Enterprise ABM: +20% YoY leads, 12 strategic accounts moved
Situation
A global materials-science manufacturer's aerospace & defense division sold deeply technical products into long, committee-driven buying cycles. Demand was steady but not growing, and a set of named strategic accounts weren't progressing.
My mandate
Lead digital demand generation for the division on the agency side: grow qualified lead volume and get named key accounts moving through the funnel. Sales stayed with the client — we owned demand gen and handed off MQLs.
Scope and constraints
7-figure annual media budget. Technical audience that ignores generic B2B advertising. I also planned media and budgets across all seven of the client's business units, so every division decision had portfolio context.
Diagnostic insight
Engineers and procurement committees don't convert on ads — they convert on evidence. The unlock was treating content as the offer: technical white papers and videos as the value exchange, sample requests as the buying signal.
Decisions I owned
- ABM strategy and the named-account list approach
- Channel pairing: LinkedIn for reach into buying committees, Demandbase for account identification and orchestration
- Content-to-offer sequencing: white papers and video first, sample-request offers second
- Budget allocation across the funnel
Execution model
Named accounts received a sequenced program: technical value content into the buying committee, retargeting toward sample requests, and MQL handoff to the client's sales team with account context attached.
Verified impact
- Leads +20% year over year (MQLs passed to sales)
- 12 key and strategic accounts progressed through the funnel to sales
Metric definitions
Leads = marketing-qualified leads passed to the client's sales organization. Accounts = named ABM targets reaching sample-request / sales-accepted stage. Baseline = prior-year volume on the same definitions.
What I'd do differently
Start the sample-request offer earlier. We sequenced value content first out of caution; the accounts that converted fastest were the ones that hit a sample offer sooner.
Leadership lesson
In technical B2B, the media plan is downstream of the evidence plan. Owning the whole seven-unit budget made that visible: divisions that funded content as the offer outperformed divisions that funded impressions.