Scrappy ABM

Bryan Byler caps his ABM lists at 25 companies so there's time to research every person on them before the first message goes out.

Bryan says so many people ask for "a list of all companies this size, number of employees" and run an ABM campaign from it, and that it just isn't going to work as well as they'd like. On this episode of Scrappy ABM, Mason Cosby talks with Bryan Byler, Chief Growth Officer at 4CAST, about the program he runs instead: lists of 25, two or three people per account, and real research on...

Cold outreach gets a 0.1% to 0.5% response rate. A podcast invite to the same cold audience gets 3% to 5%, and when it goes to your LinkedIn network, it climbs to 20% to 50%. That gap is the case for account-based podcasting, and it's what this week's Scrappy ABM conversation is built around.

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Mason Cosby sits down with Joseph Lewin, who has run 47-ish podcast launches in about two and a half years. They get into why a podcast invite works as a door opener instead of a sales pitch, and how to move from interview to first meeting without th...

Most event programs are a booth, a badge scanner, and a hope that the right buyer walks past. This episode of Scrappy ABM is pulled from a webinar Mason Cosby ran on ABMifying your events, and it covers two programs from the past six months.

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One client invested two hundred thousand dollars into a single event and generated 31 opportunities in three days. Mason's own two-person team spent thirty to forty thousand dollars across a full year of events, got punched in the mouth at SaaStr with zero connections after day one, and rebuilt the whole ap...

Most ABM advice assumes a team of ten and a six-figure tech stack. This episode of Scrappy ABM goes the other way. Mason Cosby takes a real company with a three-person marketing team and builds their ABM program live on a webinar, with the audience following along and writing their own answers down.

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Hanna Liszniansky leads marketing at Roundtable Learning, which creates custom VR and AR training programs for Fortune 500 companies. Big expensive product, complex sale, long cycle. Mason works through how people currently find out Roundtable exists, how the team builds pain, how they pr...

Most ABM programs stall on the list. Cindy Dubon has a fixed budget and a rule about it: don't spend a dollar on an account you aren't desperate to win. On this episode of Scrappy ABM, Mason Cosby talks with Cindy Dubon about how she built a tiered target account list at Goldcast, and why tier A comes down to whether a company already gets what she's selling.

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Cindy walks through the firmographic and technographic signals she uses, how she separates preferences from requirements when tiering, and why she can hand sales five hundred accounts in...

Twelve events, roughly $30,000 to $40,000 all-in, and a plan that fell apart at the first conference.

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On this episode of Scrappy ABM, Mason Cosby sits down with Jim Gilkey to break down what happened when the pre-booked meeting play stopped working. When you're not a sponsor you don't get the registration list. Vendor-class tickets can lock you out of the attendee directory entirely, and the event app often doesn't open until the day before.

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The fix came from reading the target account list differently. At one conference, about 10% of a 350-account list was...

Most advice on building a target account list assumes you have the time to build one properly. Amanda Oles has a second answer for everyone else, and it starts with the accounts that already know who you are.

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Mason Cosby and Amanda work through both paths on Scrappy ABM: the fully structured ICP approach for when ABM is your whole role, and the two programs to run when it isn't. Pipeline acceleration and closed lost. Her case is that those two lists define themselves, so you skip signals and orchestration and get straight to doing.

Most target account lists get built backwards. Someone writes an ICP, sales adds the logos they've always wanted, and nobody checks it against a single closed deal. On this episode of Scrappy ABM, Mason Cosby talks with Christy Behnke, VP of Marketing at Terryberry, about where that list should actually come from.

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Christy starts with Salesforce reports on closed won and closed lost, and pays close attention to the stage where lost deals fell out. From there she grades accounts A through D, loops in product to see where the roadmap is headed, and tests me...

Most product-led companies decide ABM isn't built for them and move on. On Scrappy ABM, Mason Cosby makes the opposite case with Jess Annadurai, Senior Global Marketing Director at Supermetrics, who ran customer expansion as the entry point instead of new business.

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Supermetrics is a PLG company with a land-and-expand motion, and Jess treats its existing customer base as the strongest target account list it owns. She walks through how she, the VP of Sales, and the Director of Customer Success in North America picked accounts, why they started with an advocacy approach, and how a...

Most ABM target lists start the same way: sales names the accounts they want, marketing runs campaigns at them, and everyone hopes volume closes the gap. On this episode of Scrappy ABM, Mason Cosby sits down with Mahsa Malekyar to pull that approach apart. Her point is blunt: an account that will eventually need your tool is not the same as an account that needs it right now, and if you can't tell the difference, you're buying brand awareness and calling it ABM.

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The conversation covers where free intent data already lives inside the tools yo...

Most people are three to five years into account-based marketing. Ed VanderBush has been doing it for over a decade, and he's watched the whole thing move from a concept Bev Burgess was talking about in the early 2010s into an integrated mindset across a marketing team. On this episode of Scrappy ABM, Mason Cosby sits down with Ed, Senior Manager of Account-Based Marketing at LiveRamp, to get into what actually moves ABM forward when you don't have an unlimited budget.

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They cover the three inputs Ed uses to build a target account list, why "sa...

For almost a year, the Scrappy ABM team has run a full-day workshop called ABM in a Day, with over 900 marketers coming through it. In this solo episode, host Mason Cosby pulls the best of the best from that workshop's survey feedback and condenses roughly seven hours of material into about 15 minutes.

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The thing marketers rated most helpful was a clear structure and system for their ABM program. Mason walks through the two core frameworks behind that structure: the account progression model and the 4D framework. Then he gets into the best customer profile, a lo...

A best-of pulls the moments worth keeping, and this one runs from getting internal buy-in all the way to proving the ads nobody clicks. On Scrappy ABM, Mason Cosby revisits four conversations that each solve a different part of running an account-based program without an enterprise budget.

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Hannah Forson explains how to bring channel managers along without wrecking their metrics. Payton Christopher builds a target list from CRM data and customer-service influence. Greg Rokisky turns organic social into an account channel. Adam Holmgren connects LinkedIn ad data to the CRM so brand awareness stops being in...

Most ABM programs stall not because the channels are wrong, but because nothing is designed to actually move accounts forward. This episode of Scrappy ABM pulls from the live Q&A section of one of Mason Cosby's ABM in a Day workshops, and the questions are exactly the ones practitioners get stuck on: how to define account progression stages, how long to run a re-engagement playbook before giving up, and what a real conversion mechanism looks like when you're running lean.

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The episode wraps with a live program teardown with a workshop attendee, walking through he...

Most ABM teams are drowning in signals and stressing about gaps in their programs. This episode of Scrappy ABM cuts through that with raw Q&A from the ABM in a Day workshop, where Mason Cosby answers the questions that keep coming up again and again. Measurement cadences. Signal prioritization. Partner plays for locked-down verticals. What to do when someone visits your book-a-meeting page and doesn't book.

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This is part three of the ABM in a Day FAQ series, pulled straight from live workshop Q&A. No fluff, no setups. Just Mason working through real pr...

Engaged accounts that won't advance. SDRs burned too early. Twenty email opens with zero replies. This episode of Scrappy ABM pulls real Q&A from the ABM in a Day workshop and works through the questions every ABM operator hits when the playbook starts to crack.

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Mason Cosby walks through why engaged accounts stall (usually because the wrong people are engaged, or nobody has quantified the cost of inaction), what signals to use when website visitor data isn't an option, and where SDRs actually fit in an account progression model. He also breaks down the mi...

Outbound has changed. What worked two years ago does not work today, and what works today is not going to work two years from now. On this episode of Scrappy ABM, Mason Cosby sits down with Drew Johnson, Senior Director of Business Development at Everflow, to walk through how his team actually picks targets, runs LinkedIn-led outreach, and knows when to pivot off a vertical that has stopped paying out.

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Drew runs outbound for a bootstrapped affiliate-tracking platform going up against bigger logos. He calls it David versus Goliath. To compete, his SDRs and AEs le...

Most of us have run an event, watched the in-person conversations crackle, then sent the same templated follow-up to everyone on the lead list. The energy disappears the moment marketing hits send. That gap is what Dave Schools set out to close when he started Singulate, and it's what he and Mason Cosby get into on this episode of Scrappy ABM.

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Dave breaks down why marketing ops keeps becoming the bottleneck on personalization, why data is now a commodity but messaging is not, and what it actually takes to send hyper-segmented email at scale without so...

This episode pulls a question-and-answer block from Scrappy ABM's ABM in a Day workshop, the recurring session Mason Cosby runs every four to six weeks. Mason takes the questions that have surfaced most often across past workshops and answers them in one sitting, drawing on the patterns he sees show up across operators in the room.

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The questions cover what most ABM teams hit in their first six months. When you should and shouldn't run ABM. What the LTGP-to-CAC ratio means for software companies. How to pick the next vertical without burning the program. What to...

Most ABM programs start with a plan and die with a calendar. Moréa Pollet spent three years watching that happen at InfluxData - and then figured out why. On this episode of Scrappy ABM, Mason Cosby sits down with Moréa to walk through exactly how her team rebuilt their ABM motion from the ground up, using Clay-powered enrichment, AI-generated personalization, and a LinkedIn funnel built for technical buyers.

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The conversation covers what killed version one (sales bandwidth, no real operationalization), what made version two stick (automating everything except the phone call), and the hone...

Most security and risk companies sell fear. Factal sells facts - and their ABM program reflects that difference. On this episode of Scrappy ABM, Mason Cosby sits down with Dave Clark, Marketing Strategist at Factal, to break down how a two-person marketing team with no dedicated ABM stack runs targeted, personalized outreach to Fortune 500 security operations centers - without resorting to fear-mongering.

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The conversation covers how Factal uses NGO champions who move into the private sector as a warm targeting signal, why Dave ignores click-through rates (and why that made them go up 40%), and how to...

This is an interview of Mason on the GTM & AI Operators Show.

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What happens when you strip away the enterprise budget, the fancy ABM platform, and the eight-person marketing team - and still have to hit a revenue number? That's the premise behind Scrappy ABM, and in this episode, Mason Cosby sits down with Aakash Sinha on the GTM & AI Operators Show to break down what ABM actually is, when it works, and why most programs fail before they ever get going. Mason walks through the four core reasons ABM programs break down, how to te...

Building an effective account-based program brings up a lot of specific questions. On this episode of Scrappy ABM, host Mason Cosby answers the most frequent questions pulled directly from previous ABM in a Day workshops. Mason addresses exactly what re-engagement means and when accounts should cycle out of your program.

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Mason details the minimum viable tools required to run a successful strategy. He warns against buying new software before establishing a clear plan. Instead, he explains how your strategy should inform the tools you use. You only really need a CRM, a marketing automation platform, an...

Account-based marketing does not strictly require massive budgets or gated landing pages. Sometimes, all it takes is showing up where your target accounts already spend their time online. On this episode of Scrappy ABM, host Mason Cosby speaks with Greg Rokisky about a highly specific, low-cost marketing play.

Greg details the process of building an organic social account program during his time at Sprout Social. He explains how his team partnered closely with sales to identify target accounts and monitor their activity. When a target brand had a viral moment, Greg's team engaged directly on platforms like...

Roughly 80% of ABM programs fail. The main reason is that companies start by targeting accounts that have never heard of them. It takes three to six months for your brand to even be remembered. By that time, the program has usually been killed. Welcome to Scrappy ABM. Host Mason Cosby breaks down exactly where you should build your target account list to nearly guarantee a win.

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If you focus on a completely net new audience, you are setting yourself up for a long wait. It can take anywhere from 3 to 24 months for those accounts to en...

Struggling to get buy-in for your ABM program budget? Securing hundreds of thousands of dollars for marketing initiatives requires a specific, structured process. In this episode of Scrappy ABM, host Mason Cosby walks through the exact four steps for building ABM programs and getting leaders on board quickly.

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Instead of asking for a budget right away, marketers must first audit their current efforts. Mason Cosby explains how to map out everything from SEO to organic social events. He breaks down how to categorize these programs by their intended purpose to create your first account progression mo...

Most ABM programs fail not because they have a bad strategy, but because they execute in the wrong sequence. Marketers often start with a blank canvas and build strictly at the awareness stage for cold accounts. Brand recall typically takes three to six months. Because of this timeline delay, executive leadership often cuts the program before it generates any actual pipeline.

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On Scrappy ABM, Mason Cosby explains why mathematically paying off debt with the Avalanche method is the fastest, but the Snowball method is actually the most successful. The Snowball method works because human psychology re...

Buyers are not searching Google keywords in the dark funnel anymore. They are asking questions in private channels, large-language-model communities, Perplexity, and Slack communities. In episode 259 of Scrappy ABM, host Mason Cosby sits down with Lisa Sharapata to discuss this exact shift in buyer behavior.

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Lisa shares how she is rewriting marketing playbooks by getting closer to the customer through first and second-party intent signals, in-person events, and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). She explains how to use artificial intelligence to find content gaps, draft resources with human-in-the-loop oversight, and build highly specific dashboards using Claude co...

If you are not hitting your pipeline goals, you might be ignoring the easiest way to generate revenue: a systematic referral program. Mason Cosby argues that most organizations leave millions of dollars on the table simply because they do not know how to ask for referrals effectively.

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Many revenue leaders fall into the trap of thinking referrals are serendipitous or awkward to request. In this episode of Scrappy ABM, Mason breaks down a repeatable process to turn referrals into a scalable revenue engine. He explains exactly when to make the ask, how to structure incentives so...

If you are struggling to make your revenue results highly repeatable, you need a simple system to ensure you cover all your bases. In this episode of Scrappy ABM, Mason Cosby walks through the "4D framework" that has helped generate a hundred million in revenue over the past three years.

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Mason breaks down the four critical components of every successful program: Data, Distribution, Destination, and Direction. He explains why simply sending mass emails to a database fails to create nuanced messaging and how to align your outreach triggers with the right people. You will learn wh...

Mason Cosby shares a webinar on finding a treasure trove of opportunities in closed-lost programs. If you are looking for a quick way to generate a pipeline right now, this is it. You have already spent money to acquire these accounts, built relationships, and uncovered real pain. Mason explains why 60 to 80 percent of closed-lost opportunities are lost for reasons that can change: budget, timing, and priorities.

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This episode breaks down the 4 D framework: Data, Distribution, Destination, and Direction. Mason outlines a systematic approach to re-engagement rather than just reaching out when the pipeline is low. He...

Mason Cosby connects with Putney Cloos, the Chief Marketing Officer at Bombora, to clarify exactly what intent data is and how revenue teams should use it. While many marketers view intent data strictly as a tool for sales prioritization, Putney argues that the use cases go much deeper. She explains the difference between first-party data collected from owned properties and third-party data gathered from across the web.

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A major focus of the conversation is data provenance. Putney highlights a critical but often overlooked question: Does your data provider actually have the right to use the da...

Mason Cosby shares a conversation from the Growth & Conversions podcast with Meghana Bhate. The discussion centers on a practical scenario: launching an Account-Based Marketing program for a greenfield account with high annual contract value.

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Mason breaks down the process, starting with targeting based on profitability and retention rather than just revenue. He explains how to map the buying committee by analyzing deal records and introduces the Account Progression Model. You will hear how to build awareness, validate existence, and move accounts through meaningful engagement using existing tools and content.

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What We Cove...

Most marketers follow a strict rule: never send paid traffic to a homepage. Tony Bradberry and the team at Grey Matter break that rule every day. Tony joins Mason Cosby to explain how a "problem-centric" homepage can actually outperform specific landing pages when the messaging is right. He argues that if your core message resonates with the buyer's problem, the homepage should be the best place to start.

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They also discuss Grey Matter's evolution into a tech-enabled ABM approach. Tony breaks down their internal "Intelligent Dossier" tool, which automates research and generates custom landing pages fo...

Buying technology first to inform marketing strategy is a common mistake. This approach burns through the typical three-to-six-month grace period executives give for new initiatives. By the time the tech is implemented, there is no revenue to show, and the program gets cut.

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Mason Cosby joins Andrea Coloma, Product Marketer at Dreamdata, for a live session on the Attributed podcast to discuss building repeatable account-based marketing plays. Mason explains why companies should prove ABM works using their current tooling before investing in expensive software. They discuss how to navigate the shift from lead generation to AB...

Sendoso has solidified its position as a leader in the direct mail space by acquiring competitors like Alyce and Postal. But acquiring a company is only the first step. The real challenge is retaining those customers and expanding the relationship. Host Mason Cosby sits down with Kris Rudeegraap, Co-CEO of Sendoso, to discuss the specific playbook they used to merge three platforms into one without alienating their user base.

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Kris Rudeegraap details a strategy built on patience and data. Instead of forcing an immediate migration, Sendoso unified its data sources and focused on education. Kris ex...

Most companies treat events as a logo parade or a chance to walk the floor, relying on hope, dreams, and prayers to scan badges and make money later. Mason Cosby argues that if your event is not ROI positive before your plane takes off, you are doing events wrong. Events should be viewed as a relationship accelerator for existing connections rather than a place to blindly hope for new ones.

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Mason breaks down a tactical plan to ensure every event generates a return. He outlines four core sections: pre-event preparation, event execution, follow-up, and speaking se...

Mason Cosby sits down with Gillian Hinkle to discuss the complexities of marketing within a portfolio company. When an organization moves from a single product to a suite of services, marketers often struggle to build intentional sequencing. Gillian shares her approach to identifying customer behaviors and mapping the overlap between different buying committees.

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She explains why you cannot go it alone: you must work with other teams to find commonalities in lead information and problem sets. A critical part of her strategy is to market to the internal sales team first. If sellers do not un...

If you are tired of getting ignored, show up in the one place your prospects cannot ignore you: their mailbox.

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If you have been building a B2B marketing program, direct mail has likely come up. Unfortunately, it is often thrown out immediately—just like the junk mail you get at home. This happens because most marketers treat it as a cold opener or a mass outreach tool. On this episode of Scrappy ABM, Mason Cosby explains why you should never use direct mail to start a conversation with someone who has never heard of you...

BambooHR built a massive brand on inbound marketing for small businesses. As the company looks to move upmarket to target larger, growing organizations, its strategy must evolve to cut through the noise. Hannah Forson joins Mason Cosby to explain how she layers account-based strategies on top of an existing inbound engine without bringing the bank.

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The conversation focuses on the practical steps of defining a target audience by analyzing closed-won opportunities rather than guessing. Hannah explains why marketers should rarely start an ABM pilot by creating net-new content and how to repurpose what already works. Sh...