The Hightouch ABM playbook: How to build a program based on real account progression
A practical guide to designing stage-based ABM that moves accounts forward over time
Made by: Hightouch
When ABM works, it really works: high-value accounts convert, sales and marketing actually align, and the business grows as a direct result. But, like all things in marketing…it’s rarely that easy.
Why? It’s not the ABM practitioner’s fault (they’re usually pretty great at their jobs). The truth is that there’s no perfect science to reach buyers in a way that always connects, on top of internal people, processes, and tools that make marketing messy. In ABM, those pitfalls just take a particular shape: maybe it’s blowing most of your budget on a giant platform contract. Maybe it’s marketing running a bunch of campaigns with an “ABM thing” happening off to the side. Or maybe ABM just feels like a bit of a guessing game.
These pitfalls are pretty common. But, a lot of teams have overcome them, too. Below, we’ll walk through real, vetted tactics — some that weren't common even a year or two ago — that nearly any business can adopt to make ABM a motion for repeatable, growing success.
At Hightouch, we not only market to marketers, we’re marketers ourselves, which gives us two advantages: our products support our own marketing workflows, and we talk to marketers every day, which gives us a unique view into what works, what falls short, and what winning programs look like. That’s why we’re breaking down what we’ve learned and showing you exactly how we architect our ABM motion.
It’s not just what we believe to be good marketing. After putting the playbook below into practice, we saw a 30% lift in opportunities generated, which led to a 20% increase in closed-won accounts.
We’ll get into our tactics below, but first, we want to share the beliefs we center our strategy around:
Timing is critical: Getting touches in quickly when you see intent is just as important as content itself (sometimes more so)
Design for continuous motion: Treat ABM as one ongoing GTM motion (based on account-stage orchestration), not a one-off channel tacked to the side of campaigns
Align marketing and sales: It's not a nice to have. Responsive sales activity will tremendously drive the success of the program.
Context first: Get as much data from your existing tools as possible so you can act on full context
Underpinning all of this is your data, which we see as every company’s competitive differentiator. Let’s explore how and why below, as we dig into our exact playbook.
Whether you are launching ABM for the first time or rebuilding an existing program, the first thing to get right is your data foundation.
We use Hightouch ourselves as our composable CDP, and we centralize go-to-market data in Snowflake. This warehouse-first setup gives us a clean source of truth for personalization and attribution. The same principles apply even if you are not there yet.
Later in this playbook, we cover how to adapt this approach if you do not have a warehouse-ready foundation. You can run ABM without strong data, and you might still see early wins. But signals fragment, segmentation weakens, and end-to-end reporting quickly becomes hard to trust.
Once your data is unified and governed, you can stop thinking in disconnected campaigns and start building ABM as a system.
That’s where strategy comes in.
Our ABM motion treats pipeline as the result of account progression over time. Instead of casting a wide net and moving on when accounts do not convert quickly, we work from a prioritized list of target accounts. The focus is on moving each account forward through clear stages of awareness.
Every touchpoint has a job to do. Every signal feeds back into the warehouse. That makes progression measurable and actionable, not subjective.
This stage model becomes the operating system for ABM. It decides what happens next, which channel activates, and what message an account should see.
Our awareness stages are pre-sales conditions. They describe where a target account is based on real behavior, not assumptions. They also determine which plays we run next.
We use five stages:
Unaware: The account has shown no recent digital, email, sales, or intent activity, and is not currently engaging with Hightouch in any observable way.
Aware: The account has had its first meaningful signal of engagement, such as a website visit, ad interaction, email engagement, social activity, intent spike, or response to outreach.
Interest: The account is actively researching, demonstrated by repeated website visits, engagement with key content, event attendance, or two way interaction with sales.
Desire: The account is showing buying intent, including evaluating competitors, involving multiple stakeholders, asking about pricing or implementation, and engaging with use case specific content.
Action: The account takes a clear conversion step, such as requesting a demo or progressing into a sales opportunity (S1+).
To make these stages useful in practice, each one is tied to clear signals and a clear next play. Signals come from across channels, like website activity, ad engagement, email and social engagement, content downloads, event attendance, outbound responses, and intent spikes, then roll back into the warehouse. From there, we calculate the stage centrally based on the overall pattern of engagement, then sync only the stage to the tools responsible for the next step. That keeps execution consistent across channels, without flooding systems like Salesforce with noisy engagement data.
This also clarifies how the middle stages work in practice. Interest reflects sustained research behavior, such as multiple sessions and engagement with key content, while Desire reflects higher-intent evaluation behavior, such as competitor comparisons, pricing, and implementation questions, or multiple stakeholders engaging. And because real-world signals can be messy, we do not rely on any single action to advance a stage. We look at the broader pattern so the stage stays actionable.
With this model in place, we can run coordinated plays across ads, email, and personalized landing pages, and expand into more targeted 1:1 tactics as accounts progress. If you do not have a warehouse-first setup today, that is okay. The execution details may change, but the progression model stays the same.
In our ABM system, ads are designed to move accounts forward at each stage. Their job depends on where the account is right now. For accounts that have not engaged yet, ads focus on surfacing relevant pain points and creating initial awareness. For accounts already showing interest, ads shift toward product value, specific use cases, and the jobs-to-be-done we know matter for that segment. We anchor ads to the current account stage and what should happen next.
Everything starts with a named account list. That means a finite list of specific companies you want to win, typically selected by Sales or an AE, not a large audience built from ICP filters.
From there, we use Hightouch in two core ways:
Sync audiences into ad platforms on an hourly cadence
Send conversion events back into ad platforms via conversion APIs
We also segment audiences so messaging stays relevant, and performance can be evaluated across meaningful cohorts. The dimensions that matter most for us are:
Industry
Persona
Technology
We send conversion events back to the server because pixel tracking alone is rarely enough for ABM. Browser restrictions, ad blockers, cookie loss, and cross-device behavior can all degrade signal quality. Server-side events help us capture the milestones that actually indicate progression, improve attribution, and give ad platforms better signals to optimize toward.
Suppression is a core part of the system. We exclude audiences that have already progressed past the stages ads are meant to influence. That way, we do not waste spend and avoid creating friction by showing early-stage ads to accounts already in a later-stage motion.
Core suppressions we use include:
Existing opportunities, especially beyond the stages ads are meant to influence
Employees, to protect ad spend and avoid polluting performance signals
Competitors, maintained as a suppression list
Because ABM audiences are smaller and more targeted, creative fatigue tends to hit faster than it does in broad demand gen. If you cannot refresh creative quickly, performance drops, and the team starts rationing updates.
This is where ABM often slows down. Refresh cycles stretch, design becomes a bottleneck, and “keeping ads fresh” turns into a lot of manual coordination.
With Hightouch’s Ad Studio and AI agents, we can generate new ad concepts faster and at scale. From there, we review, edit, route variants to the right audience segments, and push them downstream to ad platforms.
The result is less busy work, faster iteration, and consistently fresh creative for the accounts we care about most.
Email is one of our main tools for moving named accounts through the awareness stages. It is also one of the levers that helps move an account from Aware into an S1 opportunity.
Because our data lives in the warehouse, we can tailor nurture based on account attributes, persona, and real behavior. We sync the right fields and segmentation logic into HubSpot, then HubSpot runs the workflows.
We personalize nurture flows based on:
Industry
Persona
Topic of interest
Sales context, so we do not collide with active outbound or open opportunities
Entry point, meaning what action brought the account into the flow
We split nurture into four core entry points:
Demo request
Account signup
Content or event form submission
Event attendance
One thing consistently holds true in marketing. The more relevant the message is to the buyer, the more likely they are to convert. We apply that directly to our ABM motion by personalizing the landing page experience for target accounts.
In practice, every account on our ABM list gets a dedicated experience, tailored with industry-specific use cases, company logos, and messaging based on what we believe matters most to that business.
We tested this against a control group, and the results were clear:
47.5% increase in accounts reaching Stage 1 compared to the control group
82.5% increase in accounts reaching Stage 2 compared to the control group
Personalization works when it stays scalable, measurable, and governed.
Below is how we built it.
The process starts in Clay. Clay is a GTM enrichment platform with a broad set of integrations. It helps turn fragmented go-to-market data into structured, usable signals.
We start by loading our prioritized ABM account list into Clay. From there, Clay enriches each account with:
Industry
Champion presence
Champion mover signals, where a known advocate has moved into a new company
Additional firmographic and contextual data that we do not already have in our CRM
This enrichment layer gives us a stronger foundation for personalization.
Once the data is enriched, we use an LLM integration inside Clay to generate landing page content. Using tightly scoped prompts, we generate the major components of the page, including:
Hero headlines and subhead copy
Body copy aligned to account-specific use cases
Industry-relevant customer quotes and proof points
Messaging framed around the account’s likely business objectives
Each prompt includes guardrails tied to Hightouch positioning and brand standards, so outputs stay consistent. We also include a human review step before anything goes live, to validate outputs and fix anything questionable.
Once content is generated in Clay, we sync it into Salesforce. From there, it becomes available centrally for activation via the warehouse. The important part is that every account’s personalization data is structured, governed, and queryable.
When someone lands on the site, we use Clearbit Reveal to identify the visitor’s company at the account level.
When we can identify the account, we route them into a personalized landing page experience:
All ABM landing pages live on a single flexible template
Content is dynamically swapped based on the detected account
Pages are rendered using Hightouch Personalization API
Content is pulled from central systems of record, so messaging stays consistent across channels
This setup gives us a true 1:1 account-based web experience without maintaining hundreds of static pages. And because the data flows back into the warehouse, we can measure progression and lift between pilot and control groups. That makes the impact of personalization not just visible, but provable.
You can still run ABM without the warehouse-first infrastructure we have at Hightouch. The trade-off is that you need to be more intentional about where your data lives, how you define stages, and how you maintain consistent targeting across tools.
You do not need our exact stack to apply these ideas. What matters is keeping the principles that make ABM cohesive. A shared source of truth, stage-based routing, and measurable progression.
Centralize your signals in one source of truth: Start with what you have. That might be your CRM plus a BI layer, or a lightweight warehouse. What matters is that engagement signals and account state live in one place you trust.
Define awareness stages as operational rules: Make each stage measurable with clear entry signals, like website visits, content downloads, demo requests, and opportunity creation. Avoid vague definitions that are hard to apply consistently.
Keep audience syncs and suppression rules consistent: Even if you are not fully automated, set a reliable cadence and process for updates. Manual list uploads break down quickly and create targeting drift.
Build lifecycle programs around account context and sales motion: Tie nurture to industry, persona, intent topic, and sales context. Add simple rules that pause or reroute marketing when an SDR or AE is actively working the account, so you avoid conflicting touches and keep the experience coordinated.
Make personalization scalable from day one: Design personalization as a system, not a collection of one-off assets. Anchor it to one source of truth so the same account context can power ads, email, and on-site experiences without fragmenting logic or reporting.
If you get these right, you can run effective ABM today and add automation as your infrastructure matures.
Ready to move beyond one-off ABM tactics? Book a demo to see how to turn account progression into a repeatable system.
