Enterprise ABM ads strategy pitch by Spear Growth [Revealed]

Fun fact, as of writing this article we know that we’re the agency that this client picked. The reason we won this deal is because of this strategy. So why are we sharing our “competitive edge” with the world (including competing agencies)?

Because we believe great SaaS deserves to be found. The standard playbooks fail for enterprise SaaS companies. We hope that in-house teams and other agencies will learn from this and implement these strategies, which will lead to better marketing standards across the board, stronger campaigns, and smarter conversations. And if we do our job right, a few of those folks might come knocking on our door too. If you’re one of them, we’d love to talk.

Want a version of this strategy tailored for your company? Book a discovery call with us →

About the prospect (now, soon-to-be-client):

They’re a fintech company based in Europe. Their average deal size is $80K USD, and they target regions like US, UK & LATAM.

Enterprise marketing is already hard, marketing often feels like the assistant to sales. A few things about this company make it even harder to market. Here are all the challenges:

1. Sales-led company till now:
   1. They’ve grown through outbound and referrals. That means there’s no foundation of inbound content, no awareness in-market, and marketing’s job is now to generate demand from scratch.
      
2. New industry:
   1. No set industry: They serve multiple verticals, but aren’t tailored to any single one. This makes it difficult to run focused industry-specific campaigns.
   2. Very few direct competitors: There’s no clear “category” to ride on. So buyers don’t know what to compare it to
      
3. Large ticket size:
   1. Long sales cycle: With $80K+ deals, there’s no such thing as an impulse buy. The sales cycle is long, with multiple touchpoints, and your marketing needs to nurture across the entire journey.
   2. Complex marketing journeys make attribution harder: Because buying takes time and involves multiple influencers, it’s nearly impossible to track which campaign or message moved the needle. This means standard attribution models fail.
   3. Large buying committee: When 10–50 people are involved in a deal, marketing can’t just hand over a lead. We need systems to detect interest by persona, role, and geography, and coordinate tightly with sales to act on it.
      

During our sales process, we don’t do elaborate presentations. But we are very clear about the strategy we may pursue. That’s what we’re writing about today. The strategy we shared with this client.

Summary of the strategy

I’ll dig deeper into how this strategy deals with the challenges we’ve discussed earlier. But on the surface, the strategy is pretty standard. We’re using a combination of LinkedIn and Google ads to generate pipeline.

It’s been divided into 4 stages. In stage 1, we’ll focus on generating signals so we can closely coordinate with sales, and we’ll measure the impact of our ads via our ads’ influence on deals based on the company level engagement before the company turned into an MQL.

Once we get a good offer, we can move to stage 2, where we’ll shift our focus to generating leads that can be nurtured into pipeline.

From there, as we see things work, we’ll test more advanced strategies.

Here’s an overview of it:

Funnel Stage	Stages	Strategy	Outcome
TOFU (LinkedIn ads)	Stage 1 (3 months)	Problem-first messaging across the target account list. Share the companies engaging recently + the problem they’re engaging with, with the sales team to narrow down stakeholders.	Drive awareness, but also generate intent signals: Company + problem + department(based on problem)So the sales team can reach out.
BOFU (Google)	Stage 1 (3 months)	Create category & competitor campaigns in adjacent industries. E.g., reconciliation.	See some conversions, but primarily, use de-anonymisation to identify ICP high-intent accounts to pass to sales.
1 to 1 to top 20 accounts(LinkedIn ads)	Stage 2	Create custom ads per account with the company logo in it.	These ads should get screenshotted and shared internally with our messaging.
Offer-first messaging(LinkedIn)	Stage 2	Test 4 different offers, to find 1 that even companies not currently in market may want.	Get email IDs of the exact stakeholders and run drip sequences to push them further down the funnel. Reduce CAC.
Closed lost – indecision (LinkedIn)	Stage 3	Target pipeline accounts that ghosted or went close-lost. Pass these as signals to the AE who owns the account.	Deliver highly personalized remarketing campaigns
Companies in the pipeline	Stage 3	Alerting AEs when a specific team inside a company engages deeply with a campaign	Provide signals + awareness to reengage the prospect when they’re in the pipeline.
TOFU (Google)	Stage 4	Target support complaints of platforms in adjacent industries via keywords	See some conversions, but primarily, use de-anonymisation to identify ICP high-intent accounts to pass to sales

Like this approach? Let’s talk to see if this fits your company. 

Challenge 1: Lack of landing pages to use for our ads

Problem: The company was a sales-first organization and never needed landing pages in the past. But landing pages are critical for ads and SEO campaigns to perform.

Solution: We’ll begin by conducting keyword research for both SEO and ads. We’ll also use our proprietary tool, Chosenly.com, to analyze market presence and identify the content needed to appear in LLM-driven searches. Based on this, we’ll spend the first 1–2 months collaborating with their team to build conversion-optimized pages that target relevant search and ad intent.

Challenge 2: Lack of industry/competitors to target on Google ads

Problem: Usually, running ads is straightforward; if you’re selling HR software, you target terms like “HR software.” But this client doesn’t fit into an established category, which makes standard search targeting difficult.

Solution: We’ll target adjacent industries that deal with similar problems. Instead of going after direct competitors (which don’t exist), we’ll build out campaigns based on pain-point alignment.

Challenge 3: Attribution problem in Google ads

Problem: The product is unorthodox, so the target audience doesn’t have preset expectations. Even if someone finds the solution relevant, they won’t convert in the same session; it takes conversations. Standard attribution models can’t capture this journey.

Solution: Search intent is the most valuable form of intent. We’ll track which companies are reaching the website using de-anonymization tools like Factors.ai and RB2B. Once identified, we’ll pass the company data to sales, who can then follow up and nurture appropriately.

Challenge 4: Click -> convert funnels don’t work on LinkedIn

Problem: LinkedIn’s platform only gives surface-level attribution. You get job title and company data for up to 90 days, and even that’s often incomplete. For a high-ticket, multi-touch sale, that’s not enough. It’s hard to know who’s engaging, what content they’re engaging with and run accurate retargeting.

Solution: We use ZenABM to go deeper. It tracks engagement signals at the company level, mapped to the specific messaging or problem we’re addressing in our ads. This means we can detect what kind of problem a company is resonating with, not just that they clicked. We then sync this intelligence with sales, so they’re not reaching out cold; they know what the prospect has seen, what they engaged with, and what conversation to start.

Challenge 5: Large buying committee, makes company level engagement data useless

Problem: In most accounts, ZenABM’s company-level engagement data is enough to activate 3-7 decision-makers. But in this client’s case, the buying committee can span 50+ people across geographies, rendering company-level insights too generic.

Solution: We’ll divide campaigns by job title and region to track more granular engagement. That way, when a company crosses an engagement threshold, we can share with the sales team exactly which job title is engaged and from where, enabling more targeted follow-ups.

Challenge 6: 

Problem: During our pitch, we discovered that the client had a list of 4,000+ companies but lacked filters to segment it into actionable subsets.

Solution: We’ll use Clay to scrape, enrich, and filter these companies based on the actual content of their websites. This lets us segment more meaningfully, far better than relying solely on LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Apollo, or Crunchbase.

Tech Stack Used:

• ZenABM: Used to map engagement data back to specific problems or messaging within campaigns. Instead of just knowing a company clicked, ZenABM helps us identify what they clicked on and what message resonated. It allows us to segment audiences based on interest, enabling better coordination with sales.
  
• Factors.ai: Helps de-anonymize web traffic from Google Ads and other channels. This lets us identify which companies are visiting key pages, even if they don’t fill out a form, and use that insight to generate sales signals.
  
• Chosenly.com: Our own internal tool to analyze how companies show up on LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini. We use it to plan content & landing page strategy based on what’s missing from their digital footprint.
  
• Clay: Enriches and filters long company lists (like the client’s 4,000+) based on real website content. This gives us better segmentation than generic filters like industry or employee size.
  
• Other tools: Apollo, Crunchbase, Sales Nav, Google Ads, LinkedIn Campaign Manager

We’ve built this system over dozens of accounts. If you want help adapting it to yours, let’s talk.

The team that’ll work on this:

A lot of the success depends on the team that does the work. At Spear Growth, you’ll work directly with the people who build and run your campaigns, no account managers in between.

You’ll have direct access to the Founder, and the Delivery Head, especially if something is urgent or needs escalation. Day to day, the following team members will be in constant contact with you:

• Paid Media Expert
• Copywriting Expert
• Design Expert
• Head of Paid Media
• Head of Copy

Our structure is intentionally lean. You’ll always be in touch with the actual experts managing your campaigns, creatives, and results.

About Spear Growth and how to work with us:

We’re the team behind growth for some of the fastest-scaling B2B SaaS companies – from unicorns to Series A, B, and C startups.

Everything we do is built on our experience of managing $50M+ in ad spend, generating $150M+ in pipeline, and delivering over 20,000 sales-qualified leads for 30+ B2B SaaS companies.

If you’re a B2B SaaS company spending at least $10k+/month across your ads (LinkedIn, Google, Meta, anything else), we can help manage your ads. 

Let’s talk growth!
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