To stand out, Ramp creates highly specific, memorable experiences for key personas. For example, they hosted a suite at a Beyonce concert and specifically invited women CFOs, encouraging them to bring their children. This creative, thoughtful approach generates significant interest and goodwill.
Instead of a marketing-led initiative, Account-Based Marketing at Snowflake starts with sales objectives. The marketing team's role is to use their channels and budget to elevate the metrics sales cares most about for their top target accounts, flipping the traditional marketing-first view.
To scientifically demonstrate ABM's impact, Hightouch runs a control group. They identify their top target accounts but only apply ABM tactics to a portion. This allows them to measure the conversion lift (e.g., 32% higher opportunity creation) directly attributable to their ABM efforts.
At Hightouch, selecting target accounts is a CRO-level decision, not just a marketing or sales task. This strategic process involves data science and research to ensure the entire go-to-market team focuses only on accounts with the highest propensity to buy, preventing wasted effort on poor-fit prospects.
To understand what drives success, Hightouch employs LLMs to synthesize all interaction data for an account from Gong, Salesforce, and Slack. The model then generates a qualitative narrative, or "deal story," explaining the deal's progression, providing deeper insights than traditional attribution.
To prevent ABM from degrading into generic "targeted demand gen," companies like Hightouch and Snowflake enforce strict limits on the number of accounts per rep (e.g., a maximum of 20). This guardrail ensures each account receives the intimate, personalized attention that defines a true ABM strategy.
To make social proof more potent, Ramp's data team developed a similarity model. For any given prospect, the model identifies the most similar current customers. This information is then piped into ad platforms, website personalization tools, and the CRM for sales to use on calls.
For scrappy teams without big budgets, a powerful ABM play is to create a landing page dedicated to a single target account. This page, built with existing tools, should directly address the account's needs. Sales reps then use this page as a free, high-value distribution channel.
Ramp abandoned using paid social ads for broad ABM brand awareness campaigns, finding them ineffective and too easily diluted into generic demand gen. Their focus has shifted to higher-impact in-person and physical marketing tactics for engaging target accounts in a saturated digital landscape.
Believing attribution fights are culturally damaging and unproductive, Hightouch's leadership team has banned them. Instead of arguing over credit, they measure marketing's success by tracking account progression through six defined, data-verifiable pre-opportunity stages, creating a shared view of momentum.
While data science models are crucial for identifying high-intent accounts, they lack real-world context. Companies like Snowflake acknowledge that a salesperson's direct knowledge—like knowing a CEO isn't ready to buy for two years—always outweighs what the data says, requiring a human-in-the-loop process.
Hyper-targeted ABM ads shown to tiny audiences face rapid creative fatigue, as contacts see the same ad constantly. To counter this, Hightouch's program mandates a complete creative refresh at least every two or three weeks to keep messaging engaging and avoid creating negative brand sentiment.