How A Series A Company Should Build Its First ABM Playbooks

If you’re reading this, you’re likely at that critical inflection point. Your Series A funding means you’ve proven you can sell, but your investors are already asking about your path to Series B.

You want to move from a sales-led strategy to a systematic process for success because right now, your growth depends too heavily on individual heroics. Your best salespeople are working overtime, your executive teams are still jumping into critical deals, and while deals are closing, there’s a nagging feeling that this approach won’t scale.

You’re wondering…

What happens when we need to double or triple our revenue? What if our star salesperson leaves? How do we make success repeatable without burning out our team?

You need to build an ABM playbook. Fast.

Let’s talk about how to build that playbook – one that turns your early sales victories into a repeatable engine for growth, without requiring a huge marketing budget or a massive team expansion.

What You Need Before Building Your First ABM Playbook

Clear sales data story

Your successful deals hold critical patterns that will shape your ABM strategy.

Start by analyzing your sales history across key metrics: deal velocity, win rates, average contract value, and expansion revenue.

Map out the stakeholders involved in each deal, their engagement patterns, and the specific value propositions that resonated.

Document the common objections and how they were overcome.

Most companies discover that their perceived best-fit customers aren’t actually their most profitable ones. This analysis forms the foundation of your target account selection criteria and helps you replicate winning patterns across your ABM campaigns.

Defined ICP based on deal data

Move beyond surface-level ICP characteristics like company size and industry. Examine the specific attributes of accounts where you’ve delivered significant value and seen strong retention.

Focus on operational indicators: their tech stack, business model, growth stage, and organizational structure. Map out their buying committee structure and decision-making process. Understand their internal evaluation and procurement procedures. This detailed ICP becomes your blueprint for account selection and personalization strategies.

Companies often find that seemingly minor characteristics — like having a specific tech stack or organizational structure — are actually major predictors of deal success.

Sales and marketing operational alignment

Document your current lead-to-revenue process with specific handoff points between marketing and sales.

Define clear criteria for marketing qualified accounts (MQAs) and sales qualified accounts (SQAs). Create shared SLAs for account engagement, follow-up timing, and pipeline progression. Build feedback loops where sales insights inform marketing targeting and content creation. Establish joint KPIs that encourage collaboration rather than department-specific metrics. Set up regular cross-functional meetings to review account progress and refine engagement strategies.

This operational foundation ensures your ABM plays will be executed consistently across both teams.

Core technology requirements

Audit your current tech stack’s capabilities for account-level tracking, engagement measurement, and personalization.

Your CRM should have clean account hierarchies and reliable opportunity tracking. Your marketing automation platform needs account-based segmentation capabilities and integration with your sales engagement tools. Set up basic intent tracking to monitor target account behavior. Implement account scoring based on engagement signals across marketing and sales touchpoints.

Configure your analytics to report on account-level metrics rather than just lead-based ones. Address any major gaps or data inconsistencies before launching ABM campaigns.

Resource allocation framework

Calculate the true cost of acquiring and expanding your target accounts, including sales time, marketing spend, and technology investments. Map out the required resources for different types of ABM plays — from high-touch campaigns to scaled digital programs. Document the specific skills and time commitments needed from each team member involved in ABM execution.

Create a realistic budget that accounts for both technology and content creation costs. Develop a roadmap for gradually expanding your ABM capabilities as you prove ROI.

Consider which activities can be handled internally versus requiring external expertise.

5 Steps to Build an ABM Playbook

Target account analysis and segmentation

Start by analyzing your total addressable market through the lens of your successful deals. Your goal is to create tiers of target accounts based on both fit and potential value.

Gather these key data points:

Past deal sizes and sales cycles by company type
Customer lifetime value and expansion patterns
Resource requirements for successful account management
Common technical and business requirements
Buying committee structures and decision paths

Next, develop your segmentation framework:

Tier 1 (Strategic): Perfect-fit accounts with the highest revenue potential. These typically match your most successful current customers and warrant high-touch, customized ABM campaigns.

Tier 2 (Focus): Good-fit accounts that might need some specific triggers or conditions to become ideal customers. These accounts get more scalable, programmatic ABM approaches.

Tier 3 (Scale): Accounts that meet basic criteria but might have longer sales cycles or lower initial deal sizes. These receive lighter-touch ABM tactics that can be highly automated.

Create a clear scoring rubric for each tier, incorporating both firmographic data and behavioral signals. This scoring system should be simple enough for your teams to apply consistently but comprehensive enough to predict account potential accurately.

👉 Your tiers should reflect your current resources and capabilities. It’s better to start with a smaller list of highly qualified accounts than to dilute your efforts across too many targets.

Building your engagement playbook

Every target account needs multiple touchpoints to move forward. Instead of randomly trying different channels, you need a clear plan for how these touchpoints work together to create momentum.

Start by understanding how your best deals actually happened. Look at your last 5-10 wins.

Which combination of touchpoints worked?

It could start with a LinkedIn connection, followed by a research report, then a sales call. Or it could be an industry event, followed by executive outreach, then a custom demo.

Map out your core channels. You’ll likely have three main types:

Digital (like LinkedIn ads, email campaigns, website personalization)
Direct (your sales team’s outreach, executive connections, phone calls)
Value-add (thought leadership, custom research, events, workshops)

The key is to match these channels to your account tiers. Your top-tier accounts might get custom research and executive outreach, while your broader target list gets more scalable digital campaigns.

Create simple rules for how these channels work together. For example, When a target account engages with your LinkedIn content three times, trigger a personalized sales outreach. Or when a key stakeholder downloads a whitepaper, invite them to an industry roundtable.

Content and messaging blueprint

Think of ABM content as having different versions of the same conversation, each perfectly tuned to who you’re talking to. Instead of blasting out generic marketing messages, you’re creating content that feels like it was made specifically for each target account.

Your content needs to directly reflect what matters to specific accounts. This means:

Using their industry language and metrics
Addressing their particular market challenges
Showing outcomes from companies just like them

The shift is from “here’s what our product does” to “here’s how we solve your specific problem.” You’re not creating more content – you’re creating more relevant content.

Let’s use an example of SeaOps (a fictional company) that sells AI-powered route optimization software to shipping companies. They’re moving from opportunistic sales to ABM after initial success with mid-sized shipping operators.

Their content blueprint breaks down like this:

Business Challenge

Key Stakeholder

Core Message

Content Approach

Rising fuel costs cutting into margins

CFO

“Reduce fuel costs by 23% through AI-optimized routes”

ROI calculator with their fleet data

Hard to optimize routes across multiple vessels

Fleet Manager

“Real-time route adjustments across your entire fleet”

Interactive fleet simulation

Crew retention issues due to unpredictable schedules

Operations Head

“Better crew schedules through predictable port arrivals”

Crew satisfaction case study

The key is taking your broad industry expertise and making it specifically relevant to each target account’s operational reality. This means sales can walk into every conversation with content that feels custom-made for that prospect.

Good ABM content feels less like marketing and more like a consultant who’s done their homework on the account’s business.

To get starters, create content building blocks that sales can easily customize. Instead of long whitepapers, think of modular pieces: customer stories, ROI calculators, implementation timelines, and comparison frameworks. These should be easy to mix and match based on each account’s specific interests.

Sales enablement and playbook documentation

Your sales team needs a clear manual for how to use all these ABM pieces effectively. You don’t have to create a 50-page document that no one will read. Instead, build a practical guide that helps sales execute consistently.

Here are the core components to document:

Account research process: Start with exactly what information sales needs before engaging an account. Create simple templates for capturing key insights: target account’s tech stack, recent business changes, growth indicators, and potential champions. Make this easy to complete in 30 minutes, not 3 hours.
Engagement sequences: Map out the specific steps for different account types. What’s the ideal first touch? When should marketing support kick in? What triggers move an account to high-priority status? Document these as simple workflows that anyone can follow.
Response playbooks: Build quick reference guides for common scenarios: when a target account visits your pricing page, when they engage with a competitor, or when they raise specific objections. Include real examples of what’s worked before.
Content usage guide: Show exactly which content to use at each stage. If you have a case study about reducing implementation time when exactly should sales share it? Make these decisions easy and clear.

Keep this documentation live and practical. Update it as you learn what works, and cut out anything that isn’t actively helping sales close deals.

Execution workflow and measurement setup

Your ABM program needs a clear operating rhythm to turn strategy into results. Start with your daily execution framework – this is where deals are won or lost.

Every morning, your team should have a clear view of account priorities and required actions. This means having a simple dashboard showing which accounts need attention and why. Maybe Company X engaged with three pieces of content last week, or Company Y’s target buying cycle is approaching. These signals drive your day’s priorities.

Core daily activities:

Review account engagement signals and update your CRM with new intelligence
Orchestrate planned marketing touches across your active accounts
Sync with sales on any significant account movements or needs

Make this real with specific actions.

When a target account shows high intent (like multiple stakeholders engaging with your product pages), trigger your orchestrated response: Marketing launches targeted advertising, sales gets an alert to reach out, and your content engine activates account-specific messaging.

Set up regular checkpoints to keep everything aligned.

Weekly: Quick status updates on priority accounts
Monthly: Deep dive into what’s working and what’s not
Quarterly: Full program review and strategy adjustment

Most importantly, document what’s working. When an account converts, immediately capture what combination of touches and timing led to success. This becomes your playbook for similar accounts.

👉 Start this process with your top 10 accounts. Get it working smoothly before you expand. Good ABM is about quality of execution, not quantity of activities.

Common ABM Mistakes Series A Companies Make by Trying to Copy Enterprise Playbooks

Your Series A company doesn’t need the same ABM setup as Salesforce. Good ABM at Series A is about focused execution with limited resources, not building a mini version of an enterprise marketing machine. Your advantage is speed and personal touch – use it.

Here are 3 things to avoid:

Trying to buy every ABM tool on the market

Many early-stage companies rush to purchase expensive tech stacks like 6sense, Demandbase, and RollWorks all at once. You probably can’t effectively use even 30% of these platforms’ features right now. Start with your CRM, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and maybe one ABM platform. Master these basics before expanding.

Building complex scoring models

Enterprise companies use intricate scoring systems with hundreds of variables to rank accounts. At Series A, you need maybe 5-6 key signals that actually indicate buying intent. Focus on obvious triggers like multiple stakeholders viewing pricing pages, engagement with bottom-funnel content, or direct requests for sales conversations.

Creating too many content variants

Don’t try to create 20 different versions of every piece of content. While personalization matters, you likely don’t have the resources to maintain a massive content library. Instead, build a core set of materials that can be quickly customized with relevant examples and data points for each account.

Launch your ABM program in 30 days

Building your first ABM playbook is a critical milestone in your Series A journey. While the steps we’ve covered give you a framework to start with, the reality is that most companies benefit from expert guidance during this transition.

This is exactly why we created the ABM Accelerator Program – a 30-day intensive program that helps Series A companies transform their early sales wins into systematic success. Instead of spending months figuring out the right approach through trial and error, you get a proven blueprint that’s already worked for companies just like yours.

The program is specifically designed for companies that: