Account-level intent doesn't tell sales who to reach out to first - that's usually where the ABM handoff breaks down.
Buying groups don't move as one - treating a whole account as "hot" wastes sales time on stakeholders who haven't actually engaged.
Modern ABM has two jobs: targeting the right accounts, and collecting and activating engagement data down to the individual people in the buying group.
Mapping content to persona pain points and tracking engagement at the contact level turns a raw list of names into a clean, "outreach ready" handoff for sales.
Compared to a matched, unreached control group, reached contacts book meetings at close to double the rate - and contacts who clicked convert into pipeline at roughly 2.18x.
What this session covered
Most ABM programs are built to surface account-level intent: which companies are showing signals, which are in market, which are worth a look.
The problem is that “this account is active” doesn’t tell an SDR: who inside that account showed interest, what they engaged with, which buying group they belong to, or where outreach should start.
That’s where the handoff breaks. Marketing can report strong account engagement, but if sales can’t identify the people behind it, that engagement turns into guesswork, generic outreach, or no follow-up at all. And that’s where pipeline stalls.
In this VertoTalks On-Air session we did with Influ2, Ivailo Shipochki (Partner, Head of Inbound & Outbound Growth at VertoDigital), Paul Green (Director, Growth & AI Solutions at VertoDigital), and Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) dug into why the handoff keeps breaking, and what it actually takes to fix it.
Why buying groups make account-level signals unreliable
B2B buying groups have gotten bigger and messier. Tighter budgets mean more stakeholders get pulled into the decision, and the bigger the group, the more of them stay invisible to sales.
A single engaged researcher inside an account can look, on a dashboard, like the whole company is ready to buy. In reality, that person might not hold the budget, might not have raised it internally yet, and might just be shopping around. Without knowing who’s engaging and what role they play, sales has no way to tell if it’s real buying intent.
Marketing’s two jobs in modern ABM
The session framed this as an evolution, not a departure from ABM fundamentals.
Targeting the right accounts is still job one, and it’s the muscle most teams have already built. Job two is newer: collecting engagement data beyond the account level so sales can see who inside the account is actually paying attention.
That second job is what’s becoming possible now, through platforms like Influ2 and LinkedIn, in a way it simply wasn’t a few years ago.
Mapping content to personas, then syncing it with sales
Getting to person-level data doesn’t help if every contact in the buying group sees the same generic message. The recommendation from the session:
- Break the buying group into its core personas
- Map content to each persona’s pain points
- Build toward proof and credibility, so the group is warmed up by the time it’s flagged “outreach ready” for sales
That air cover doesn’t stop once outreach starts, either. Once an SDR sequence is live, the ads can mirror it - same narrative, same stage of the relationship, reinforcing the message through a second channel.
Getting sales to actually use the data
None of this works without a clear handoff. The speakers pointed to a simple but often-skipped step: an SLA between marketing and sales that defines exactly when an account and its contacts are “outreach ready,” based on real engagement thresholds, not a hunch.
When that engagement data lives directly in the CRM, sales isn’t being asked to trust marketing’s word for it. They can see the same timeline of impressions and clicks that marketing sees, which makes the handoff a shared view of the deal instead of a negotiation.
What the results look like
Influ2 shared their own benchmark, comparing contacts their platform actually reached (15+ impressions or a click) against a matched, unreached control group:
- Reached contacts convert into booked meetings at close to double the rate
- Contacts who clicked convert into pipeline at roughly 2.18x the rate
Looking at our own client work, we see the same pattern play out downstream: when marketing has done the work to sequence content by persona and build that air cover before outreach starts, cold accounts that get exposed to it consistently produce more booked meetings and more pipeline than cold outreach into accounts that haven’t been warmed up first.
Where to start, whether you’re new to ABM or already invested
For teams just getting started, the advice was to bring sales in from day one rather than trying to sell them on the program after it’s built. From a tech standpoint, LinkedIn is a low-lift place to start: no upfront licensing commitment, and access to the largest firmographic database available to build and test personas against.
For teams with more maturity, already running ABM infrastructure and with SDR bandwidth to support it, layering in contact-level platforms like Influ2 is the next step toward the most granular level of targeting and measurement.
The bigger mindset shift the session left the audience with: most ABM programs don’t need to be rebuilt from scratch. They need to evolve from measuring account exposure to measuring and acting on real, individual buying signals - because at the end of the day, deals close with people, not accounts.