ABM Strategy Template: The Ultimate Tactical Guide (and Free Templates)

I’d say this isn’t an article but a giveaway.

I have shared all that you need to build your ABM strategy template and many free, ready-made templates for different steps of the strategy.

I have also discussed how ZenABM can help your ABM motion.

Go grab all of it 😉

ABM Strategy Template: Quick Summary

ABM Strategy Template Steps: Define revenue-aligned goals & KPIs → Identify & tier target accounts (1:1, 1:few, 1:many) → Build detailed ICP using CRM, LinkedIn, enrichment tools → Map account data, decision-makers & SPICED pain points → Craft persona-specific messaging & value props → Structure ABM campaigns by intent, stage & channel (start with LinkedIn) → Plan content by funnel stage (identified → aware → interested → consideration → selecting) → Launch coordinated ads, emails & sales outreach → Organize assets & campaign hierarchy (ABM campaign → group → campaign → ad) → Enable sales with content, training, & engagement alerts → Monitor account progression & campaign performance in real-time → Use tools like ZenABM to automate attribution, CRM syncing & dashboards → Optimize based on ROAS, stage conversion & pipeline velocity.

Free Templates:

• ICP Template
• ABM Budget Calculator
• Account Map/Dossier Templates: Download Template 1, Download Template 2
• Wouter Dieleman’s SPICED-Driven ABM Account Mapping Template
• Intent-Based ABM Campaign Structure Template
• ABM Stages Framework Example
• Campaign and Ad Asset Management Template: Excel Version, Notion Version

Tool Stack for Your ABM Strategy Template:

• CRM: Salesforce, HubSpot
• Marketing Automation: Marketo, Pardot, HubSpot
• Advertising: LinkedIn Ads, Demandbase, RollWorks
• ABM/Analytics: ZenABM (LinkedIn ad analytics, automatic CRM sync, intent tagging, company-level de-anonymization, built-in ad ROI and attribution dashboards)
• Data Enrichment: ZoomInfo, Clearbit, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Clay
• Sales Engagement: Salesloft, Outreach.io
• Collaboration & Assets: Notion, Excel, Asana
• Direct Mail/Gifting: Sendoso, Alyce

What is an ABM Strategy Template and Why Do You Need One?

An ABM strategy template is a structured project plan that captures your entire ABM program, ensuring alignment and preventing overlooked details.

It organizes complex campaigns like managing dozens of ad assets, aligns marketing, sales, and RevOps teams around shared accounts and KPIs, and ensures consistency in naming conventions and asset labeling.

Additionally, a well-designed ABM strategy template integrates smoothly with tools like your CRM or ABM platforms (e.g., ZenABM), enabling accurate attribution and smooth execution.

What Does an ABM Strategy Template Include?

An ABM strategy template typically covers all the foundational elements of your program in a structured format (spreadsheet, Notion doc, etc.), such as:

• Target Account List & Tiers: Which accounts are in each tier (Tier 1, 2, 3) and why.
• Buyer Personas: Key contacts/roles to engage at each account and their pain points.
• Campaign Structure: How you’ll group campaigns by intent, funnel stage, and channel.
• Content and Offers: Messaging and content assets planned for each persona and stage.
• Channels & Tactics: The channels (LinkedIn, email, events, etc.) and specific tactics (ad types, outbound touches) for each campaign.
• Timeline and Ownership: When each touch launches, and who is responsible.
• Metrics & KPIs: pipeline goals, engagement targets, etc., for each campaign.

Approaches and Tiered Account Strategies for Your ABM Strategy Template

Before filling in your ABM strategy template, clarify what “type” of ABM you’re running and segment your target accounts accordingly:

Why Tiering?

Tiering allows you to allocate effort where it matters most and prevent overspending on tier 3 accounts.

Like, do you want to send a hyper-personalized creative video ad that costs $500 to a prospect account with a predicted deal of $250?

Pro Tip: Many teams kick off ABM with some one-to-many plays to gauge interest and quick wins, then double down on the most engaged accounts with one-to-few or one-to-one efforts. You, to,o don’t have to be stuck with this tier triangle:

But I don’t straight-up call it dead either, like ABM expert Rhiannon Blackwell (ABM Leader at PwC) said in a guide by Momentum ITSMA.

But here’s the deeper insight she added: “We need to be more flexible and responsive, moving beyond the layers of the triangle to adopt a dynamic, client-centric strategy that aligns with today’s complex market.”

Bottom Line: Tiering is not just about deal value, and an account’s tier isn’t static. Mid-value accounts can always be treated as tier 1 accounts if you see great engagement.

Let’s get to the steps for building your ABM strategy template now.

Step 1: Define Goals and KPIs Aligned to Revenue in Your ABM Strategy Template

RevOps leaders need to have clear goals and connect them directly to revenue outcomes.

So, in your template, create a section for Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for the ABM program.

Key points to cover:

Revenue & Pipeline Targets and Ad Spend Budget

Set a revenue (closed won) target for ABM.

And calculate the corresponding pipeline based on your historic close rate.

For example, if your goal is to close $1M in new business from ABM, and your sales close rate is 50%, you know you need $2M in qualified pipeline.

And for ad spend budget, work backwards from revenue to pipeline to budget.

Like at Userpilot, they set a goal of $3.5M in pipeline for the year and an annual ABM budget of $350K, essentially planning for $10 in pipeline for every $1 in spend.

Btw, if you need help with calculating ad spend budget based on the ‘pipeline per dollar’ metric you desire and other things like revenue target and close rate, our free ABM Budget Calculator can help.

Account Engagement Goals

Just because it’s ABM, it doesn’t mean you cannot build some awareness along the way, right?

So, tracking account engagement at all stages should be set as a priority in your ABM strategy template.

For instance, out of 100 target accounts, you might aim for 60 to become “aware” (engaged with at least one ad or touch), 30 to show “interest” (e.g. multiple engagements or a website visit), and 10 to enter a sales conversation (SQL/opportunity stage).

Also, tracking the number of accounts that progress from one stage to the other will help you find the crack.

ZenABM, by showing the number of accounts that moved from one stage to the other, helps you with that:

And yeah, this 5-staged set-up is the one I recommend: Identified → Aware → Interested → Consideration → Opportunity → Customer.

I’ll talk about this stage mapping in detail soon, and here.

Leading Indicator Metrics

Include goals for early indicators that your campaign is working. This could be a number of target accounts that clicked an ad, content downloads by persona, meeting requests, etc. For example, “25% of target accounts to engage (click or visit site) in the first 2 months” could be a goal.

Efficiency Metrics

Beyond the absolute pipeline, measure efficiency metrics.

I suggest these as non-negotiable ones:

• Cost per account engaged
• Cost per opportunity
• Pipeline-to-spend ratio (shows how well you’re using your budget)
• ROAS

Plus, these metrics are to be calculated at each level and for each campaign (if you run it like that), i.e. campaign groups, campaign, and ABM campaign (more on this later).

Note: If you run ABM primarily on LinkedIn, ZenABM matches the engaged companies with the deals in your CRM to calculate these effectiveness and revenue metrics for you (No math. Yay!):

Step 2: Identify Target Accounts and Tier Them (ICP Development)

Start by teaming up with Sales (and Customer Success, if applicable) to define your ICP and pick target accounts.

Sales reps have ground-level insights on which deals closed fastest or which prospects show promise. Host a workshop to ask, “Which accounts closed quickly or were the best wins last year, and why?” Look for patterns in industry, company size, use case, trigger events, etc.

ABM is all about sales–marketing alignment, so this joint exercise not only sharpens your ICP but also gets buy-in from sales on the account list.

Here’s an ICP template you can fill out and circulate to all departments for approval:

Also, add these tools to your ABM strategy template. They’ll help with data and enrichment:

• LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Use filters for firmographics (e.g. “SaaS companies in North America with 200–1000 employees that recently raised Series B”). Sales Nav can give you a starting list, which you can export and further score based on your ICP in Clay.
• CRM & Marketing Data: Export companies from your CRM that match your ICP or have shown interest (e.g. high website visits or past leads). Sort by fit and engagement. You might find “low-hanging fruit” accounts that engaged with content but never converted.
• Third-Party Data/Enrichment: You can enrich account data with products like ZoomInfo, Clearbit, or Clay. Some teams also use technographic and intent data to refine the list. For example, if one of your campaigns is promoting a new feature, you might filter accounts using a competitor’s product or missing that feature. Userpilot, for instance,  targeted accounts that were using an old competitor but lacked a key capability and used BuiltWith and Clay to find those companies.
• Tier Assignment: Once you have a master list of potential accounts, break it into Tier 1, 2, and 3 as we discussed before.

Step 3: Map Account Data, Decision-Making Unit, and Pain Points

For each target account (at least for Tier 1 and 2), make an account dossier with all the data about that account.

It should not just include the firmographics and technographics but also contain details like pain points, decision makers, target personas, etc.

Here’s a free template for that:

Here’s a similar one for Excel users:

Download it here.

I further suggest layering this step with the SPICED strategy, like Wouter Dieleman suggests in his LinkedIn post:

According to this framework, for each target account (or each segment of accounts), you’d outline:

• Situation (e.g., “Acme is running on legacy software from 2010 and expanding globally”)
• Pain (“their legacy system can’t support multi-region, causing outages”)
• Impact (“downtime costs them $50k/hour, hurting their growth”)
• Critical Event (“they have an IPO next year, need to fix this before then”)
• Decision process (maybe “CIO and CFO will decide by Q3”).

Wouter even suggests mapping SPICED to each buying committee member’s perspective. E.g., Pain/Impact for the IT Director might differ from Pain/Impact for the CFO.

Once you have mapped all the firmos and DMUs of each account, including all the personas in that account and their SPICED elements, each dossier should look something like this:

If you don’t want to use the SPICED-driven template, opt for the simpler one that I just shared.

Step 4: Craft Value Propositions and Messaging for Each Account (or Segment)

With target personas defined, outline your core messaging and value propositions for each account or segment. This part of the ABM strategy template ensures you have a compelling story to tell each target account, aligned to their needs.

For example, if you’re running an ABM campaign aimed at fintech companies, the overarching message might be about “driving customer engagement in fintech.”

But it will be voiced differently to a CTO vs. a COO.

In your template, you might have a section that says:

• Campaign Theme/Intent: e.g. “Improve Product Adoption (Onboarding)” or “Reduce Cloud Costs” – basically the main problem area you’re addressing in that campaign
• Persona 1 (CTO) – Key Message: e.g. “Cut your cloud hosting costs by 30% with unified analytics.” (Speaking to the CTO’s cost concern in technical terms)
• Persona 2 (VP Product) – Key Message: e.g. “Accelerate feature adoption with in-app guidance, without relying on engineering.” (Solving a VP Product’s pain of driving adoption without more dev resources)
• Persona 3 (CEO) – Key Message: e.g. “Increase customer lifetime value by improving onboarding – impact your ARR directly.” (High-level outcome for an executive)

Each of these messages addresses the same product capability but frames it for what that person cares about. This messaging matrix should be captured in your template so that content creators and sales reps can easily reference it.

Step 5: Build ABM Campaign Structure and Content Strategy

Now, it’s time you build your entire campaign structure:

Decide On The Advertising Channel and Tactics

Ok, so for “Where should I show my ads?”, I strongly recommend LinkedIn ads.

Because LinkedIn is the largest B2B social platform there is.

LinkedIn gives you the option of targeting specific companies, personas, look-alikes, and demographics – I mean, the capability to narrow down to the perfect audience is the best on LinkedIn.

Plus, other options like display ads are just disappointing (Hello, bot fraud and false positives):

Also, deanonymizing the companies clicking your display ads is not inherently provided by DSPs. You have to use third-party IP matching tools for that.

Now these IP matching tools are just too inaccurate (accuracy tops at 42%):

On the contrary, LinkedIn ad tracking with company-level deanonymization is something you get easily in LinkedIn campaign manager:

Here, the details are rolled up to the whole ad account. With ZenABM, you can see the same data for each individual campaign:

With all that said, I recommend you try LinkedIn. At least in the start. You can always expand later.

Build The LinkedIn Ad Campaign Structure

Here’s how to map out your LinkedIn ad campaign structure in your ABM strategy template:

Account Targeting

Use LinkedIn Matched Audiences to upload your target account list into Campaign Manager. You’ll need at least 300 companies in a list to match (for smaller segments, you might group Tier 1 accounts into one list to meet the size requirement). Also layer on job title or function targeting so that your ads reach the right personas at those accounts (e.g. target “CTO, VP Engineering, Head of IT” titles within the list of accounts).

Campaign Structure

Plan LinkedIn Campaign Groups and Campaigns aligned with the other aspects of your ABM strategy template.

A best practice is to group your ads by intent or theme in Campaign Groups.

For instance, if you have two value propositions (say Feature A and Feature B), create separate campaign groups for each intent. This way, you can later see which intent an account is engaging with most.

Within each group, have campaigns for different ad formats or funnel stages.

Example: Campaign Group “Improve Onboarding” containing: an Awareness campaign (sponsored content ads with a pain-point post), a Consideration campaign (ads offering a webinar or case study on onboarding), etc.

Planning this structure in your template (maybe as a hierarchical list of campaigns under each ABM initiative) will ensure you hit the ground running when building them in LinkedIn.

At Userpilot, they built a similar campaign based on intent:

Ad Formats

Decide which LinkedIn ad types to use for each purpose and map that in your ABM strategy template:

• Sponsored Content (single image ads): Great for broad reach in feed; according to one case, single-image ads and video ads tended to get the best click-through rates in an ABM program.
• Video Ads: Good for storytelling or demos in feed (and often high engagement, though you pay per view).
• Carousel Ads: Useful to showcase multiple benefits or a multi-page story.
• Conversation Ads (InMail): Highly recommended for ABM, especially for higher tiers. You can send targeted InMail messages that appear in the person’s LinkedIn inbox. For Tier 1, personalize it heavily (perhaps even have the sales rep or an executive send it). For Tier 2, you might use the Conversation Ad format with predefined response buttons – guiding the prospect with questions or offering choices (e.g. “Interested in a case study? 👉 Yes/No”).
• Text Ads and Dynamic Ads: These are sidebar ads. They are low-cost and can be used as extra touch points, but generally have lower engagement. Some ABM practitioners use LinkedIn Text Ads (TLAs) as cheap awareness plays, though they noted TLAs are better for top-of-funnel visibility than for conversions.
• LinkedIn Posts: Don’t forget organic content. Plan a cadence for posting on your company page or key employees’ profiles (e.g. your CEO or evangelist posts thought leadership relevant to your targets). These posts can be subtly amplified to your target accounts by using hashtags or by employees engaging with target accounts’ posts (showing up in their feed). It’s harder to track, but adds credibility and air cover.
• Frequency & Budget: Determine how you’ll allocate budget by tier. For instance, you might allocate a higher ad spend per account for Tier 1 (since it’s a smaller list, you can afford higher bids to ensure they see your content often), whereas Tier 3 gets a modest budget just to stay on their radar. Also plan frequency caps. You don’t want to overdo it. A reasonable approach is to start with enough budget for each target to see 2-3 impressions per week in early stages, then ramp up frequency for those who engage.

Pro Tip: Many ABM pros first run a very pocket-friendly awareness campaign. Then they make their TAL including specific companies that engaged with the awareness campaign. For this, Text ads and Spotlight ads are the cheapest. Tim Davidson (ABM expert), for instance, shared how text ads and spotlight ads helped him get 213,478 impressions for a little expenditure of $276. That’s a CPM $1.12. Some would call it dirt cheap!

One more thing: For ads, we are sticking to LinkedIn. But other forms of content will require other channels. Consider these in your ABM strategy template:

• Email Nurture: 3–5 personalized emails aligned with ad themes; plain-text, consistent sender; coordinate with sales.
• BDR/Sales: Trigger personalized outreach after key account actions (e.g., 5+ clicks); provide scripts.
• Web Personalization: Tailor website and landing page messaging using company or industry specifics.
• Events/Webinars: Host targeted events or exclusive webinars; integrate ABM into trade shows.
• Direct Mail: Send strategic physical gifts timed with digital touches, automated via Sendoso/Reachdesk.

Design Your ABM Stages Framework

So we discussed that you should start with LinkedIn as the ad platform and make intent-based ABM campaigns in a hierarchy.

There’s one more layer to it – stages.

Not just intent, but your ad content and other channels like emails must also respect the account’s stage in the buying journey.

And what should the ABM stages in your ABM strategy template look like?

I suggest using Kyle Poyar’s framework for that:

Userpilot, for instance, made this ABM stages structure inspired by Kyle’s framework:

• Identified – basically all the accounts we’re 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

The accounts in each state were shown different content (ads and emails) by Userpilot. The further down the funnel, the more product-oriented the content.

I suggest a similar approach to you.

Build a Solid ABM Content Strategy for Each Stage and Segment

So, you have your ABM campaign structure and stages set up in your ABM strategy template.

Now, it’s time we talk about the content for each stage in your ABM strategy template:

• “Identified” (Pre-awareness) Stage: These are target accounts that have not yet engaged. The goal here is to grab attention. Content should be high-level and provocative, focusing on thought leadership or big industry pain points (not a product pitch). Examples: blog posts or LinkedIn posts on industry trends, infographics, short videos, or maybe a bold stat (“Did you know 60% of CIOs plan to cut SaaS spend by 20% this year?”). For one-to-many broad campaigns, you might use Sponsored Content ads on LinkedIn that highlight a key insight or question, to make your targets stop scrolling. The KPI at this stage is an initial engagement – a click, view, or social interaction – which moves them to “aware.”
• Awareness → Interest Stage: Now the account has shown some awareness (visited your site, clicked an ad, etc.). At this interest stage, you want to deepen engagement with more educational, value-adding content. Examples: whitepapers, deep-dive blog posts, on-demand webinars, or interactive content (e.g. assessments, calculators). It’s still mostly about their problem and how to solve it, but you can start subtly introducing your solution. Also, this is a great stage to deploy LinkedIn Conversation Ads or InMail for higher tiers – e.g., sending a Tier 1 account a personalized invite to an executive roundtable, or a Tier 2 account an interactive quiz via LinkedIn message. In fact, a common play is to run LinkedIn Conversation Ads for Tier 1 with a single CTA (tailored invite or offer), while using automated chat sequences for Tier 2 with a few options to guide them.
• Consideration Stage: This corresponds to accounts that are actively evaluating solutions (or at least have shown strong interest, like multiple content engagements or a request for more info). Now it’s time for product-focused content that differentiates you. Examples: case studies relevant to their industry, ROI calculators, detailed product videos, comparison guides (“[Your Company] vs. [Competitor]”), and if possible, personalized demos or workshops for Tier 1 accounts. You might invite the account to a live demo meeting or offer a free trial if applicable. For advertising, retarget these warm accounts with ads highlighting customer success stories or specific features addressing the pain they’ve shown interest in.
• Decision Stage (Selection): Finally, when an account is in vendor selection (say, they’ve engaged with sales or are in an active opportunity), your content should help seal the deal. This might not be mass content at all, but highly personalized deliverables: a custom proposal, a security architecture doc, or ROI business case made specifically for that account. However, marketing can still assist with scalable touches. For example, targeted ads reassuring the buyer (like “#1 Rated by Gartner” or “Used by 3 of your industry’s top 5 companies” type social proof). Also, customer references or an invitation to speak with an existing happy customer can be powerful at this stage (coordinate that through sales).

Step 6: Organize Campaigns and Assets with a Management Template

Once you have mapped out the ad content and other assets for different intent-based campaign groups, stages. and ad formats, you’ll end up with a lot of assets.

You need an organized template to store each ad asset so that you know the intent, stage and ad format it belongs to in a second.

Here’s one in Notion:

View & copy the Notion ABM Campaign template here.

And here’s another one if you prefer Google Sheets:

Download this ABM Campaign Management Template in Google Sheets here. 

How Do These Templates Work?

In these templates, each add asset belongs to various objects: LinkedIn Ad, LinkedIn Ad Campaign, LinkedIn Campaign Group, and ABM Campaign.

As we discussed before, these are the hierarchies of your ABM campaign structure:

• ABM Campaign (top level): Your broad go‑to‑market motion aimed at a distinct audience or region (e.g., “US Expansion,” “DACH Mid‑Market”). It can blend LinkedIn ads with events, gifting, and display.
• LinkedIn Campaign Group: A folder that unites multiple ad campaigns under one intent theme, whether quantitative (“High,” “Mid,” “Low”) or qualitative (“Analytics Feature,” “Feedback Feature”). Consistency of intent is the rule here.
• LinkedIn Campaign: A sub‑folder that houses ads of a single inventory type (image, video, text, document, etc.). Each format gets its own campaign for clean budgeting and reporting.
• LinkedIn Ad (creative): The individual asset users see. Every ad should be tagged to its Campaign, Campaign Group, and ABM Campaign before upload to avoid misplacement and ensure accurate intent‑level reporting.

Step 7: Launch and Execute Your ABM Strategy Template (and Align Sales)

With planning done and assets in hand, it’s go time.

Launch your ABM campaigns and closely manage execution.

Coordinated Launch

Launch your campaigns in a synchronised manner. For example, you might start LinkedIn ads on the first of the month, send the first emails a few days later, and have BDRs ready to call into any engagement spikes by week 2. Ensure your sales team is aware of the timeline. E.g., “Ads will start showing to accounts on Jan 10, expect an increase in website visits; by Jan 20, we’ll pass you a list of engaged accounts to begin calling”. This prevents the classic disconnect of sales saying, “I didn’t know this prospect saw our campaign.”

Real-Time Monitoring

Once live, monitor performance daily, especially in the first couple of weeks.

Your template can include a section or linked dashboard for interim metrics (impressions, clicks, etc.).

ZenABM has built-in plug-and-play dashboards for the same:

Also, many ABM teams set up CRM alerts for hot engagement.

This can be done via your marketing automation or tools like ZenABM, which push engagement data into CRM:

Sales & Marketing Sync

Here are some tips for sales and marketing alignment.

Note these down in your ABM strategy template:

• Add a weekly ABM stand-up with marketing and sales (and RevOps) in your ABM strategy template to review progress on target accounts. Look at which accounts moved stages, which ones stalled, and decide jointly on next steps.
• Implement joint account planning for Tier 1 accounts.
• Enable and train sales: Make sure sales knows what content has been sent to the account and how to leverage it. If marketing published a new case study as part of the campaign, ensure BDRs have that and know the talking points. Consider holding a short training when you launch a big ABM initiative to walk sales through the content and messaging (“Here’s the ads they will see, here’s the whitepaper we’ll send them, and here’s a sample call script to reference that content”).
• Share intent signals with sales: If you’re capturing account-level intent or engagement data (e.g. which topics an account is interacting with most), pipe that to your sales team. This could be via CRM fields (“Intent topic: Analytics”). ZenABM helps with that:

• Service Level Agreement (SLA): Establish an internal SLA for follow-up in your ABM strategy template. If marketing hands over a Marketing Qualified Account (MQA) or a highly engaged account, sales should follow up within X days/hours. ABM opportunities are often fleeting (a buying committee might be researching in a short window), so a fast follow-up can double your chance of connecting while interest is hot. ZenABM helps with this too. The accounts that reach the interested stage are also assigned to a BDR in your CRM automatically by ZenABM:

Step 8: Dedicate a Reporting and Analytics Section in Your ABM Strategy Template

In your ABM strategy template, dedicate a section to Analytics & Reporting.

For this, you’ll need to set up a master dashboard (in your CRM or BI tool) that aggregates the key metrics for all your ABM campaigns.

At minimum, track:

• Pipeline
• Wins/Revenue
• Conversion rates
• Ad engagement metrics
• Ad spend
• Account progression
• ROI, ROAS, etc.
• Pipeline per dollar spent

And as we discussed about the campaign structure, your dashboard should show the above metrics at all levels: ABM campaign, campaign group, and LinkedIn ad campaign.

ZenABM gives you all these metrics in its dashboard at all levels with zero manual effort:

• Source of ad engagement and spend-related metrics for each company and campaign in ZenABM is LinkedIn’s official ads API.
• Source of deal values for ROI calculation and attribution is your CRM.

Tools for Your ABM Strategy Template

Here’s a list of tools you must consider in your ABM strategy template:

ABM Strategy Template: Wrapping Up

Hope you found the ABM strategy template guide valuable, and please download the free templates without hesitation 🙂

Also, add ZenABM to your ABM strategy template for free now or book a demo to know more!