How to set up and run outbound ABM campaigns for your Fintech (with SDRs)

In a recent webinar, Alex Gasson, CEO of Delta-v, shared practical tips for planning and running outbound ABM campaigns using SDRs. He talked about creating target lists, planning outreach across different channels, using data to book better meetings, and more. 

What is account-based marketing (ABM)?

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Account-based marketing (ABM) focuses on targeting and engaging specific high-value accounts rather than focusing on individuals in a broad audience. Generally, this involves personalising marketing efforts and messaging to address specific needs or challenges of individual target accounts.

This approach works best when selling high-value solutions to larger organisations.

Different ABM approaches

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There are a few different approaches to ABM, which you can use to slice and dice your ABM campaign.

On-to-one

This approach targets a single account with a dedicated marketing campaign. For example, if you’re selling reconciliation software to a global bank with multiple divisions and operations across countries, you have many opportunities to sell into different parts of the organisation.

In this case, it makes sense to run a focused campaign aimed solely at unlocking that one account.

One-to-few

This works best when you’re targeting a small group of similar accounts, usually tens to hundreds, that share clear common traits. Because of this commonality, you can use similar messaging and targeting across all of them.

One-to-many

Use this approach to reach high hundreds or low thousands of accounts with programmatic messaging that feels personalised.

Outbound ABM using SDRs works best for one-to-few and one-to-many campaigns. For one-to-one, you might prefer full-cycle sales reps or account execs rather than SDRs doing outbound.

Account-based marketing channels

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Let’s look at how a marketing-led account-based motion is different or similar to an account-based SDR motion.

Account-based marketing workflow

Start by going through the process of selecting target accounts, then identifying contacts within those accounts.

Next, use your marketing channels to nurture those contacts and drive conversion – getting hand raisers to interact with your forms and book demos or talk to your sales team.

You’ll generally use:

• Email marketing
• Paid activity to custom audiences you’ve built, and
• Personalised landing pages.

Account-based SDR motion

If you’re starting SDR outbound from scratch, they must identify, research, and qualify accounts against your ICP, find contacts matching buyer personas, load them into cadences (phone, email, LinkedIn), engage them, and get them to meetings or demos with sales.

Account-based SDR and ABM overlap heavily at the top of the funnel with account selection and contact identification. The difference lies in channels and conversion: marketing drives awareness and relies on inbound conversions, while SDRs run 1:1 calls, emails, and LinkedIn messages to fetch meetings.

How to use SDRs to support ABM efforts

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If you want to run an outbound ABM campaign, the first step is to define your strategy – everything else will flow from that.

Key questions to ask when building out our strategy:

• Which product/solution/use case are we focusing on?
• Who is our target audience? (most important to get right)
  • ICP
• Buying committee (buyer personas)
• From there, clarify any specific regions or markets you might be targeting.
• Think about how big your target audience is – how many target accounts you have and how many buyer personas sit within each account to understand the total audience size.
• Lastly, figure out your campaign goals.
  • Is it audience engagement?
  • Are you looking to get more intel on accounts, or are you looking to drive conversions – meeting books, credit booked or pipeline created.

Using SDRs to run outbound ABM campaigns can be expensive, but they are going to drive qualified pipeline you can feed directly into your sales team.

Defining the target audience

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Ideal customer profile (ICP)

Define what type of companies you are targeting, their size and locations.

If you’re targeting large or public organisations where revenue data is accessible, revenue is a great metric for company size. If you are targeting mid-market or private companies, reliable revenue numbers are harder to get, so use proxies like headcount, which you can find on LinkedIn.

Think about other organisational factors needed for an account to be a good fit. This could be technographic factors, such as what technology they use, firmographic factors such as maturity, and team makeup.

Buyer personas

If you’re using SDRs for account-based outreach, getting this right is critical.

First, understanding personas deeply lets you create persona-specific messaging – putting relevant messages in front of people in your ICP.

Things to cover in a persona: typical job titles (there may be many), example LinkedIn profiles, responsibilities, goals, problems and pains you help them solve, and how they currently solve those problems.

Also capture buying triggers, what to listen for as opportunities, how they expect to benefit from your service, and common objections to engaging with you.

Target account list building

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You’ll live and die by the quality of the data you build your campaign around, so start by building a list of target accounts and knowing where you get that data from.

ABM campaign data sources

• If you’re a well-established business with a CRM and a lot of data, your CRM might be your best starting point for building a target account list.
• Alternatively, pull data from B2B data providers or a combination of those – no single provider has a perfect view.
• Focus on industry data sources, which are often the most reliable source of truth.
• Conference lists with high ICP concentration are another source.
• AI tooling – not perfect but useful for building targeted account lists.

Once the data is sourced, start the build process – this typically requires a sales, marketing, or rev ops person to do the work.

ABM campaign list build process (Sales/Marketing/Rev Ops)

• Search and filter if using CRM or data providers.
• If using alternative sources, you might need to do some web scraping.
• Consolidate and dedupe accounts across sources.
• Enrich accounts with basic information: company descriptions, headcount numbers, HQ locations.
• Set up a list with qualification criteria from ICP and build this into a Google Sheet, Excel, or your CRM.

See a practical example here.

Account research process

Channels for outbound ABM

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If you’re getting SDRs to look into accounts, there are three channels you’re going to be using: a combination of email, phone, and LinkedIn.

Email

• Email as a channel has a huge amount of traffic.
• Think about email as a mechanism for creating awareness and consideration, but we don’t necessarily expect it to drive conversion.
• We don’t necessarily expect people to reply to the emails, but it helps to warm up contacts for when we call them or reach out on LinkedIn.
• Create email templates specific to each persona.
• 3–5 emails in a sequence.
• If you have nailed your targeting and messaging, you’ll see a reply rate of 2–5%.
• Hitting 5% means you have an incredible campaign.

Phone

• The primary channel for driving conversion.
• Two uses for the phone:
  • Having the conversation to the point where they want to do a demo or meet with you.
  • Qualifying prospects – talking to the right person at the right company with the right problems for sales to engage.
• Purpose of phone: drive conversion and qualify prospects.
• Assets needed: core scripts, objection handling framework, competitive battle cards.
• SDR activity: attempt to dial a contact at least 10 times in a sequence.
• Monitor connect rate – aim for around 5% or better (1 in 20 dials result in a conversation).

LinkedIn

• Channel for outbound: LinkedIn connection requests.
• If connection accepted: LinkedIn message or otherwise LinkedIn InMail.
• Useful when prospects don’t respond on email or phone but engage on LinkedIn.
• Build into the sequence structure.

Typically 16 touches: around 5 emails, 10 dials, and a couple of LinkedIn touches.

Outbound ABM messaging concepts

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When you’re doing outbound, there are two key concepts that you want to be thinking about: relevance and personalisation.

Relevance is about creating messaging that’s focused on the pain points and benefits we know are relevant to the specific personas we’re targeting. It’s not just relevant to an account or ICP, but should be very specific to a certain persona.

Then in terms of personalisation, we haven’t found it to reliably do anything other than create work – it doesn’t drive results.

Baseline SDR metrics for outbound ABM

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Generally, in an account-based outbound motion to large enterprise, an SDR is enrolling around 240 new contacts per month into sequences, sending around 600 mails, doing around 1,200 dials, around 360 LinkedIn touches, resulting in around six qualified meetings. 

Tie this together and analyse how campaigns are running. Look at volume like contacts, emails sent, and dials made. More critically, look at conversion points.

The key is to track how many meetings were booked and how many actually happened. Look at how many contacts it takes to book a meeting, which is the contact conversion rate. A good metric is around 3%.

One in 33 people turns into a meeting. Break down outreach by persona. Run persona-specific sequences and gather data.

Over time, you might drop personas that take too much effort to convert.