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 sponsoring the event, so Mason and Jim stopped chasing attendees and started walking the show floor. They cover the plays that came out of it: logo-printed lattes at Forrester B2B, a plate of buffet food at Gartner that turned into a CMO meeting, and a $250 taco night that produced four booked meetings. Even with the original plan dead, the year still produced over 40 opportunities.

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👤 Guest Bio

Jim Gilkey is Head of Sales at Scrappy ABM and the only seller on the team, as he points out in the first 30 seconds. Before joining, he spent nearly four years at Terminus across enterprise sales, customer success, and account management, and he started his career as a Salesforce BDR. He also hosts Account Based Beverages, a short-format ABM interview show he launched in 2022. He's based in Indianapolis.

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📌 What We Cover

• Why a $30,000 to $40,000 event budget bought a plan that didn't survive the first conference
• The structural problem: no sponsorship means no registration list, and vendor tickets can hide the attendee directory
• Nobody reads event app messages, including the people sending them
• The shift from attendees to sponsors, and the 350-account list where 10% were sponsoring
• The opening line at a booth: "Hey, do you have a marketer here that is helping run the show?"
• Logo-printed lattes, a plate of lunch at Gartner, and the $250 taco night that booked four meetings
• Why targeting sponsors lets you go where your ICP is, from ed tech to HR tech, instead of only marketing conferences
• Networkers, offerers, and setters, plus why the setter should hold the first meeting
• Building measurement layers so a weak offer doesn't get an entire channel killed

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Events: B2BMX, SaaStr, Demand & Expand, ANA, Gartner, Salesforce Connections, Forrester B2B
• Tools: LinkedIn Sales Navigator, ChatGPT, Claude, Canva
• Data Axle
• Taco night landing page

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Resources:

Scrappy ABM: Visit for more ABM tips and strategies.

Connect with Mason on LinkedIn for a conversation about ABM.

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If you enjoyed today's episode and found valuable insights for your business, be sure to subscribe to the Scrappy ABM podcast for more expert discussions. Don't forget to leave a review and share this episode with your team or fellow marketers!

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.

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From there they get into channels for long enterprise sales cycles, why Stensul's most influential combination is trade show plus email plus paid social, the two-minute pitch rule that makes customer dinners convert, and how Amanda knows she has momentum before pipeline shows up. Her closing lesson: simple is better.

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👤 Guest Bio

Amanda Oles is Director of Revenue Marketing at Stensul, the governed creation platform for enterprise marketing teams. She stepped into the role in 2025 after two and a half years leading demand generation there, and came up through demand gen at Datto and WordStream. Her programs sell into large, highly regulated enterprises where sales cycles run long and compliance limits what marketing can say. She's active in the ForgeX ABM community.

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📌 What We Cover

• Why sales and marketing "need to be like best friends" before a target account list exists
• The two programs Amanda recommends when the company treats ABM as a tactic: pipeline acceleration and closed lost
• Using AI to analyze the past 100 Gong calls instead of relying on philosophical intent at the account level
• Getting target contacts into Salesforce and tagged so the motion can scale
• Stensul's most influential channel combination: trade show plus email plus paid social
• Mason's split of digital for existence and in-person for acceleration
• The two-minute pitch rule at customer dinners, and using an anchor customer to fill the room
• Owning your own account score instead of being married to a platform's version
• Why the procurement one-pager came out of finding where deals stall the longest

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Stensul
• ForgeX
• Marketo, Salesforce, Gong
• Influ2 study presented at Gartner on ABM success metrics
• Amanda Oles on LinkedIn

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Resources:

Scrappy ABM: Visit for more ABM tips and strategies.

Connect with Mason on LinkedIn for a conversation about ABM.

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If you enjoyed today's episode and found valuable insights for your business, be sure to subscribe to the Scrappy ABM podcast for more expert discussions. Don't forget to leave a review and share this episode with your team or fellow marketers!

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 messaging on 10% of the target account list instead of half of it.

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The conversation also covers content mapped to funnel stage, ChatGPT ads as a new test channel, and why she treats ABM as part of demand gen rather than a separate program. Plus the measurement that happens before the MQL, her 25% of contract value rule for acquisition cost, and what she wishes she'd known before her first ABM campaign.

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👤 Guest Bio

Christy Behnke is VP of Marketing at Terryberry, an employee recognition and engagement company founded in 1918 and headquartered in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She's built ABM at multiple organizations, with prior revenue marketing leadership roles at SMG (Service Management Group), Omnigo Software, and Rittal North America. At Terryberry she led the migration onto HubSpot and pulled the company's ABM launch forward to March, grading the ICP and building the target account list from CRM data.

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📌 What We Cover

• Why pulling closed won and closed lost comes before anything else in building a target account list
• What the stage a deal died at tells you about product fit versus a test segment worth running
• ICP grading with A, B, C, and D tiers, and why a bloated C tier is a signal to investigate
• Mapping the product roadmap against firmographics when there's no historical closed won data
• Using content syndication and 10% of target accounts to test messaging without risking budget
• Why ABM is a play for demand gen rather than a separate program
• The Engagement Maturity Map, and mapping content to top, middle, and bottom of funnel
• Top-of-funnel measurement, cost per lead, the 25% of contract value rule, and three to one CAC

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Salesforce (closed won and closed lost reporting)
• HubSpot, including the smart content feature for personalized landing pages
• Forrester and Gartner analyst reports
• ChatGPT ads, Bing, and Google paid search
• Terryberry's Engagement Maturity Map
• Christy Behnke on LinkedIn

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Resources:

Scrappy ABM: Visit for more ABM tips and strategies.

Connect with Mason on LinkedIn for a conversation about ABM.

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If you enjoyed today's episode and found valuable insights for your business, be sure to subscribe to the Scrappy ABM podcast for more expert discussions. Don't forget to leave a review and share this episode with your team or fellow marketers!

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 "meet your manager" campaign moved booked meeting rates from under 1% to 13-14%.

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The conversation stays specific: product signals for targeting, gifting that feels personal instead of a $25 gift card, $150K to $200K in pipeline per send, and roughly 9X ROI on year-one spend. Jess also shares what didn't travel when she tried to take a US playbook global.

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👤 Guest Bio

Jess Annadurai is Senior Global Marketing Director at Supermetrics, where she's spent just over three and a half years, first as North American head of marketing and then across a global remit covering demand, field, partner, and customer marketing. She was an active 6sense power user around 2018 and has worked both sides of the ABM world, as a practitioner buying the tools and as a marketer at an ABM vendor before moving to the data side of martech.

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📌 What We Cover

• Why a PLG customer base is the best target account list you already own, and how much context it hands you for free
• How Jess, the VP of Sales, and the Director of Customer Success agreed that customer education was the real gap
• Starting with an advocacy approach: 10 customer case studies, and the new use cases and retention lift they uncovered
• Segmenting customers by whether they had an account manager, then running two different motions
• The "meet your manager" campaign, with personalized gifting instead of gift cards
• Booked meeting rates going from under 1% to 13-14%
• $150K to $200K in pipeline per send, ~$35K total gifting spend for the year, and roughly 9X ROI
• A small agency at ~$10K that expanded to $140K within six months
• Why gifting norms differ by region, and what Jess would scale differently next time

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Supermetrics
• 6sense
• Postal (now Sendoso)
• Looker Studio
• Google Sheets
• Connect with Jess on LinkedIn

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Resources:

Scrappy ABM: Visit for more ABM tips and strategies.

Connect with Mason on LinkedIn for a conversation about ABM.

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If you enjoyed today's episode and found valuable insights for your business, be sure to subscribe to the Scrappy ABM podcast for more expert discussions. Don't forget to leave a review and share this episode with your team or fellow marketers!

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 "sales, please go after Google" is how programs fail, and how framing existing content beats building bespoke assets for every account. Ed also walks through going from "the ABM guy off in the corner" to an integrated ABM motion, plus the accidental CIO deal acceleration he hammered out with a seller over Slack in under 20 minutes.

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👤 Guest Bio

Ed VanderBush is Senior Manager of Account-Based Marketing at LiveRamp, the data collaboration and identity platform. He happened into ABM by accident at LexisNexis in the early 2010s, picking up a project a colleague had to hand off, and it turned into the last decade-plus of his career. At LiveRamp he built the ABM function from the ground up and now runs it as part of the integrated marketing team. He's based in southwest Ohio.

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📌 What We Cover

🔸 The three inputs Ed uses to build a target account list: sales priorities, signals that validate them, and whether marketing actually has a story to tell

🔸 Why "sales, please go after Google" is the wrong way to pick accounts, and the rocket-ship example of saying no when you have zero resources for a segment

🔸 Building a first ABM program off existing CRM data and existing content instead of creating everything bespoke

🔸 Why framing an asset for the audience beats custom reports, and the client who built a one-off report for a single CIO

🔸 Customer stories as Ed's favorite content, and how a recognizable logo closes more than a stronger but unknown one

🔸 Industry groups and subject matter experts as a sourcing channel that never shows up cleanly in a dashboard

🔸 The "Anatomy of the Deal" conversations Ed ran to mine internal stories and build early evangelism

🔸 The accidental deal acceleration: spotting a CIO engage with an ad, then closing the loop with the seller over Slack

🔸 The Kroger coupon mailer that taught Ed what relevancy and value actually mean

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

🔸 Bev Burgess, an early voice in account-based marketing referenced from the practice's infancy

🔸 LiveRamp, the data collaboration and identity platform where Ed leads ABM

🔸 LexisNexis, where Ed first picked up account-based marketing

🔸 BambooHR, the recognizable customer story Mason credits with lifting close rates

🔸 Salesforce and Slack, the tools behind the accidental deal acceleration story

🔸 Kroger, the personalized coupon example behind Ed's lesson on relevancy

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Resources:

Scrappy ABM: Visit for more ABM tips and strategies.

Connect with Mason on LinkedIn for a conversation about ABM.

ㅤ

If you enjoyed today's episode and found valuable insights for your business, be sure to subscribe to the Scrappy ABM podcast for more expert discussions. Don't forget to leave a review and share this episode with your team or fellow marketers!

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 look-back method for finding the accounts you actually want more of.

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If you're heading into H2 and trying to figure out where to make an impact in the second half of the year, this one hands you a starting exercise you can run with a sheet of paper today.

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📌 What We Cover

• Why a clear structure and system ranked as the most helpful takeaway from ABM in a Day
• The account progression model: awareness, initial engagement, meaningful engagement, marketing qualified account, sales qualified account, opportunity, and a re-engagement stage
• The paper-and-pen exercise: write down every program you run, then map each one to the stage that matches its primary intent
• The 4D framework: data, distribution, destination, and direction
• Why targets without triggers turn "ABM" into targeted cold outbound, and how a champion tracking play creates a real reason to reach out
• Matching direct vs indirect channels to where an account sits in its journey, plus weaving problem, product, and proof content across the model
• The BCP (best customer profile) and the look-back questions behind it: happiest by NPS, longest-tenured, most profitable
• How the overlap of BCP and ICP creates the TAP (target account profile)

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• ABM in a Day workshop: Next live session on July 28th. Podcast listeners can use code 75OFF to join for $50.
• Free ABM template: The exact program-build template Scrappy ABM uses with every client, available behind a quick form fill.

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Resources:

Scrappy ABM: Visit for more ABM tips and strategies.

Connect with Mason on LinkedIn for a conversation about ABM.

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If you enjoyed today's episode and found valuable insights for your business, be sure to subscribe to the Scrappy ABM podcast for more expert discussions. Don't forget to leave a review and share this episode with your team or fellow marketers!

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 invisible.

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👤 Guests

Hannah Forson, Senior Manager of Demand Generation at BambooHR, layers account-based motions on top of a primarily inbound engine.

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Payton Christopher, Head of Demand Generation and Growth Marketing at Delivery Solutions, runs an enterprise-focused program built on CRM data, events, and paid social.

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Greg Rokisky, Senior Social Media Marketing Manager at Calendly, built the organic social ABM program discussed here during his time at Sprout Social.

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Adam Holmgren, Co-Founder and CEO of Fibbler, created a tool to measure LinkedIn ad influence after struggling to prove the channel to his own board.

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📌 What We Cover

• Isolating an ABM campaign so a channel manager's CPMs and form fills stay clean in reporting.
• Why a separate executive campaign over the holidays captures decision makers when the market is quiet.
• Defining the ICP from CRM data instead of asking each department for an opinion.
• Engaging frontline influencers who have no buying power but real internal influence.
• Building a target account list with sales and engaging brands during their viral social moments.
• Making content that is one-to-one for the account and one-to-many for the audience.
• Connecting LinkedIn ad data to the CRM to surface influenced companies and deals.
• Avoiding LinkedIn super titles so you target specific roles you can actually follow up with.

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Resources:

Scrappy ABM: Visit for more ABM tips and strategies.

Connect with Mason on LinkedIn for a conversation about ABM.

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If you enjoyed today's episode and found valuable insights for your business, be sure to subscribe to the Scrappy ABM podcast for more expert discussions. Don't forget to leave a review and share this episode with your team or fellow marketers!