How we built our ABM-focused nurture sequence program

With the success of our ABM MBA and Surv-ai-vor programs, we saw a surge of high-quality contacts in our CRM, but we weren't doing anything to engage our lower intent leads. Instead, we would have BDRs reach out ad hoc, resulting in few meetings booked.

To move these leads down the funnel and create value before our prospects are ready to talk to sales, we implemented a new scoring and ABM nurture sequence program.

While some marketers believe nurture is dead, we think bad nurture—generic messaging and mistimed CTAs—is the real issue. If you’re looking to start or improve your lead scoring and messaging, see our learnings, templates, and emails below.

We invest in a few key channels to drive engagement with target accounts, including events, ads, BDR outreach, and Mutiny personalized experiences on our website.

We wanted to create a process that enables us to:

• Work in lockstep with our sales org to deliver consistent and relevant messaging at every interaction with target accounts

• Come up with a scoring system to systematize engagement to meet our prospects where they are

• Create a shortlist of very high intent leads for BDRs to prioritize

By creating an ABM nurture program, we intend to build our brand, explain our product and provide value for our target accounts, accelerating our pipeline along the way.

Align with sales to define ICP

On a quarterly basis, collaborate cross functionally to define and refine your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) at both the contact and account level. During our company offsites, we compile a list of account and contact level descriptors and use in-person time with our head of Sales, CX and BDRs to validate. You can grab that template here.

Post offsite, we use Keyplay to refresh our target accounts that match that criteria and work with AEs to define our priority accounts within our TAM and upload that list into SFDC and integrate into Hubspot. After that, we assign points to various contact and account demographics to nurture only qualified prospects (more on that below).

Create a three-part scoring system

Our scoring system includes three parts: contact level, account level, and web behavior.

Contact and account level points are weighted higher (right contact and account level characteristics, including 6sense 6QA are scored at 20 - 40 points each) than web activity so that only qualified prospects get our nurture.

We categorized popular web pages into low, medium, and high intent, assigning scores to each. You can swipe my scoring template here.

Negative scores were assigned for inactive web activity (>30 days) to deprioritize unready prospects. Customer nurture was also given a negative score to avoid nurturing existing customers. Test recently acquired customers and leads to make sure the math maths!

And voila! We came up with our threshold, focusing on leads that scored greater than 125 points. We input all of our account, contact and web activity criteria into Hubspot's Lead Scoring.

Align on Messaging and CTAs

Once we the scoring system was locked in, we brainstormed what the content would be for top of funnel and middle of funnel. Here's a Figma template you can use. We positioned our CTAs to move prospects down the funnel (for example, our top of funnel content had CTAs to read playbooks and blogs, while our bottom of funnel nurtures were very focused on taking a product tour).

• TOFU Messaging:

  • Free templates

  • 5 ABM tactics that work

  • How to build a revenue-generating ABM program

  • Light social testimonial

• MOFU Messaging:

  • Case studies

  • Explaining our product

Remember to have fun with it! Our mascot is a raccoon, so we scoured the internet for funny raccoon GIFs. I’m also looking for any excuse to scroll TikTok, so I found a few funny ones about B2B marketers and added that in too. I tucked some Easter eggs into our footer. Here's a template that you can fill in with the actual copy that you'll use for your team to collaborate on. Remember to think about the end to end experience for your prospects. We made sure the content created was in line with our paid ads, events and content, including creating personalized Mutiny experiences (like the dynamic URL variable below).

Create workflows to automate sequences

We uploaded all of the emails above once we felt good about them and created 2 workflows.

The first was the nurture sequence flow. Here's a step by step (I find using ChatGPT very helpful when creating Hubspot workflows):

1. Select an automatic workflow when filter criteria is met.

2. Group 1 Criteria: Lead Scoring is greater than or equal to 125 (or whatever your minimum threshold is).

3. Add a branch based on filter criteria. Name one branch name TOFU (Lead Scoring is greater than or equal to 125 AND Lead Scoring is less than 150). Name the second branch MOFU (Lead Scoring is greater than or equal to 150 AND Lead Scoring is less than 175). You'll create the BOFU branch in a separate workflow.

4. Populate the emails in and set a delay of a few weeks.

The second workflow is to trigger a Slack notification to BDRs when a prospect has crossed the BOFU threshold.

1. Create a Slack channel.

2. Select an automatic workflow when filter criteria is met.

3. Group 1 Criteria: Lead Scoring is greater than or equal to 175 (or whatever your BOFU threshold is).

4. Add a branch based on filter criteria. Name each branch after a BDR and set each group as: BDR name is equal to any of [BDR name].

5. From each branch, select a Slack notification send. We include the prospects email, company, score, their Mutiny microsite and last web page visited. Hot tip: to ping a BDR, you'll need to find their Slack ID by copying their member ID and insert in the flow.

6. We also integrated each prospects lead score into Salesforce so BDRs can compile a list and drop high intent leads into their existing Salesloft sequences.

And there you have it! We define our ICP, assign scoring to them, create valuable content and use marketing automation to nurture our leads.

Curious to see it in action? Take our nurture sequence for a spin and subscribe today! LMK what you think!