ABM plays, written out: nine account-based plays with the trigger, the touches, the owner and the number that proves it worked.

What is an ABM play?

ABM plays are repeatable, named campaigns that start when something specific happens at a target account. A play says who to reach, what marketing builds, what sales sends, in what order, who owns each step, and which number decides whether it worked.

The word matters, because a play is not a campaign. A campaign is a quarter of activity pointed at a list. A play is a small unit any rep or marketer can start tomorrow, because the signal fired today.

ABM plays live inside an ABM strategy, which picks the target accounts, the tiers and the goal both teams share. This page assumes that part is done. What follows is the library itself, written out play by play.

A team with an ABM strategy and no plays talks about accounts in meetings. A team with a play library moves on an account the same week the signal appears, and can say afterward what the move cost.

Play, playbook, campaign: the ABM words teams mix up

Every ABM program argues about these four words, and the argument is worth having, because each one is funded, staffed and measured differently. This is how they stack up in practice.

An ABM playbook is the binder; ABM plays are the pages inside it. Most teams write the playbook first, fill it with strategy, and never get to the pages, which is why the plays on this page are written out in full.

ABM campaigns are where the confusion costs money. Running two campaigns and calling them a playbook hides the fact that nobody agreed what starts a play, who acts, or when it stops.

The seven parts every ABM play needs

An ABM play missing one of these parts turns into an idea that somebody was supposed to do. Write all seven down before you run anything.

• Trigger: the observable event that starts the clock, defined precisely enough that two people would agree it fired.
• Audience: which roles at the account, not just the one contact who replied last time.
• Offer: the one thing you are giving them, which should be useful even if they never buy.
• Sequence: the touches in order, with days attached, across ads, email, LinkedIn and calls.
• Owners: a named person per touch, split between marketing and sales, not a team name.
• Exit: what stops the play, including a reply, a meeting, or the trigger going stale.
• Measure: the one number that decides whether this play earns another quarter.

The sequence is an ordinary sales cadence with an account wrapped around it. What makes it a play is that marketing is running something in the same window, aimed at the same building.

The ABM plays library: nine account-based marketing plays

Nine account-based marketing plays follow, each written for this page rather than copied from a vendor deck. No company names, no claimed results, and no figures we did not read in a primary source.

Start with two. Most teams that fail at ABM did not fail at strategy. They launched nine account-based campaigns at once and staffed none of them properly.

The plays are ordered by how hard the trigger is to detect, not by value. Plays 1, 4 and 6 need no bought data at all, which is why they belong in the first quarter of any ABM program.

Where the triggers actually come from

An ABM play is only as good as the signal under it. These are the sources that are public, checkable and hard to fake, which matters because trigger marketing collapses the moment a team stops trusting the alert.

Public filings deserve a note. A United States public company files a Form 8-K as its current report, and Item 5.02 covers the departure of directors or certain officers and the appointment of certain officers.

Form D is the notice a company files with the SEC for an exempt securities offering, online through EDGAR, within 15 days after the first sale in that offering. Both are free to read, which makes them better triggers than a rumor.

Sort your signals into three buckets before you build anything. Owned signals come from your own site, ads and events. Public signals come from filings and announcements. Bought signals are intent and technographic data, and they belong in the ranking, never in the message.

ABM data quality decides how many plays you can run. If the account data is wrong, every play fires at the wrong company, and both teams stop opening the alerts within a month. Fix the target account data before you add the fifth play.

Play 1: a new executive lands in a seat you sell to

New leaders rewrite priorities in their first quarter, which is the short period when a vendor conversation is a help rather than an interruption. This is the highest value play in most ABM libraries, and the easiest to run badly.

• Trigger: a new VP or C-level leader starts in a function you sell to, confirmed by a filing, the company's own announcement, or a profile change.
• Audience: the new leader, the two directors who report to them, and whoever already owns the budget line.
• Marketing builds: one asset about the first ninety days in that role, with a version per industry, not per person.
• Touch 1, day 3: ads to the account go live, so the name is familiar before anyone writes.
• Touch 2, day 7: a short email from the rep, naming one decision the role owns, with no flattery.
• Touch 3, day 12: a LinkedIn note to one of the directors, referencing the same decision.
• Touch 4, day 20: the asset goes to all three contacts, with a single question about their timeline.
• Touch 5, day 30: a call attempt, then the account returns to the nurture track.
• Owners: ops fires the alert, marketing owns touches 1 and 4, the account owner owns 2, 3 and 5.
• Exit: a reply, a meeting, or day 45 with no engagement from any of the three.
• Measured by: meetings booked in the leader's function, and the share of triggered accounts where two or more people engaged.

It backfires when the email is congratulations plus a pitch. Every vendor in the category sends that in week one. Wait until day seven, and lead with the decision rather than the greeting.

Play 2: the account announces a funding round

A raise means budget, hiring and pressure to show progress quickly. It also means every vendor in the category emails on the same afternoon, so this play wins on timing and specificity, never on speed.

• Trigger: a Form D notice on EDGAR, or the company's own announcement of a round.
• Audience: the function that will spend the money first, plus the operations lead who has to make it work.
• Marketing builds: a short piece on what usually breaks in that function when headcount grows quickly.
• Touch 1, day 1: nothing by email. The account is buried. Ads start, outreach does not.
• Touch 2, day 10: an email tied to the job postings the company has published since the raise.
• Touch 3, day 17: the asset, sent to a second contact in the same function.
• Touch 4, day 28: a call, then the asset offered to whoever is now hiring for the role.
• Owners: marketing owns the ads and the asset, sales owns every message with a name on it.
• Exit: a meeting, or 60 days after the announcement, when the account rejoins the standard list.
• Measured by: reply rate against the same accounts before the trigger, and opportunities created inside 90 days.

It backfires when the first line congratulates them on the round. That sentence tells the reader you have a news alert, not an opinion about their business.

Play 3: a competitor contract is inside its renewal window

Displacement is the slowest account-based play in the library and the one with the largest deals. It is a one to one play by nature, because the research behind it does not scale past a handful of accounts.

• Trigger: evidence the account uses a rival, plus an estimated renewal window from a filing, a public case study, or a conversation.
• Audience: the economic buyer, the day to day user who feels the pain, and the technical owner of any migration.
• Marketing builds: an honest migration guide naming what is hard about switching, and a comparison that does not pretend the rival is bad at everything.
• Touch 1, week minus 20: ads to the account, about the problem, not about the competitor.
• Touch 2, week minus 18: the rep reaches the user-level champion with the migration guide.
• Touch 3, week minus 14: an offer of a working session for the technical owner.
• Touch 4, week minus 10: the economic buyer hears from a senior person on your side, once.
• Touch 5, week minus 6: a written switching plan with dates, sent to all three.
• Owners: the account owner runs the whole play, marketing supplies the guide, the ads and the session.
• Exit: the renewal date passes, or the account tells you they resigned early.
• Measured by: committee coverage, whether a switching plan was ever requested, and win rate on displacement attempts.

It backfires when the content attacks the incumbent. Your champion chose that tool, and telling them it is bad tells them they were wrong.

Play 4: someone from the account attends an event

Event attendance is a first-party signal, which makes it cleaner than any intent data you can buy. The play exists because most teams send one follow-up to the attendee and ignore the other four people at the same company.

• Trigger: a person from a target account registers for, or attends, your webinar, roundtable, or session at a conference.
• Audience: the attendee, plus anyone else at the account in the same function, whether or not they registered.
• Marketing builds: a short written version of the session, so the attendee has something to forward internally.
• Touch 1, day 1: the written recap, sent automatically to everyone who registered.
• Touch 2, day 2: retargeting ads to registrants, split by whether they actually showed up.
• Touch 3, day 4: a rep email that quotes something the attendee asked or reacted to.
• Touch 4, day 9: a message to a second person at the account, offering the same recap.
• Owners: marketing owns the recap and the ads, sales owns both named messages.
• Exit: a meeting, or day 21, whichever comes first.
• Measured by: accounts with two or more engaged people after the event, not raw attendance.

If you run the session on LinkedIn, LinkedIn Events can feed the ad side of this play directly. The targeting rules sit further down the page, because they set a hard floor on how small a play can be.

Play 5: several people at one account read the same thing

One visit is noise. Four people from the same company on the same topic in ten days is a committee forming, and it is the most reliable buying signal you can generate for yourself.

• Trigger: three or more people from one target account engage with related content inside a set window, on your site or in your ads.
• Audience: everyone who engaged, plus the role you know is missing from that group.
• Marketing builds: a deeper piece on the exact topic they clustered around, and an ad set aimed at the account.
• Touch 1, day 0: the alert reaches the account owner with the list of pages and roles.
• Touch 2, day 1: ads to the account switch to the topic they read.
• Touch 3, day 2: a rep email to the most senior engager, about the topic, with no mention of tracking.
• Touch 4, day 6: a second contact receives the deeper piece.
• Owners: ops owns the threshold, marketing owns the ads and the asset, the rep owns the outreach.
• Exit: a reply, or 14 days of silence, after which the account drops back to normal nurture.
• Measured by: the share of clustered accounts producing a meeting, against a control group you leave alone.

Play 6: reviving a closed lost account

Closed lost is the cheapest target list you own. The people already know what you do, the objection is on record, and the reason they said no often expires on a date you can predict.

• Trigger: a deal marked closed lost passes its cool-off period, usually six to twelve months, or the recorded loss reason stops being true.
• Audience: the original champion if they are still there, their replacement if they are not, and one level above both.
• Marketing builds: a short changelog of what is different since the loss, written for buyers rather than as release notes.
• Touch 1, day 0: check whether the champion changed jobs, because that alone reopens two accounts.
• Touch 2, day 2: an email that names the original objection and says plainly what changed.
• Touch 3, day 8: the changelog to a second contact, with no reference to the old deal.
• Touch 4, day 18: a direct question about whether the decision is due for review.
• Owners: the sales manager triggers it, the original rep runs it where that person is still around.
• Exit: a meeting, a clear no, or day 30, which sends the account back to lead nurturing.
• Measured by: reopened opportunities per hundred revived accounts, and win rate against fresh accounts.

It backfires when the email pretends the loss never happened. Naming it is what makes the message credible, and buyers respect a team that remembers why they said no.

Play 7: expansion inside an existing customer

The account is already yours, which changes the play completely. There is no awareness problem, only an internal one: the people who would buy the second product have never heard of you.

• Trigger: a usage milestone, a new office or team, or a hire in a function that does not use you yet.
• Audience: the new function, reached through the existing champion rather than around them.
• Marketing builds: a one-page internal case for the champion to forward, written in their language, not yours.
• Touch 1, day 0: the customer team asks the champion for an introduction, and asks for nothing else.
• Touch 2, day 5: ads to the account point at the second use case.
• Touch 3, day 7: the introduction happens, or the rep goes direct with the champion's knowledge.
• Touch 4, day 20: a working session with the new function, run as discovery, not as a demo.
• Owners: the customer team owns the relationship, sales owns the new opportunity, marketing owns the ads and the page.
• Exit: an opportunity, or a clear no from the new function.
• Measured by: expansion pipeline per hundred customer accounts, and whether renewal health held while you sold.

It backfires when sales goes around the champion. A cold email into a customer account reaches that champion within a day, and it reads as a breach of trust.

Play 8: an open deal has gone quiet

Most stalled deals are not lost, they are single-threaded. The one contact who liked you went on leave, changed priorities, or failed to sell it internally, and nobody else at the account knows the project exists.

• Trigger: an open opportunity with no inbound contact for a set number of days, usually fourteen or twenty-one.
• Audience: two people who were never in the deal, on the finance side and the technical side.
• Marketing builds: a short decision brief the champion can hand to a committee without editing it.
• Touch 1, day 0: one message to the original contact offering an easy exit, including a plain "later".
• Touch 2, day 4: a senior person on your side contacts a peer on theirs.
• Touch 3, day 9: the decision brief goes to the new contacts, with the champion copied.
• Touch 4, day 16: the deal is either re-dated with a reason, or moved to closed lost and queued for Play 6.
• Owners: the account owner runs it, their manager owns the peer-to-peer touch.
• Exit: a new date with a reason attached, or a clean loss.
• Measured by: contacts per open deal before and after, and the share of stalled deals that re-date once and then close.

This is multithreading forced onto a schedule, which is the only version of it that survives a busy quarter.

Play 9: the account that never gives you a signal

Every target account list has companies that matter and do nothing. They never download, never register, never show up in intent data. Waiting for a trigger on these accounts is how tier one lists quietly die.

• Trigger: the calendar. A named tier one account with no engagement for a full quarter.
• Audience: five people mapped by hand, across the functions that would use the product and fund it.
• Marketing builds: one piece of original research or analysis about the account's own market, not about your category.
• Touch 1, month 1: always-on ads to the account at a low, steady budget.
• Touch 2, month 1: the rep sends the research to two contacts and asks for a reaction, not a meeting.
• Touch 3, month 2: an invitation to something small, a roundtable or a working session with peers.
• Touch 4, month 3: a physical or handmade touch, reserved for this tier because it does not scale.
• Owners: both teams, reviewed together monthly, because nothing else forces the review.
• Exit: the account produces any signal, at which point it moves into the matching play above.
• Measured by: known contacts per account and engaged people per account, quarter over quarter.

The work here is company research rather than sending. If the research is generic, the play is only advertising with a longer cover letter attached.

One to one, one to few and one to many plays

Tiering is the oldest idea in account-based marketing, and the one teams get wrong most often. The tier is not a property of the play, it is a decision about how much of the play gets rebuilt per account.

The same trigger can run at all three tiers with completely different economics, and the right tier is usually the one your content team can actually feed.

The common failure is selling a one to many play internally as one to one. Executives hear "personalized for each account", then see the output, and stop funding ABM. Name the tier honestly in the plan.

Tiering also settles the budget question. A one to one play can justify a day of research per account; a one to many play has to work from fields in a target account list and nothing else.

How the plays change by market and deal size

The same ABM play behaves differently in a market of two hundred possible buyers than in one with twenty thousand. Deal value sets the tier, and the tier sets how much of the sequence a person writes by hand.

In a small target market, account-based marketing and ordinary sales outreach collapse into the same thing, and that is fine. The value of naming plays is the shared trigger and the shared owner, not the branding.

In a large market, the specific risk is different. Teams stretch a one to one play across four hundred target accounts, the personalization thins out, and the intent signals start choosing accounts that nobody on the sales team believes in.

The sales and marketing split inside a play

Most account-based plays die in the gap between the two teams. The fix is boring: write the split per touch, keep it in the play document, and review it monthly. "Both teams own it" means nobody does.

The handoff row is where the argument usually sits. Agree the response time and what happens to an account sales declines, and treat that as a sales handoff rule rather than a favor.

One more rule that saves plays: marketing never writes a message carrying a rep's name, and sales never changes the offer mid-play. Both habits make the results impossible to read afterward.

Which buying committee roles each play reaches

Account-based marketing is judged on buying committee coverage, not on contacts. A play that reaches one person at a target account has not run, whatever the reply rate says. Check which roles each play actually touches.

Run this table across your own account-based campaigns once a quarter. If two committee roles never appear in any play, that is the gap costing you deals, and it is usually finance or the technical owner.

Coverage is also the fairest early measure of an ABM program. Revenue from target accounts arrives quarters later, but engaged people per account moves inside weeks and predicts it.

What LinkedIn ad targeting allows inside a play

Several ABM plays above assume account-based advertising, aimed at a named company list. LinkedIn publishes hard limits for that, and they set a floor on how small a play can be. The figures below come from LinkedIn's own help pages.

Event audiences are the useful detail for Play 4. LinkedIn lets you build audiences from members who clicked to attend, who registered and attended, who registered but did not attend, or who engaged without registering, which are four different messages.

On measurement, LinkedIn retired the Company Engagement Report in November 2024 and replaced it with Companies in Campaign Manager, offering 7, 30, 60, 90 and 180 day windows across paid and organic engagement. Audience sizes can also be smaller in the EEA and Switzerland, based on member opt-in.

How to build a play from scratch

1. Pick one trigger you can actually detect

   Start with a signal your team already sees without new software: a filing, an event registration, a closed lost date. If detecting it requires a purchase, pick a different trigger first.

2. Write the account and contact rule

   Decide which accounts qualify when the trigger fires, and which roles the play reaches. Name the role you always forget, usually finance or the technical owner.

3. Build one asset, not a campaign

   The play needs a single thing worth sending. Write it for the moment the trigger describes, and make it useful to someone who never replies to you.

4. Draft the sequence with days and owners

   Put every touch on a day, assign a person to each one, and mark which are ads and which carry a name. Keep the whole thing under six touches.

5. Agree the exit and the response time

   Write what stops the play and how fast sales responds to an alert. Both teams sign it, and it lives in the play document, not in somebody's memory.

6. Run it on ten accounts before you scale it

   Ten is enough to find the broken step and cheap enough to throw away. Review after the first ten, change one thing, then run it again.

The same discipline applies to the writing. A play that scales only because the message got vaguer is not a play, and personalized outreach stops working at the exact point where the personalization becomes a merge field.

How to measure an ABM play

An ABM play is measured on accounts, not leads. The unit that matters is whether the right people at the right companies moved, and whether that movement turned into pipeline inside the window you set.

Every play needs a control group. Hold back a slice of triggered accounts, run nothing on them, and compare. Without that, you are measuring the trigger, because accounts that just raised money buy more anyway.

Report revenue at the program level and meetings at the play level. Revenue from a single ABM play is too thin to read, while revenue across the whole target account list, against the rest of the pipeline, is the number the business wants.

When to retire a play

ABM play libraries rot quietly. Nobody removes anything, so the list grows, the team spreads thinner, and the two plays that work get the same attention as the six that do not.

Review the whole library once a quarter, with both teams in the room and the numbers on screen. Retiring one play per review is a healthy rate, and it is the only habit that keeps a library honest.

Mistakes that make a play library useless

• Nine account-based campaigns launched at once, none of them staffed past the first month.
• A trigger nobody can verify, so half the sales team learns to ignore the alert.
• The sequence written down, the owners left as team names instead of people.
• Referencing tracked behavior in an email, which turns a warm account cold.
• Marketing writing messages that go out under a rep's name.
• No exit rule, so target accounts sit inside a play for months collecting outreach.
• No control group, so every result is really a measurement of the trigger.
• Counting leads, which makes a one to one play look like the worst thing marketing runs.
• Reporting revenue per play, when the honest unit is revenue across the whole target list.
• Never retiring anything, so the library becomes a list of things nobody does.

The first email in the new executive play

The template below is touch 2 of Play 1, and it was written for this page. It goes out around day seven, after the ads have been running, and it deliberately avoids congratulating the reader on the new job.

Subject: the {{decision}} question in your first quarter

Hi {{firstName}},

You picked up {{function}} at {{company}} this month, so {{decision}} is probably already on your list, along with about forty other things.

Two teams in {{industry}} told us the same thing about it: {{observation}}. We wrote up how they handled it, including what they would do differently, and I can send that over.

Worth a look, or is this a next-quarter problem?

{{senderName}}

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