AMA: Docker SVP, Growth Marketing (CMO Role), Andy Ramirez ✪ on Account Based Marketing Strategy

This is another one where the answer shifts dramatically based on the company, the team, the market their in, etc. Maturity of the org. If an org is young and in those early growth stages with limited brand recognition, I might recommend some default rule of thumb like an 80/20 outbound-to-inbound split at first. Then gradually shifting toward 50/50 as inbound marketing gets better, channels mature, etc. A more mature company with established inbound demand might only need 30% outbound to supplement inbound leads. Though lots of very mature orgs are still at around 50/50. What kind of data you have. If you know enough about the companies ARR goals vs historical conversion rates and can reliably (very important word) reverse engineer the funnel then you can back into the right balance. If inbound lead velocity is strong but can’t scale fast enough, I’ll recommend a heavier outbound mix. If inbound is highly efficient but underutilized, we optimize that first before leaning into outbound as a volume play. What your target audience actually prefers, what behaviors. For a dev centric SaaS company, I’d lean on an inbound-heavy strategy since the audience prefers self-research and trials. In contrast, for a high-ACV enterprise SaaS offering, outbound will need to do more heavy lifting early in the funnel, supported by ABX-style inbound plays. Internal makeup of your company. If the company has a lean marketing team but a strong sales team, then start by maxing out what you can get from them and goal marketing on making up the delta, shifting more toward inbound over time, with the goal of surpassing outbound eventually. If the company is investing heavily in brand and content, a more even mix can drive efficiency over time.

The key word here is "immediately." I struggle with that. The first reason I struggle is that I don’t trust data at face value. When results look too good or too bad, I don’t react right away. I dig in to understand what’s causing it. That means I wouldn’t immediately kill a campaign just because, after 48 hours, there were no clicks or form fills. The second reason is that a lot of things take time. Modern marketing systems don’t just launch a campaign and expect instant results. They enter a learning phase. Machine learning models adjust targeting, personalization algorithms optimize based on early engagement, and audience data refines itself. So reacting too soon can do more harm than good. But There Are Signals That Require Immediate Attention. One of the most underrated but highest-impact signals comes from sales and customer-facing teams. I once launched a campaign in partnership with PMM that I felt amazing about. The work was deep, visually stunning, and multichannel. We had events, digital, and dynamic ad creative - everything we always dream of in an integrated ABM motion. Then, I got invited to a meeting with enterprise AEs. They were not happy. The campaign had everything… except effectiveness. Instead of helping close deals, it was driving consideration of our competitors. We had worked so hard to be objective that we had actually over-positioned alternative tools. Instead of reinforcing our differentiation, we created analysis paralysis. I walked out of that meeting and killed my beautiful campaign. It hurt, but it was the right thing to do. We reworked the foundational content, and only then did we relaunch. Honestly, there are tons of reasons to reconsider a campaign and take action. You might be bringing in the wrong audiences. It might be upside down on ROI. It might just not be landing. We are artist-scientists, we hypothesize and create beautiful art that we think addresses that hypothesis and then test and measure and adjust our hypothesis based on what we learn. Audience Quality Red Flags - If unqualified audiences are engaging - wrong industries, job levels, or geographies - it means something in targeting is off. Immediate ROI Discrepancies - If a campaign is spending heavily but not converting into meaningful engagement, there’s something off in the message, offer, or targeting. "Not Landing" Reports from Sales - If sales says: "Prospects don’t care about this message." "The positioning isn’t resonating in real conversations." Then you take that seriously. Numbers alone can’t tell you if a campaign is effective - it has to move deals forward. Hope that helps.

It starts with understanding that there's a huge difference between expanding, which is about finding additional use cases or teams within an organization, and landing, which is about identifying the right starting point for a user. First, in many organizations, I've found that some products do NOT work for landing new customers. They don’t stand alone well against competitive products, and instead, they serve better as add-ons for existing customers, where "good enough" is sufficient when layered on top of a strong primary use case. If you think about this as breaking in vs. building up, you're already starting from the right perspective. There are also differences in where the customer is in their journey. When landing new accounts, you’re ideally creating demand, meaning customers did not know they had a pain and didn’t realize how valuable the solution could be. Side note: In the world of AI-mediated buying, this awareness of pain is more important than ever. If a customer doesn’t know they have a problem, they won’t know to search for a solution, and they certainly won’t know what to ask AI about it. When you’re expanding, you're building new relationships but from an established foothold. Instead of convincing someone of a problem they didn't know they had, you're looking for signals inside the organization that suggest a need your product already solves. You’re working through the org from a different perspective of discovery, leveraging the contacts you have today to move into new teams, geographies, or product categories. The resources and execution models differ drastically between landing and expanding. Landing requires broad reach and heavy outbound efforts to generate awareness and demand. This involves BDRs, outbound prospecting, digital campaigns, intent-based ads, events, and targeted plays. The challenge is getting net new attention and breaking into the account for the first time. Expansion, on the other hand, is about leveraging internal champions and customer teams to drive adoption. AEs, CSMs, SEs, DevRel, and partner teams play a much bigger role here. Instead of net-new outreach, this is about deepening the relationship and proactively recognizing expansion opportunities before the customer does. When landing new accounts, your content needs to answer the question: Why change? You focus on category differentiation, pain-point awareness, and competitive positioning. You need proof points, case studies, and thought leadership that shift mindsets and make prospects see why the problem needs solving now. When expanding, the question shifts to: What’s next? It’s about showing ROI, reinforcing existing success, and demonstrating additional value. Expansion messaging focuses on ease of adoption, cost efficiencies, and getting more out of what they already have. Landing ABM is expensive, you’re starting from scratch, requiring more ad spend, outbound motion, and longer sales cycles to break in. Expansion ABM has a lower CAC, you’re already inside the org, so the cost of driving additional revenue is lower, and the conversion rates are much higher. Landing is about spending money to win trust. Expansion is about leveraging trust to drive more revenue. At the end of the day, a good ABM strategy needs both. If you only focus on landing, you’ll struggle with LTV and retention. If you only focus on expansion, you’ll struggle with new pipeline growth. The key is knowing which motion to prioritize for which product, audience, and stage of the business.

You get a really good sense early on when something is working. Honestly, the best teams sometimes know as they’re building it that they’ve landed on something great. I’m terrible at that; predicting success before launch isn’t my strong suit. If I make a call while we’re building, you might actually be better off betting against me. But once it’s in motion, I know how to read the tea leaves and pick up on signals quickly. That ability to decode early indicators is what increases velocity. It’s not about waiting for a fully matured dataset; it’s about recognizing pattern recognition moments when engagement trends, qualitative feedback, and conversion behaviors start pointing in the right direction. I think experience and data obsession both play a role in this. But it’s also a skill anyone can develop. If you know what signals to look for, whether it's increased deal velocity, compounding engagement, or Sales leaning in harder than usual, you can start scaling smartly and fast instead of waiting for a perfect data set to validate what’s already obvious.

There are a couple of ways to interpret this question. One way is process; how do you create a system that lets you operate efficiently, rinse, repeat, and scale? The second is growth; how do you expand from a few accounts to many while still doing “ABM”? I’m going to start with the latter, because it lets me start off with a strong statement: I Do Not Believe ABM Is Real or Effective As Originally Defined. I’ve been doing digital marketing for a long time, in many different ways, and one thing marketers are exceptional at is reframing what we already do, giving it a new name when we’ve only made a small tweak. Email marketing became marketing automation. Now, really great targeting became ABM. Early ABM had a couple of distinct features. At first, it often included literal 1:1 tactics, like sending custom physical packages to a specific person at a specific company. But over time, we got better at scaling those tactics digitally—and suddenly, we called it ABX (Account-Based Experience). So what are we really talking about? It’s not ABM, it’s just really solid marketing with really solid targeting. And that’s something everyone should be doing. Yes, ABM is more B2B-focused, and yes, selling iPhone cases on Instagram doesn’t map to ABM-style targeting in the same way. But the core principle—highly strategic, high-intent targeting—should be the standard for all sophisticated marketing. So, Given That, How Do You Scale It? I think about marketing the same way product managers think about products. Every campaign and audience combination is a separate product. Scaling ABM isn’t about running one play and making it bigger—it’s about building a system where you repeatedly test, optimize, and expand audience and campaign combinations. 1. Start with a strong initial audience-campaign fit—something you’re confident will perform. 2. Build the mechanisms, measurement, and execution for that audience. 3. Test, iterate, and optimize. 4. Once you’ve validated it, add the next audience or campaign. 5. Repeat. Again. And again. Two Critical Things to Watch as You Scale: 1. Maintenance Costs – Every new campaign adds operational overhead (tracking, reporting, optimization). It only works if the ROI outweighs the upkeep. 2. Audience Overlap and Cannibalization – The more you scale, the greater the chance you start targeting the same people in multiple places. You have to manage cross-channel saturation and ensure new campaigns aren’t just stealing conversions from other efforts. When you've achieved the right scale you then get to really have fun, something I've termed "moneyball marketing" which is a fancy way of saying constant tweaking. At some point, you’ll max out one or more of these factors: 1. Total Addressable Market (TAM) – You run out of high-fit accounts. 2. Budget Ceiling – You need to justify more spend by proving incremental ROI. 3. Team Capacity – You don’t have enough hands to execute everything. At this stage, your job is to fine-tune the balance between these constraints: 1. Find and test new audiences. 2. Justify more budget from Finance by proving ROI. 3. Optimize your team’s workflow, automation, and execution velocity. Once you’ve built a scalable ABM engine, you’re no longer just marketing. You’re running a system that continuously finds, targets, and converts the best-fit buyers in a predictable way. Some other things to think about: Don't neglect your audiences, the rinse part also applies to stuff that's been out a while and getting stale, your audiences notice that and you'll lose efficiency. Partner with the sales/revenue org on this. Great marketing of this type requires that side of the playbook to be just as good. One aspect that ABM had is that super personal feel. AI can be a place you rediscover that with the broader scale I'm talking about here. NOTHING is more important than measurement. You can't manage what you can't measure. All these campaigns are not going to work if you can't compare them apples to apples and really prioritize. ABM isn’t some exclusive marketing methodology, it isn't fancy, it’s just high-quality targeting at scale. If you rinse, repeat, and scale effectively, it stops being just marketing and starts becoming a revenue engine. Really you're not making a campaign, you're building a system. Hmm. I wrote all that answering my second interpretation and looking back I think it solves for both, so I'm going to stop here.

I said it earlier, but it bears repeating: I don’t necessarily believe in ABM as originally defined. I think ABM is just really good targeting combined with specific, intentional marketing efforts. The industry has a habit of renaming things we’ve always done in slightly evolved ways, and ABM is no different. ABM, in theory, was about treating a single account as a market of one, crafting hyper-personalized campaigns tailored to its specific needs. But in practice, ABM is rarely done at that level. Instead, it has evolved into tiered targeting; sometimes it's 1:1, sometimes 1:few, and often it's just really well-segmented 1:many. To me, ABM is not a standalone strategy; it's a system. It’s just great marketing with strong targeting, tight sales alignment, and a clear understanding of customer needs. It’s about shifting from a lead-based model to an account-centric view where success is measured by engagement, pipeline velocity, and expansion within key accounts rather than just MQL counts. At its core, ABM is an execution model, a system, and not a separate discipline. It’s how you prioritize, structure, and scale outreach to the accounts that matter most. Whether that’s through outbound plays, inbound nurturing, or a hybrid of both. It’s not about running a playbook called “ABM”; it’s about running the right campaigns, with the right message, to the right audience, at the right time. If you’re doing intent-driven, multi-channel, sales-aligned marketing that leads to revenue growth, you’re doing ABM, at least as I define it, even if you’re not calling it that.