ZenABM

I wanted to post about how we run $5000 ABM strategy on LinkedIn ads with cheap ad formats today, but I went into such a rabbit hole with the numbers (thanks to ZenABM MCP server! 🫠) that I’m going to post about running something else after all 😅 Well, move over Astronomer - here’s me & my boss on the Big Half today! I've heard that married couples have it harder than strangers to raise funding. I find it uncanny that investors would rather bet on two 20-something strangers that met in a collage dorm over a couple that has decided to literally merge their financial lives (hence: less likely to fight over equity, imho), have and have weathered some of life's worst hardships together. If people have survived illness, unemployment, parents' death, miscarriages, bringing up children - I'm sure they will also survive choosing the colour of the signup button. But there is this prejudice that the intensity of running a business and a household together makes couples more likely to split up (which explains why almost everyone I told I’m planning to join my husband’s startup would immediately ask “aren’t you worried about that?” - implying “aren’t you worried it will ruin your relationship, not to mention the business?”). While there’s little literature on couples working together - literally no study has found them more likely to split up than the ones that don’t. And when you think about it - why would they? Spending 5 minutes on Linkedin is enough to realise how incredibly important work is to us - as a source of purpose, meaning in life, identity, self-worth and belonging. Perhaps even more than family or religion. Why would having a shared sense of purpose, meaning, and identity pose a threat to a couple that got together precisely to share their entire lives? For the past 7 years, we’ve been running many things together. From business projects, through households, rental apartments (and now also races because I’m getting just getting slower with age 😅 ) - and ZenABM is just another shared goal we have together (try it free here btw. https://lnkd.in/dp-Ym6Wj) And I’m grateful for the other “couples in business” I’m following on LinkedIn that are openly sharing about their “working relationship” - and helping break that stereotype. In no particular order: Alina Vandenberghe 🌶️ & Nicolas Vandenberghe from Chili Piper Iuliia Shnai & Marc Seitz from Papermark Maja Voje & Anze Voje from Go-To-Market Strategist Kinga Edwards & Andrew Edwards from Brainy Bees Paulina Walkowiak & Kamil Walkowiak from cux.io (Whom else should I follow btw??) Keep it up! P.S. Maybe lapping your boss in your first week is not such a good idea 😅 P.P.S: 1:49

Repeat after me: Return on Adspend is not linear! [+ our Q4 campaign update] The problem with LinkedIn ad campaigns is that they often don't "feel" like they are working and the success metrics are lagging very, very far behind the spend. But this is by design. You can't expect results from your campaign before you've reached enough accounts enough times to build awareness 🤡 Deal open rate (on average, very recent data from 118 accounts) still hovers below 1% (0.66% to be precise) so you need to reach A LOT of accounts before you see pipeline. And by *reach* we mean 10-15 meaningful impressions *per member* in the account - so if you're targeting 10 people in the account - you need to deliver a 100-150 impressions per account! And then - you do need to expect that pipeline will lag weeks or months behind the campaign end. So when I said I'm planning to open $105k in pipeline from a 13 week campaign - I didn't mean open it in 13 weeks. Otherwise the companies with impressions at the tail-end of the campaign would get no time to enter the sales funnel at all. So you need to plan to hit your KPIs on an end-skewed curve, not a linear scale. Look - I know this sucks. I'm used to spending 10 to 20x more on LinkedIn ads than I am now, where the impact on leading was a lot more 'visible' (an expectedly higher volume of demo bookings). I feel I still haven't quite rebooted my expectations of the campaigns I'm running 😅 It is *scary* to be front-loading budget and not seeing an immediate return on it - but that's why, when planning campaigns - you need to a) track leading metrics b) manage expectations that the return on adspend is not linear. So here is our own Q4 campaign at week 5 of 13, scored both ways (P.S: Use ZenABM's FREE trial for 37 days get this level of visibility into your accounts & plan your ABM strategy for 2027: https://lnkd.in/dp-Ym6Wj) DELIVERY 🔴 Spend: 44% of budget, 38% expected. 🟢 Impressions (feed, the ones that count toward the 18): 41% of goal, 38% expected. 🟢 TLA impressions (8 of the 18): 61% of goal, 38% expected. 🔴 Document impressions (10 of the 18): 6% of goal, 38% expected & over its CPM ceiling ($32.59 vs $26). 🟢 Dose per reached account: 9.6 of 18, 6.9 expected. 🔴 Companies reached: 15,649 of 20,413. FUNNEL AND REVENUE (here is where the scale decides everything 🟢 Accounts past 18 impressions: 262 of 6,500. Flat says 90% behind. Our curve says 2.9x ahead. 🟢 Accounts into WARM: 629 of 6,500. Flat line: 75% behind. Curve: 7.0x ahead. 🟢 Demos: 16 of 65. Flat line: 36% behind. Curve: ahead. 🟢 Pipeline: $8,212 of $100k. Flat line: 79% behind. Curve: 5.9x ahead. 🟢 Deals won: 3 of 13. Flat line: 40% behind. Curve: ahead. 🟢 Closed-won ARR: $7,164 of $50k. Flat line: 63% behind. Curve: 10x ahead.

The last 2 weeks since I left my job to join my husband's startup have been nuts to say the least, but I honestly didn't expect *this* to happen. When we first started talking about ZenABM, my vision for the product was to allow Demand Gen folks to run their entire ABM campaigns with natural language, directly from Claude, based on best practices from top experts, without ever touching Campaign Manager. 1️⃣ I imagined the AI agent we would build would ask me about my goals, audit my previous Linkedin campaign performance, and then suggest the right campaign structure for me to hit my goals (number of ads, bidding strategy, bids and budgets) and then just go an implement it 2️⃣ then it would monitor the performance of my campaigns against my goals, and send me an actionable weekly report with a to-do list - that it would just go and do after getting my approval 3️⃣ it would also look at my top performing ads, and generate new ads based on what has resonated most with my audience I thought we would get there in a year or so...maybe even longer with the ads generation... But 1️⃣ & 2️⃣ is already live / in staging to be released soon (Try it for free for 37 days here - you won't want to go back! https://lnkd.in/dp-Ym6Wj) and I can't imagine going back to manually creating ads in Campaign Manager or updating the audiences manually across several adsets every time something changes - even though this is something I used to do literally a couple of weeks ago 😅 3️⃣ & is something I'm working on and that we'll have an MVP for our launch on the 28th of September 😈 lmk if you'd like to get your hands on it to test it before! Thank you Kas Szatylowicz ☀️and Valentin Dimitrov for the nudge to ship this faster btw 😅

Ok this is probably the most mind-blowing case of TLAs *smashing* on Linkedin I’ve ever seen - which made me totally reconsider our own ABM ad strategy & reprioritize demand gen plans: $0.15 cost per Landing Page click (! - 66 x cheaper than image ads!) and…$ 0.02 /engagement; … 169,571 impressions (CPM… $2.31) , 18,113 engagements and 2,669 clicks to LP (1.57% average CTR to landing page, 10.68% CTR)…all for only…$391 🤯 Audience? Senior SaaS executives (mainly CFOs, CEOs etc.), global audience (US + UK + DACH/Western EU). Several meetings booked. TLAs drove 83% of all website clicks for under 6% of the total ad spend - I told them to hold their horses until the data syncs and they can tell if the conversions were influenced by TLAs only, or have been influenced by image ads and carousels too…but when the company-level engagement results came in (from ZenABM) - the demos were all influenced by TLAs only. Needless to say, other ad formats (image & carousel ads) had to go. STORY TIME: 👇 The co-founder of Valueships (Krzysztof aka the “pricing guy” & the only person who actually closed a deal at my wedding except my husband) has been building amazing content & personal brand on Linkedin + conferences. But being the smartest guy in the room doesn’t scale - Kris had to sometimes hop between 3 countries in 2 days 😂 so I’ve been pushing them to try Linkedin ABM, and finally Valueships’ Head of Growth, Aleksandra, launched their ABM campaign - here’s how it did: Top 3 TLAs: 🥇 - 20.92% CTR, 4.69% eCTR (= clicks to landing page/ impressions) 1,394 clicks, $0.10 CLCP - “Millennials: 'skinny jeans are still cool!' (they're not); SaaS: 'seat-based pricing is still cool!' (it's not)” 🥈- 21.03% CTR”, 3.02% eCTR, 141 LP clicks, $0.02 CLCP; “In a single month, Amos Bar-Joseph from Swan AI (just raised $6M) paid Anthropic $51,217. If Antropic did seat-based pricing like most SaaS co's, how much would they be able to charge?" 🥉- 8.46 CTR, 2.29 eCTR, 463 LP clicks, $0.10 CLCP - “As I'm sadistically bashing software companies for pricing mistakes, I couldn't let it slip. Jenna Alburger did a great job in smashing Netflix, and I spin it for myself as well:” 👉 Full case study: https://lnkd.in/eiCSiPhh Key patterns for the top 3: - storytelling/humor hook (skinny jeans, real company example, Netflix teardown) - never direct product pitch - real companies with real numbers (Swan AI, Anthropic $51k, Netflix) Lessons? Do: ✅ real people, companies, products + real data/results ✅ Write in 1st person, admit mistakes ✅ Short punchy hook ≤2 lines ✅ Open with paradox/ specific number ✅ mention specific pain ✅ Deliver value before any CTA (in P.S./ soft offer (but DO put the link in) Don’t: ⛔ pitch slap, open with generic "We're excited to announce we’ve been featured in Gartner report” ⛔ Write in “brand voice” rather than *your* voice / 3rd person ⛔ no value, make it about your product/features

[Learning in public:💥 Our Q4 ABM Strategy 🧘♀️- running ABM via LinkedIn Ads on a small budget + Conflicting Expert Advice] We’re typically impressed by large budgets & generating big pipelines here - but running ABM campaigns when you have six figures to spend per month is *easy*. You don’t have to sweat which ad formats you can afford to run. If you don’t have to sweat objectives or impression caps - if you waste some budget you don’t even notice. But designing an ABM campaign when you have a small budget is HARD. Every impression counts. You need to be really creative with ad formats & campaign objectives. And then you hear: “If you don’t have a large budget, you need to focus on a small account list”. BUT: “Only 5% of your audience is in the market; only 1% books a demo” 🤯 So is it impossible to generate *meaningful* pipeline results on LinkedIn with a small budget? I’m about to check. I spent days sweating ZenABM’s ABM Campaign strategy…& this is the structure I want to *test*. I will describe the *whole* strategy + how we use ZenABM for it + exact ads + workflows & impression cap logic in my newsletter on Thursday - but here’s the TL;DR: 🟢 First, I benchmarked the conversions & set goals: 65 demos in 3 months with $5k monthly spend, ~102,000 in pipeline at 6.8 x pipeline per $ spent; demos close at 26% rate so that x ~3000k ACV= + $51,000 ARR - and 3.4 x ROAS 🟢 Linkedin Ad Traffic --> demo rate: 1.21% . This could be improved with better LPs + follow up outreached by intent signal (captured from the COLD ads with ZenABM - try it free here: https://lnkd.in/dp-Ym6Wj). 🟢 deals close at a median of 30 ad impressions; 🟢 assuming 1% of demos from companies meaningfully reached (45 company impressions in cold & warm/90 days) = 6,500 companies in Q4. 🟢 34k companies and 110k members. Max 60% reach = ~ 66k members. 🟢 2 simple stages: COLD & WARM. BUT devil’s in the detail - strict impression caps + combinations of ad formats & objectives (Text / Document + Website visits; TLAs + BA) 🟢 Cold signals from 2 campaigns: Air Cover (very cheap impressions, which don’t count unless someone clicks - but they can generate brand awareness, intent signals & cheap clicks too!) + Meaningful Engagement (Docs + TLAs) 🟢 COLD --> WARM: 2+ clicks or 3+ engagements OR 18+ impressions in “Docs + TLAs” ONLY OR website engagement (with other exclusion criteria) + trial/demo without a deal - based on ZenABM “Interested” stage. 🟢 Companies in WARM: 0, 0, 5, 20, 90, 350, 900, 1840, 2900, 4300, 5700, 6500 / week. 🟢 projected spend currently 38% higher vs budget, but 1) air cover campaign won’t spend its full budget; 2) budget adjustment bs warm campaign pacing; 🟢 Metrics to watch: Cold Text: CPM ≤ $0.50 · eCPC ≤ $8.00 TLAs: CPM ≤ $34.00 · CPC to site ≤ $6.00 Documents: CPM ≤ $26.00 · CPC ≤ $10.00 🟢 Impression caps: 7 / 7D · 10 / 30D · 30 / 90D - adset level. I will be reporting on progress every week 🤓

For all 💩 on Influenced pipeline: Data from 7,466 deals, opened from 1.17 million (!) target accounts with LinkedIn ad impressions in the last 180 days, across 118 of our customers: Influenced pipeline as the attribution is not the problem. In fact - it can be a *much* better measure of influence than the 'last click' (which is also a measure of influenced pipeline 🙃 - just a different criterion!) But picking the right threshold is. When you say you retarget "Warm" accounts, how do you know they are warm? [P.S: Use ZenABM's FREE trial for 37 days get YOUR signals that correlate with pipeline & plan your ABM strategy for 2027: https://lnkd.in/dp-Ym6Wj Both ABM revenue attribution & signal-based outbound share the same problem: we pick "signals" to at random. We don't look at data first to come up with the combination of signal with statistically significant correlation with deal open rate. And when we look at the "lift" - how many times *higher* the deal open rate in the cohort with the signal was vs. the without it - we forget about other factors determining if the signal is a good "deal influence": Phi: a number from -1 to 1 showing the correlation between the signal and the deal. 1 = every signal company opens a deal and no other company does. 0 = no link. Under 0.1 = weak signal. Coverage: % of ALL deals that came from companies with the signal. 1.2%, so about 90 of 7,466 deals. High lift + low coverage = strong but rare signal. Significant at (companies): how many companies ONE account needs to target with ads in total (with and without the signal)so we can say with 95%+ confidence that the lift from the signal is not due to luck. 95% lift range: where the true lift probably sits (5.6–8.4). If the range does not include 1.0, the lift is *not* luck. That gives ⭐ (⛔ if below 1). So - among our customers - what LinkedIn signals were associated with a higher deal open rate? Top 5 by phi: 🟢 ABM stage Interested: Lift 3.3× / Phi 0.024 / Sig. at 6,515 🟢 200+ impressions + 10+ engagements + 3+ clicks: Lift 4.0× / Phi 0.023 / Sig. at 6,980 🟢 200+ impressions + 3+ engagements + 3+ clicks: Lift 3.2× / Phi 0.023 / Sig. at 7,288 🟢 1,000+ impressions: Lift 4.4× / Phi 0.022 / Sig. at 8,232 🟢 10+ engagements: Lift 3.3× / Phi 0.022 / Sig. at 7,927 Top 5 by lift: 🟢 Carousel 10+ impressions + Document click: Lift 13.9× / Phi 0.010 / Sig. at 36,107 🟢 TLA engagement + Document click: Lift 11.8× / Phi 0.011 / Sig. at 30,272 🟢 TLA click + Document click: Lift 11.7× / Phi 0.011 / Sig. at 30,454 🟢 Image click + Document click: Lift 10.6× / Phi 0.016 / Sig. at 15,595 🟢 TLA engagement + Carousel click: Lift 9.6× / Phi 0.008 / Sig. at 60,105 This is the kind of signals we will be surfacing to our customers automatically very soon btw 😎 so you don't have to sweat justifying your "influence threshold" to your boss/clients (thanks for the inspiring conversation on this Gonçalo Prates btw!)