Why now
The environment changed, and it changed in your favour. Three things happened at once.
The platform economics broke for your size.
The platforms don’t get cheaper as you scale down — they get more expensive. And most teams use a fraction of what they buy. A tool sold to lower your cost of acquisition can raise it, once you add the licence, the RevOps hire, and the six-month onboarding.
The capabilities came unbundled.
You no longer have to buy one black box that does twenty things to get the five you need. Those five are separate, best-in-class tools now — Clay for data, LinkedIn for reach, ZenABM for measurement — at a fraction of the cost, with no lock-in.
The money got disciplined.
CAC payback slipped to roughly 18 months. Boards stopped rewarding tool sprawl and started rewarding capital-efficient GTM. GTM became the edge, and owning your motion became the point.
No GTM bloat. No budget waste. A lean ABM motion you own and tune for what actually works.
Unbundling made that possible. It didn’t make it easy. Choosing the right tools, for the right accounts, in the right order, and running them every week, is still the job. That’s what I do.
Lean ABM, in six principles.
Every pound on platform fees is a pound that never reached an account. The budget goes to reach, not seats.
Wastage is budget hitting accounts that were never your ICP. A small, real list beats a big loose one.
LinkedIn is the only channel with positive ROAS for a committee sale. Cold email is at a 3.43% reply rate and dying. Don’t pay to be everywhere.
The list, the campaigns, the data, the tools — yours. Cancel and it keeps running. This isn’t the old agency model where they walk off with everything.
Cost per engaged account, media-to-licence ratio, influenced pipeline. Not impressions.
Test on a small budget, kill what doesn’t work in weeks, put the money behind the winner.
How an engagement runs.
Where the budget is leaking — licence versus media, wrong channels, wasted ICP spend. The place we start.
A tight ICP and a named account list. Cut the wastage before a pound is spent.
LinkedIn pointed at the accounts and the people in them who actually decide. Role-aware creative, not one message for everyone.
Report on what the revenue is made of: cost per engaged account, media-to-licence ratio, influenced pipeline.