyle Poyar’s model to refer to for the same:

Here’s how Userpilot built its ABM stages framework, inspired by Kyle’s model:

• Identified – basically all the accounts they were targeting in the campaign
• Aware – accounts with 50+ ad impressions
• Interested/Engaged – accounts with 5+ ad clicks or 10+ engagements
• Considering – accounts that booked a demo / signed up for a trial
• Selecting – accounts with an open deal

You can build something similar.

Just don’t over-complicate it.

Only focus on touches and metrics that you can easily track.

Also, ZenABM can help you track these stages within the platform:

Some Tips to Nail ABM Emails

First of all, ensure you have the right email addresses.

Use Clay to find emails (we discussed that earlier in the article) and then validate them.

In your Clay table, click ‘Add column → Add enrichment’, search “validate email,” and pick an integration (e.g. ZeroBounce). Save it to verify which emails are valid.  

You can also use a tool like Hunter.io.

It does both finding and verification.

Once you have a proper email list, adopt these best practices:

• Don’t blindly copy templates, but you can, for sure, get inspired by templates. I love the templates from Artofsay, like the one below:
  • Personalize your outreach emails with not just the name. I discussed how ZenABM can help with that by telling you what the account is interested in based on engagement with specific ads. But I’d recommend that you go further and research their social footprint, too. For instance, reference something from their site or content to prove you’ve actually looked them up before emailing.

    

• Keep it concise. Use the “inverted pyramid” strategy – keep the most important stuff above and keep the fluff below, and keep the fluff less.
• Finally, don’t shy from follow-ups, but don’t outdo either!

Pro Tip: Use videos in your emails and also gamify your emails with tools like Mailmodo.

4. High-Impact Direct Mail & Gifting

For hard-to-reach audiences that are also enterprise-level, you can surely go for direct mail and gifting.

Direct mail, in fact, has a 4.4% response rate, which is nearly 40× higher than email!

People have sent prospects everything from iPads pre-loaded with a custom video message and relevant content, to remote-control Porsches without the remote.

The executive had to book a meeting to get the controller (classic “give to get” move).

Also, you don’t just have to send gifts to executives.

I’d say consider some junior employees also on the executives’ teams.

One ABM team sent a locked puzzle to a senior executive, and its key to one of her junior employees.

And that got the meeting booked!

So, yeah, people send really thoughtful mails/gifts, and you can too.

Note: If you are worried about whether the addresses are correct, Jon Miller (Former CEO at Demandbase) says in his article, “Most databases don’t list postal addresses… so companies either ask prospects to confirm the address for gifting or use e-gifting instead… from a $5 gift card to a meal via Uber Eats to a charity donation in the prospect’s name to the institution od their choice.”

5. Deliver Value First, Sell later

Hard-to-reach prospects rarely trust vendors, so lead with value.

They are, after all, hard-to-reach!

• Use thought leadership as a Trojan Horse: invite execs to guest on your podcast, contribute to a report, or join a closed-door roundtable. Suddenly, it’s not a sales call but a peer discussion, positioning you as a convener, not a pusher.
• Content and free services can also open doors: send personalized audits, benchmark reports, or industry-specific case studies. Free marketing audits, for example, have always attracted me as a marketing guy.
• Exclusivity also plays well: offer “executive previews” of new research or betas. Even framing a demo as insider access elevates its value. Reciprocity 101 – give something bespoke first, then earn their time.

6. Measure, Learn, and Adapt

To keep winning with ABM, you must measure everything that matters:

• engagement,
• meetings,
• pipeline,
• pipeline per dollar,
• ROAS/ROI,
• revenue-won–per–account,
• average deal value,
• pipeline velocity,
• and the like.

Good news: You can see almost all of that in ZenABM (plug-and-play – no manual math needed).

ZenABM, not only tracks ad engagement at the company-level for each specific ad campaign:

But also matched ad-engaged companies to the ones in your CRM deals.

And then builds these dashboards:

Also, it tracks the movement of each company through ABM stages, so there you have your pipeline velocity too, an can also see which stage has the friction.

This is the most important part, because measurement is not just about the after-success-celebration.

You must see the progress of all accounts through all stages and see where the accounts drop out of the journey or slow down, and fix that!

ABM Tactics for Hard to Reach Audiences: Closing Thoughts

Winning over unreachable execs means ditching generic ABM playbooks.

You need surgical targeting, research-backed personalization, multi-channel precision, and value-led outreach.

Tools like ZenABM keep you honest by showing which accounts are truly moving through the funnel.

Try ZenABM for free now or book a demo!