The Allbound ABM Framework

Read time: 10 minutes

Written by:

Eddie Reynolds
Founder & CEO

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Your organization invests heavily in sophisticated marketing strategies—running webinars, offering white papers, asking people to fill out forms, etc. But here’s the truth: most of these “leads” have zero interest in talking to sales. Just like ZoomInfo-sourced contacts, they match our ICP—but they’re not hand-raisers.

Sure, we have people that raise their hand and request a demo, but that represents a small fraction of our total inbound marketing leads. The rest are just outbound in disguise.

So now, we have one set of salespeople chasing “inbound” leads, and another chasing “outbound” leads. We’ve fooled ourselves into thinking these two motions are different, creating overlap and inefficiencies in doing so.

In this Framework, I’m going to show you how to eliminate that overlap, eliminate these inefficiencies, and get your sales teams working together to convert the most revenue with the least cost.

Step 1: Separate the Hand-Raisers

Our most valuable leads, by far, are Hand-Raisers. They’re explicitly asking for demos and meetings with sales. They’re also reaching out to our competitors at the same time and the first vendor to respond to these leads usually wins the deal.

Unfortunately, too many GTM Teams mix these leads in with all the others, losing millions in revenue due to poor Speed to Lead. On top of this, we’re often sending our most valuable leads to the least experienced sales reps, Inbound SDRs, further diminishing our conversion rates.

To fix this, and dramatically improve conversion to revenue, we should separate these leads and route them to the most experienced reps that can respond quickly. Then, we need to carefully measure Speed to Lead and Conversion Rate for these leads to ensure we’re not letting anything slip through the cracks.

Step 2: Aggregate Your Data

Our Hand-Raises should get top priority. After that, we need to identify which leads and accounts our reps should be working on next. To do this, we start by aggregating all available data. We can combine marketing engagement, firmographic and technographic data, third-party intent signals, and even customer usage data for expansion sales. Anything indicating potential buying intent must be aggregated to provide a complete picture.

Step 3: Build a Comprehensive Lead Score

Now that we’ve aggregated all our data, we can build a comprehensive Lead Score that goes far beyond marketing engagement to incorporate:

Marketing interactions (webinars, downloads)
Firmographic data (company size, revenue)
Technographic data (technologies they use)
Third-party intent signals (searches, topics)
Existing customer usage data

As with any Lead Score this starts with an initial formula and then must be iterated on over time. To do this, we need to look at what’s worked for us in inbound and outbound prospecting and do our best to combine them into one Lead Score.

We can also include existing customer usage as an option to be truly holistic. Existing customers that are healthy are usually far better opportunities than any prospect—save maybe our hand-raisers.

Here’s an example of a Lead Score capturing all this criteria together.

Step 4: Translate Lead Scores into Account Scores

Lead Scores are great but they miss the bigger picture: Who is more likely to buy? Account 1 has one person engaging with our marketing content. Account 2 has five people with the same level of engagement. All other things being equal, isn’t Account 2 more likely to buy?

To address this, we need to translate our Lead Score into an Account Score. We first look at company-specific scores like Firmographic and Technographic data and then add in contact-specific scores like marketing engagement. In this simple example, Account 2 would have a higher Account Score.

Reality isn’t that simple, so here’s a more realistic example of two accounts with their Account Scores:

Step 5: Segment to Improve Messaging and Conversion

We now have Account Scores to identify and prioritize the most valuable accounts to target. How do we maximize our conversion rates? We need to have the right messaging.

It’s extremely hard for reps to form the right messaging if they are bouncing from one type of company and one type of person to the next on every call or email. We can make their jobs easier, their workflow faster, and improve messaging and conversion rates by segmenting accounts and contacts into buckets that will resonate with certain messaging.

Need help implementing an Allbound ABM Process in your organization?

Reach out to us!

We start with the companies and ask what industries, sectors, and/or types of companies we want to target which require different messaging. We might target different industries that all require different messaging. Or, our value prop might be the same for all small businesses and different for larger enterprises. Either way, we need to identify these different types of companies.

Then we need to ask the same questions about the personas in those companies. When we combine them together we create segments where one set of messaging should resonate with every persona in every type of company in that segment.

Here’s a simple example of this:

We can all easily imagine how the messaging that resonates most for a VP of Sales in a B2B SaaS company might be very different from what resonates most for a CMO in a Professional Services company—or even a VP of Sales in that same company.

By creating these segments, we help our reps work faster and form better messaging by focusing on one segment at a time.

Step 6: Map Out Your Processes

To focus on these segments, we need to map our processes and build our sales sequences. How many calls, emails, LI DMs, etc should reps log on each contact before walking away? How long should we wait between activities?

By answering these questions carefully, we can design sales sequences for each segment and measure our penetration into each target account across each target contact. If our team consistently executes these activities, we can see what’s working and what’s not working, from Account Scoring to messaging to activity.

Step 7: Run a Capacity Plan

Another big problem we see often is reps having too many prospects. We’ve identified our highest value accounts. How do we ensure our team works ALL of those accounts without skipping any of the critical steps we just mapped out?

We need to run a capacity plan to identify how much time our SDRs and AEs have to work these accounts, after working the Handraisers and the deals in AEs’ pipelines. We need to map out how long it takes to research an account and contact the way we want it done and how long it takes to personalize the messaging and log a call or email.

Doing this will tell us how many quality activities a rep can log in a day, week, month, or year. Then we can look at the number of activities per contact and the number of contacts per account to determine the exact number of accounts each rep should have.

This will result in reps having only the accounts they have time to work and only the best accounts we can identify for them to work. Reps no longer have to spend time trying to figure out who to prospect—and management can be sure their best accounts are being worked properly.

Step 8: Track, Measure, and Drive Adoption

Everything described above is a Minimum Viable Product. To improve it, we need to track our teams’ execution of the process we just outlined and how accounts are converting to pipeline and revenue. This starts with driving adoption.

Until we get the team executing consistently, we can’t even see what’s working and what’s not. But once we can, we can iterate on everything from our Lead and Account scores to our processes to our messaging in order to consistently improve our Allbound motion.

Step 9: Pipeline Council and Optimization

In larger GTM teams, a Pipeline Council can be the best way to bring insights from our Allbound efforts and make critical decisions on how to iterate on the motion. We’ve talked about this in more detail here, and it can be one of the most impactful meetings we have in GTM.

In these meetings, we bring critical insights from our Allbound motion to the table and decide, as a GTM Team, what to do about them—from cutting specific programs that aren’t working, to doubling down on those that are performing best, to iterating on and optimizing the process.

Step 10: Accelerate with AI

Finally, let’s touch on AI here. We’ve saved it for last as we believe it’s critical to build a solid foundation before layering on fancy tools.

The obvious example here is using AI to research accounts and write messaging. This can work really well if:

We’re targeting the right people in the right accounts
We’ve segmented them properly
We’ve enabled the AI to focus on one audience for the messaging

If we plan to just spray and pray our entire database, the AI will write far less relevant messaging.

With that said, AI can be used in every area mentioned above, starting with helping us:

Define our ICP and Buyer Personas
Build our initial Lead Scores and Account Scores

We can use AI throughout this entire journey, but we can’t skip these critical steps and expect AI to work anyway.

AI shouldn’t replace foundational work—it should amplify it.

Outcome: Smarter Sales, Lower Costs, Higher Revenue

Why should we do all this work?

The simple answer is that we will generate more revenue at less cost.

Each of our reps will be working accounts that will convert to more revenue on average. They’ll also be armed with messaging that increases conversion rates even more.

And for longterm pipeline generation optimization. we’ll be able to carefully measure what’s working and what’s not working.

Most inbound and outbound is a race to the bottom today. Teams are struggling as they spend more on ads and make more cold calls just to see lower and lower conversion rates the more they spend. It’s a vicious cycle and the only way to break it is to take a huge step back and focus on quality over quantity.

Need help implementing an Allbound ABM Process in your organization?

Reach out to us!

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