Send us a text
Account-based marketing (ABM) used to be expensive, slow, and reserved for enterprise teams. But that’s changed. In this solo episode, we walk through a smarter, faster, more human approach to ABM, one that even small B2B teams can run using AI, psychology, and clear structure.
We break down how to build a focused account list, how to personalize outreach without sounding robotic, and how to align sales and marketing around real signals, not wishful thinking.
You’ll learn how to combine AI agents and human-first strategy to warm up leads, engage buying committees, and track what actually moves the needle. If your team is sick of spraying cold emails and hoping for the best, this one’s for you.
WE COVERED:
- Why modern ABM works best with small teams and smart tools
- How to build a high-intent target list using AI and intent data
- The psychology behind warming up accounts before outreach
- What real personalization looks like (and why most teams fake it)
- Why buying committees need tailored messages, not a single CTA
- How to use AI agents to do the heavy research for you
- The playbook for launching multitouch campaigns that actually convert
- How to measure success beyond clicks: engagement, velocity, and pipeline
FOR WHO?
If you’re a founder, GTM lead, or marketer inside a B2B startup (especially in tech, sustainability, or Web3), and you’re trying to make outbound work without burning your list or your reputation, this episode gives you the playbook.
Support the show
Follow us:
## Introduction to Modern Account-Based Marketing
[00:00:00] **Michel Gagnon-3:** What I'm about to show you. Used to take a sales and marketing team of 20 SDRs pulling leads, content teams, building assets and campaign managers, managing sequences, and still sales and marketing rarely worked in sync. But today with ai, behavioral psychology in a clear structure, you can build a smarter account-based marketing campaign with.
A team of three, what's even better is that these account based marketing campaigns used to be reserved to huge enterprise accounts. Now with the tools that we have today, even if you're a small team, it's a strategy that you can use really to personalize your sales and marketing.
So in this video, you will learn how to build a high impact account list using AI and data, how to warm up those accounts with a human first engagement strategy How to launch a personalized multitouch campaign that do not feel robotic or spammy. And finally, how to track the right metrics so you know what's working and making sure that your A BM campaign is moving the needle.
This is one of the core pillars of our B2B Growth Marketing course, but I'll walk you through the high level playbook right here.
## Defining Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
[00:01:15] **Michel Gagnon-3:** Let's start by making sure we're on the same page and defining what a BM actually stands for. Forget the jargon for a second. Account based marketing is just this. Be highly relevant to fewer higher value accounts and build campaigns that feel tailored to their world. Traditional lead gen cast a wider net, but with ABM We'll focus on the accounts that matter most. For this to work, you need to align sales and marketing around a shared target list. You focus on relationship building, not just blasting cold sequences, and you create content and messaging that actually fits the account's reality situation, and pain points.
And thanks to ai, this does not need to be super expensive or complex.
## Building Your Target List with AI
[00:02:06] **Michel Gagnon-3:** The first step is to build your target list. In B2B, you're usually not trying to reach 10 million potential customers. You have a smaller total addressable market. So start with your ICP, your ideal customer profile. look at your CRM, your best clients and clearly define the key attributes of your ideal customer profile.
Usually in an ICP, you'll have the number of employees where they're located geographically, the type of industries that they're in, sometimes their tech stack as well. The revenues. So look at your CRM, any first party data that you can get your hands on
There are other tools that you can use like G two or Apollo that allow you to get. Relevant intent signals. Here you see some of them that are available in G two.
for instance, you could see when a prospect is doing some research. On a tool or a solution that is in the same categories as yours, or when they're comparing competitors alternatives together or even with your solution
so these are interesting intent signals that can also allow you to refine your target list.
## Identifying Key Stakeholders
[00:03:20] **Michel Gagnon-3:** Once this is done, you move to step two, which is to identify key stakeholders. Don't just target the VP of marketing or CTO. You want to look at multiple roles across budget owners, influencers, and users as well.
Keep in mind, this is a buying committee, so treat it like one.
so here there's an example. We have the Good Energy, a UK based company. We had a couple of stakeholders that we've pulled out of Sales Navigator.
## Warm-Up Awareness Strategy
[00:03:49] **Michel Gagnon-3:** They're all relevant to our offer, And then you're ready to move to your warmup awareness strategy before you message anyone you wanna show up in their world.
So simple human stuff, you can, follow them on LinkedIn, comment on a few posts. Repost something useful or share something that they might find useful. the idea is to be curious, is to be relatable, is to be a real human being and learn about them
to be able to do this and scale. There are a couple of ways for you to do this. in Sales Navigator, for instance, we've built our account list and for each companies we've started building our list of leads, right? So it's the relevant stakeholders in each of them. once you have your lead list, you can have a look at it, on a daily basis.
See what they're sharing, what they're talking about. You can interact with them as well. and this is where you should be interacting.
## Leveraging AI Agents for Research
[00:04:51] **Michel Gagnon-3:** another tool you can use to help you see what's relevant in your prospect's world is to use AI agents. One of the tools we like to use is relevance ai, which is an AI agent builder, you can build an army of AI agents. to give you a high leverage output.
And one of them is obviously in sales, marketing is all the doing the research relevance. AI allows you to build AI agent, you could potentially build an army of AI agents here, but I wanna show you one of them,
Atlas, our lead researcher will do some research on any new leads that we get, in our CRM by gathering company data through LinkedIn websites, new sources, and then it will deliver a comprehensive analysis and recommendations via email
So as you can see, I have a list of instructions, but it will perform a Google search to find news. It will also look at recent posts that have been
published by our target leads, extract, company insights, any news, and then deliver that to us. So obviously you can customize all of these things, but
AI agents are an amazing tool for you to monitor what's going on in your target list and with your target leads.
You can also run LinkedIn ads, with thought leadership, that speaks directly to their pain points. You want to use awareness to earn familiarity. This is not about just automation. It's about being seen as someone who really gets it. One way to do this is to create a white paper or a resource that's highly valuable.
We've created one here, which is a white paper around helping climate tech companies with their sales effort. Obviously we've used AI to do this. just to give you a sense of, what can be done. the idea is to leverage AI to create something that is remarkable and highly valuable. Many companies have free resources or gated resources, lead magnets out there, and, they're asking for an email address and what you get in exchange is just not worth it.
So don't be one of them. Make sure that you provide real value.
## Launching Your Multitouch Outreach
[00:07:08] **Michel Gagnon-3:** then you can move to the next step, which is to launch your Multitouch outreach. Now you're ready to reach out, but don't fall into the Hi \{FIRSTNAME\} trap. Here's how you want to personalize with AI and psychology, your outreach. you can start with emails and dms, but basically you want to address specific pain points, competitors, industry trends, but also you wanna make sure that you have different messages for the different roles.
Remember, we're targeting a buying committee and everybody in the committee has a different reality, different challenges, a different day to day. Make sure that you are personalized and relevant. Things you can do is to mention a post they engage with, a challenge that's relevant to the industry, competitor or trends that they're watching, and you can use the AI agent we, shared with you to be able to cover all of that.
On LinkedIn, you can go beyond just the dms, use the voice notes, share personalized videos, make sure that you stand out.
So through your outreach, your LinkedIn campaigns, you want to be able to send these peoples to your website. And what you should be doing is to create a personalized lending page for those accounts.
we created a personalized page using lovable dev. You can also use Bull New that I like a lot, but the idea is you want to. Direct your potential targets to the website and you want them to have this VIP experience to do this. You personalize the entire page to their needs and to their companies.
## Tracking and Measuring Success
[00:08:57] **Michel Gagnon-3:** For this to work, you need to track what matters. You need to focus on engagement. campaign touch points. Are they interacting pipeline creation as well? Are these accounts moving forward? Are, the deals, big enough? Are they worth the effort? So use your CRM, real time website analytics, like Sales IQ and potentially a CDP like segment to make sure that you centralize all of those data sources,
you want to track if decision makers are engaging. Replying, downloading one of your resources or visiting the websites in general, And you want to capture those signals and share them, feed them to the team using an AI automation with a solution like n8n here.
An ABM campaign like this is more real, relevant and far more likely to convert than a generic sequence.
this works because it feels tailored. It's not just a a token personalization. But it's messaging that shows real understanding. AI helps you scale the research, the insight, and content. Psychology helps you make it land. And when sales and marketing align around this kind of system, A BM becomes extremely powerful.
Account-based marketing does not have to be slow, clunky, or expensive, with ai, behavioral cues and smart strategy. You can build a lean effective campaign that feels personal, but also is scalable.
## Conclusion and Next Steps
[00:10:36] **Michel Gagnon-3:** if you want the full system, including messaging testing. AI prompts, campaign builders. We cover all of it inside our B2B Growth Marketing course. If you're just starting out, try this playbook. Pick 10 accounts build one campaign and see what happens.
Alright, that's it for today. I hope you found it insightful and useful. Subscribe if you want more tactical walkthroughs like this. And if you found this helpful, we'll share it with someone leading a go to marketing team. Let's make sure that your B2B marketing becomes smarter and a whole lot more human.
