This article is for scrappy founders looking for the most unhinged yet effective ways to do ABM.
Some of these are very clever ‘AI + webhook multi-application automations’, while others are totally different ideas altogether.
So, let’s explore 14 creative ABM tactics I fell for and maybe you’d too.
Well, ‘multiple applications tied with AI + webhook/zap’ type of automations – LinkedIn is rife with these.
Here are the top 8 examples:
George Chasiotis (Co-founder at Restartt GTM agency) shared this amazing workflow on LinkedIn:
It automates the background research that your Sales team has to do before hopping on a call booked by a new prospect in Calendly (or whatever you prefer – just swap it).
The workflow:
This one again is from George.
This automation finds companies hiring for job roles related to the services you provide and enriches them.
Here’s the workflow:
Now, if a company is running ABM campaigns, the resultant enriched account list in the CRM will add to a perfect TAL.
Performance marketing and growth specialist Parvezalam Shaikh, in her LinkedIn post, made a Chatbot that tracks each ad’s daily performance and calculates metrics like ROAS, ROI, etc.
This ensures marketers need not constantly hop between Ads Manager, Sheets, dashboards, and reports, and their ABM strategy on Meta becomes easier 🙂
Philip Lakin (Enterprise Innovation lead at Zapier) built a workaround to make the best use of his existing LinkedIn network for ABM.
He imported his entire LinkedIn network into a Zapier Table for enrichment with details such as company size and job title.
He then connected a Zapier AI Agent to the table, enabling him to ask questions in natural language, like “Show me every Executive Assistant or Chief of Staff linked to a CEO within my network.”
The agent provided a precisely filtered list, essentially building a custom LinkedIn search engine.
His team could now pinpoint prospects based on specific roles, company size, or even their most recent interactions.
The best part?
There’s no need to send them connection requests. They are part of the existing network and may be Philip’s acquaintances too!
We are a LinkedIn ads ABM tool.
So ABM professionals actively engaging with LinkedIn posts talking about ABM via LinkedIn ads are our perfect pre-leads.
Here’s how we do it:
As a result, this is what our outreach looks like:
You can tweak it like this for ABM: Once you filter out the companies running LinkedIn ads in step 3, put them on your ABM TAL. Ofc you’ll have to tweak the topic of LinkedIn posts being monitored based on your business.
Clay, I’d say, has become indispensable in AI-driven automation workflows thanks to its intuitive UI and a huge number of integrations (over 100) for enriching leads.
I mean, it was part of most of the above workflows as well.
And expectedly, LinkedIn marketers are actively showcasing innovative methods they’ve used Clay to elevate their ABM and rev ops strategies.
Below are 7 outstanding examples:
| Use Case | Clay’s Role | Real-world Example |
|---|---|---|
| Building Targeted Account Lists | Aggregates data from over 100 sources like LinkedIn and Crunchbase to curate precise account lists | Combined Apify and Clay to extract targeted Instagram leads for niche outreach |
| Identifying Competitors’ Customers | Extracts and enriches client details listed on competitors’ websites | Leveraged Claygent to scrape and enrich competitors’ case-study customer lists |
| Cleaning & Validating Lead Data | Real-time email verification, duplicate removal, and lead information updates | Verified and sanitized scraped leads, extracting accurate URLs for direct outreach |
| Enriching Leads with Multiple Data Points | Pulls information such as job titles, funding stages, and technology stacks from diverse enrichment APIs | Enhanced podcast and software-related leads through comprehensive data integration for improved segmentation |
| Scoring and Prioritizing Accounts | Develops lead-scoring criteria based on roles, funding status, and engagement indicators | Implemented sophisticated scoring to prioritize leads using role-based, funding, and intent signals |
| Generating Personalized Copy at Scale | Integrates ChatGPT with dynamic data fields to automate creation of personalized emails or landing pages | Crafted AI-driven customized outreach emails and landing pages leveraging CRM data |
| End-to-End ABM Workflow Orchestration | Consolidates enrichment, scoring, and campaign execution into a single unified workflow | Used Clay as a comprehensive hub to streamline enrichment, scoring, and outbound campaign activities seamlessly |
If you want to dig deeper, here’s our Clay for ABM guide.
ABM ops are already brutal.
And false enquiries, dodging captchas and spam filters, can make it even worse.
Here’s Tarek Reda’s (Founder at Blue Pencil Marketing Agency) workflow for automated CRM cleaning:
This workflow runs quietly in the background and keeps your data healthy without extra effort, so you can concentrate on more meaningful stuff – ABM.
If you are running ABM on LinkedIn, having company-level engagement data for each LinkedIn ad campaign automatically pushed as company properties to your CRM can save you hours of ops.
ZenABM does exactly that:
ZenABM also automatically scores your target accounts based on their current and historic engagement rate with your LinkedIn ads:
and tracks their ABM stage based on the engagement thresholds you set:
Also, as soon as an account reaches the ‘interested’ stage, ZenABM assigns a BDR to that account in your CRM:
ChatGPT’s custom GPTs weren’t that great before because of an outdated AI model and many other limitations.
The biggest limitation was the inability to teach go-to-market science to your AI and make it act like an ABM/GTM pro.
But not anymore.
Now you can upload a whole knowledge base and select the model of your choice (even smart ones like o3):
And actions, aka integrations with other tools, were already there.
So?
Now, you can build entire GTM workflows using Custom GPTS and API integrations/webhooks – a literal ABM semi-copilot (‘semi’ because a bit of human supervision is still needed).
Teams are training GPTs on their ICP criteria and buyer signals so the AI can suggest the hottest accounts and write first-draft emails/LinkedIn outreach messages, etc.
In fact, most of the automations in the previous section can be built using Custom GPTs too.
See, memes are too mainstream now and have entered the boardroom.
I mean, B2B is boring, but memes could help 🙂
Memes help you present your value proposition in the most relatable language possible.
Will Atiken, who generated 22 million impressions for himself and B2B brands using memes, suggests that memes are not about immediate conversions, but they help you impress the algorithm, so future educational and promotional content reaches your audience.
And he says consuming memes on Instagram and Reddit is the secret behind his 22 million impressions from a B2B audience.
And if you want to automate meme-posting on LinkedIn, Tarke Reda built a workflow for it:
Note: Please put credits when you share memes, or else it can land you in legal trouble!
We know ABM is about DMUs/buying committees and not individual leads.
And the best way to target these committees is to go fully multi-channel with personalized emails, LinkedIn ads, LinkedIn InMails, retargeted ads, etc.
In fact, Usergems mentions how launching sales and marketing campaigns worked better for them instead of warming up accounts for 1-2 weeks and reaching out to them with sales pitches only after the warming-up period.
With so many ads all over one’s feed and browser, people have become desensitized to banners (they call it banner blindness).
But you can attract the prospect’s attention with 1:1 hyper-personalization now by adding target company logos.
And when someone from the target account clicks, they must have a personalized microsite/landing page with the company logo again.
An example:
ABM doesn’t have to live in your silo.
Build or infiltrate the communities where your targets spend time.
Whether it’s industry Slack groups, LinkedIn circles, Discord servers, subreddits, or invite-only forums, planting your brand amidst peers will drive real influence.
Note: Brand presence in communities and niche groups isn’t about spamming comments on over-enthusiastic reactions to every thread of conversation. It’s about adding real value while subtly promoting your business.
Also, we have our own Slack community too at ZenABM. Join now!
Research suggests that storytelling can help increase conversion rates by 30%.
And this applies to ABM too.
Especially for Tier 1 and Tier 2 accounts, making case studies and white-papers that address their specific pain points can be a lucrative ABM tactic.
In fact, you can go even further with personalized and creative data-driven storytelling like GumGum.
The GumGum team had T-Mobile on its target list, but instead of throwing out generic ads or sales pitches at them, they figured out that T-Mobile’s CEO loved Batman, and they sent him a comic book about T-Mobile:
Chatbot icons can now be found at the bottom right corners of most home-pages.
But for ABM, you’ll have to go a step further and make them ‘Account-aware.’
For example, imagine a bot that says, “Hey ACME Corp! Glad you’re here” with preloaded talking points about ACME’s challenges and solutions when someone from ACME visits your site.
You can do this using IP matching tools that deanonymize the company of a visitor.
You would have seen many company profile pages replying to thought leader posts or LinkedIn, or the Duolingo bot putting ‘savage’ comments on Instagram posts.
This creative ABM tactic can actually help with driving specific accounts into the pipeline.
Like you can monitor certain target accounts’ posts and react/comment to them immediately (ofc where relevant).
Say the CFO at your target account puts a LinkedIn post in frustration about legacy tech; you can jump in with a meme or case study on how Company X solved that exact issue with your solution.
In fact, you don’t have to talk about your business every time. Staying at the top of mind is the goal here.
Pro Tip: Select Tier 1 accounts that deserve this level of effort and ask your entire employee base to interact with the account and its members’ posts to stay at the top of mind.
This ceative ABM tactic is about letting real-time signals be your campaign triggers.
Like you can set up alerts on funding rounds, new C‑suite hires, big social media buzz, etc., and auto-launch mini-campaigns the instant they fire.
For instance, if a prospect just landed venture funding, send congratulations with a relevant case study attached.
Or when a known champion from an account takes a new role, immediately email them with a welcome-back note and a custom pitch.
This “newsjacking” tactic ensures your outreach is perfectly timed.
Spraying salesy small-talk in a huge trade show where everyone is in a hurry makes no sense.
Emilia Korczynska (VP of Marketing), for instance, says big conferences fall on all fronts.
She says the multi-threaded short conversations don’t lead you anywhere, nor bring in a single intelligent insight, and adds that these events don’t help with networking either:
“Networking opportunity? If better seems bigger because of the larger catchment area, consider all the time you will spend queuing for the bathroom, and not being able to find that overpriced hotdog stand where you’re meeting someone from LinkedIn who agreed to you ‘stealing 5 minutes of their time’. Everyone’s running somewhere, tired, irritable, and no one really has the time for meaningful conversations.”
And I agree!
Niche events like SaaStanak that more and more SaaS folks are tuning to make more sense – you have a greater chance of meeting and having a genuine conversation with your ICP in a live niche micro-event than a huge conference.
In fact, you can host mini-events or roundtables exclusively for your targets. This could be a private workshop with 5–10 execs from different key accounts, a virtual VIP summit, or an invite-only webinar with a hot industry thought leader. The intimacy makes it special (and share-worthy on LinkedIn).
Sometimes, the old-school in-person touch still seals the deal.
Like, maybe invite a CEO for a private dinner.
Or if you’re really bold, launch a public stunt aimed at a big fish.
For example, development shop Intridea once hung a cheeky billboard right outside Ogilvy’s NYC office reading “ogle this, Ogilvy” and linking to a custom URL with funny GIFs and a pitch.
It was so audacious it begged for a response, and it worked.
Many tools brag features like account intent analysis, giving you third-party data about what the members at your target accounts are searching for on the web.
Yes, this helps understand their pain points and if they are in-market for your product/service.
But what if I tell you that instead of using third-party intent data, you can know what about your product/services resonates with each of your prospects by embedding intent in ads themselves.
You can make different ad creatives showcasing different features of your product/service.
Then you can group ads having similar intent (i.e. feature/quality being advertised by the ad) into campaign groups.
For instance, if you sell a product management tool, you can have three different campaign groups showing different intents (e.g., product analytics, user-onboarding, and all-in-one).
Something like this:
And then ZenABM will track each account’s engagement with each of your ad campaigns and campaign groups and put all companies showing similar intent in one place:
Plus, it will push intent as a company property to your CRM:
This will help your BDRs know what to talk about while reaching out to hot accounts instead of blasting generic pitches.
The ABM landscape rewards boldness, creativity, and precision. These 14 innovative tactics will ensure your brand cuts through the noise, making memorable impressions that lead directly to high-value conversions. But to execute seamlessly, you need the right tools, especially when integrating complex data-driven approaches.
With ZenABM, you gain unparalleled visibility into your ABM campaigns on LinkedIn. Track real-time engagement, automate intent signals directly into your CRM, and effortlessly orchestrate your outreach.
Ready to supercharge your ABM campaigns?
