Sales and marketing teams are constantly chasing higher conversion rates while facing the challenge of adding value to each interaction. The ABM outbound funnel empowers marketing and sales with a framework for guiding high-value leads through a path toward conversion.

By focusing on key accounts and personalizing outreach, ABM helps companies build stronger relationships with prospects, ensuring that marketing efforts are targeted, efficient, and effective.

The funnel consists of five essential stages. Following these stages and understanding when to hand off leads from marketing to sales will contribute to your overall ABM campaign success. 

These stages include:

• List building
• Omnichannel marketing
• Marketing to sales hand-off
• Sales automation
• Sales qualification

By pairing each stage with ABM best practices, you'll be well on your way to building a robust ABM process that converts.

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The ABM Outbound Funnel in Action

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List Building

List building is the first stage of the ABM outbound funnel. It allows you to precisely identify and segment your target audience, ensuring that you focus on the most relevant prospects.

To target prospects most likely to show interest in your product or service, you’ll need to build lists comprised of: 

• Accounts: Build audiences with existing data, and product usage data, deanonymize website visitors, or create new ones leveraging intent data. By incorporating intent data, you’ll be able to segment your audience. There are two types of intent data: some text
  • Third-party: To leverage third-party data, use 3 to 8 intent signals covering a 90-day trend to segment your audience based on their behavior and interests. This data can include competitive signals and relevant topics
  • First-party: Draw this data from website visitors, win-back audiences, and pipeline acceleration.
• Contacts: It's important to target individuals, not just accounts. In your ABM platform, you can build buying circles that include key decision-makers and track their contact-level intent. That way, you can effectively segment your audience using psychographic and firmographic data to better understand their challenges, motivations, and goals, which allows for more personalized marketing.

This stage lays the foundation for a successful ABM campaign by targeting the right companies and contacts. Once you have your account list, you can target key accounts with relevant messaging.

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Omnichannel Marketing

With a refined list of targeted accounts, it's time to begin omnichannel marketing. This stage focuses on engaging marketing-qualified accounts and contacts through various channels, ensuring your messaging reaches your target audience on multiple fronts for increased mindshare.

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To get the most out of omnichannel marketing:

1. Use a variety of channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, programmatic ads, email, and direct mail.
2. Create a Playbook of marketing touches targeted across different channels with consistent messaging. Playbook best practices include:

• One message per persona per channel. Tailor your messaging to each persona and channel for better engagement.
• A/B Test to refine messaging. Conduct A/B tests within a single campaign to refine your messaging and improve results.
• Double down on multi-channel presence. The more channels you use, the greater your mindshare will be.

3. Cater your messaging to your audience. To gain higher interest, make sure it's:

• Valuable. The content you create must focus on answering the questions your target audience is asking. Think about what they may be Googling and keywords they may be searching for to create content that resonates.
• Has the proper CTA. Use phrases like "Learn More" or "View Guide" rather than aggressive, sales-y language like "Sign Up" or "Buy Now." Once they click through to your content, be sure it’s not gated since you’ll already be tracking engagement and will have a good idea of who’s clicking.
• Segmented according to the audience. Keep your messaging relevant to your audience's skills or interests to make your content more relevant and engaging. Remember: you should talk to an accountant differently than a marketing manager, even if the underlying product or service may be the same.

By executing a well-planned omnichannel marketing strategy, you can build awareness and interest in your product or service among your target audience.

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Sales Hand-off

At this stage, marketing transitions to sales. Prioritize accounts and contacts through account scoring methods and syncing data with your CRM for a smooth hand-off.

Ensure your ABM platform is integrated with and synced to your CRM. This will avoid duplicate data entry and save sales from toggling between two platforms. Once your ABM is connected, you can assign leads directly from your CRM to align your sales and marketing efforts.

To verify your marketing team is handing off the right leads to sales:

1. Score your contacts. Implement proper scoring to help your sales team identify high-value leads. Engagement ratios, such as one web visit for every ten contacts, can indicate a hot lead.
2. Differentiate between cold vs. warm vs. hot. Impressions can make an account familiar ("warm"), but clicks and deeper engagement make them "hot."
3. Understand that "hot" leads can go "cold." After 90 days of inactivity, it's time to reprioritize the lead. Reset the contact to cold so your sales team can refocus on warmer leads.

The sales hand-off stage allows sales teams to prioritize leads efficiently, moving them further down the funnel while increasing the likelihood of conversion.

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Sales Automation

Once MQLs are identified, they are sent to a sales automation platform for targeted outreach. This stage leverages automation for timely and consistent sales follow-ups.

To ensure a successful sales automation process:

1. Choose the right tool. Platforms like HubSpot, Apollo, Salesloft, or Outreach can streamline your sales outreach.
2. Customize your routing. Set up custom routing from your CRM to the proper sequences automatically.
3. Integrate your sales automation tool with your CRM. Make sure that sales responses are returned to your CRM for proper attribution.

Sales automation helps keep your outreach efforts organized, ensuring no leads fall to the wayside while helping sales further prioritize outreach efforts.

Sales Qualification

The final stage of the ABM outbound funnel is sales qualification, where interested parties are identified for direct outreach.

To effectively qualify leads, sales teams will have to ensure they are only sending to verified email addresses and start the conversation by seeking permission to continue. Once granted, sales can personalize follow-ups with relevant content. It's best to avoid links in initial emails and wait for permission, then target outreach accordingly.

While it’s a good idea to develop different sequences for different types of leads, a 30-day sales sequence might look something like this:

• Day 1: LinkedIn Connection Request* / Email #1
• Day 2: Phone Call with Personalized Caller ID
• Day 8: Email #2
• Day 9: Phone Call
• Day 15: Email #3
• Day 16: Phone Call
• Day 22: Email #4
• Day 23: Phone Call
• Day 29: Final Email

*If a connection is made on LinkedIn, replace emails #2 and #3 with a LinkedIn message for a more personal touch.

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Conclusion

The outbound ABM sales funnel is a powerful tool for targeting high-value leads and guiding them through the sales process. By focusing on list building, omnichannel marketing, sales hand-off, sales automation, and sales qualification, companies can maximize their marketing efforts and automate early outreach to achieve better results. 

By nurturing leads from cold to hot, your sales reps can focus on the most promising opportunities for more personalized hands-on outreach and increased conversion rates.Ultimately, the outbound ABM sales funnel is designed to deliver a higher return on investment. Focusing on the right accounts, personalizing your messaging, and tracking engagement can drive more conversions and generate more revenue from your marketing efforts.