Sequences that fired on a real signal — new HR VP hired, a compliance-manager job posting, a funding round — got meaningfully higher reply rates than “you’re on our list” sends.
Northstar's inbound engine was hitting its numbers and still failing the business.
(The Problem)
Marketing made MQL targets every quarter. Sales complained anyway — accurately — that most of those leads belonged to companies too small to ever be worth much. Win rates on inbound-sourced deals sat at 14%, the average cycle ran 97 days, and reps burned real hours on 200-employee accounts that would churn at the first price increase.
The board wanted larger accounts ahead of a planned raise. That meant moving upmarket into 1,000+ employee, multi-location employers, where a single blog post wasn’t going to move an HR director, an IT lead, and a CFO at the same time.
That combination — a finite target list and a genuinely multi-threaded buying committee — is the actual precondition for ABM working. A year earlier, when Northstar sold mostly to single-decision-maker small businesses, this same program would have been the wrong call.
”"We were optimizing for a number that didn't correlate with anything the board cared about. MQL volume looked great on a slide and meant nothing in the pipeline review."
Robert JohnsonVP of Marketing
Northstar Ops needed to move upmarket ahead of a Series C raise. Here's the 12-month ABM program that changed the shape of their pipeline — including the tactic that flopped twice before they cut it.
Pipeline from target accounts
3.4X
$1.2M → $4.1M. Not isolated from overall market uptick.
Return client rate
92%
Building lasting partnerships built on trust.
Projects delivered
320+
Driving successful outcomes across industries.
At a Glance
I offer a comprehensive range of web services, carefully tailored to meet each client’s unique needs and their project budgets.
ICP
500–5,000 employees · healthcare, manufacturing, multi-site retail
Total Accounts Scored
~2,000, split into 3 tiers
Core Stack
6sense, Demandbase, Salesforce + HubSpot, Clay, Sendoso
Dedicated Pod
1 AE, 1 SDR, 1 marketer (60%), shared design + lifecycle
Execution Timeline
Mo. 1–2
Foundation
Ranked accounts on firmographic + intent data. Aligned sales and marketing on tier definitions before writing a single email.
Mo. 3 - 4
Tier 1 launch
Custom landing pages for 40 named accounts. SDR sequences tied to job-change and funding triggers. First executive dinner in Chicago — 11 of 20 invited accounts attended.
Mo. 5 - 7
Tier 2 scale-up
Vertical-specific campaigns for healthcare, manufacturing, retail ops. First attempt at a virtual roundtable series — attendance was weak from the start.
Mo. 8 - 9
Correction
Cut Tier 3 ad spend 35% after CPL data showed poor conversion. Reallocated to Tier 1 direct mail and retargeting. Killed the roundtable series after session two.
Mo. 10 - 12
Compounding
Tier 1 and 2 pipeline began closing. Refined the playbook from win/loss interviews. Built a renewal-stage ABM motion for expansion revenue.
What Worked
What Didn't
Executive dinners were the highest-ROI Tier 1 tactic.
Three regional dinners produced 6 of 17 Tier 1 opportunities. Expensive per head, but deals moved faster because stakeholders were already in a room together.
One shared scoring definition mattered more than any tool.
Before this, “qualified” meant something different to sales and marketing. Rebuilding that definition jointly, and reviewing it monthly, did more for the relationship than any campaign.
Personalized Tier 1 landing pages with outreach.
On their own, they moved nothing. Combined with SDR sequencing, they lifted meeting-booking rate modestly.
Tier 3 programmatic burned budget without proving itself.
$3,400 per opportunity from 1,800 accounts — probably no better than the display spend it replaced. The “account-based” label doesn’t fix a segment too large to personalize.
The virtual roundtable series flopped, twice.
First session drew 6 attendees against a goal of 25. Competed with a saturated market of vendor webinars, and the topics were too vendor-centric to earn anyone’s afternoon.
Sales ignored the intent data for two quarters.
Reps didn’t trust a third-party “high intent” flag. It wasn’t fixed by better data — it was fixed by one rep closing two deals off intent alerts and saying so out loud.
Attribution stayed messy all year.
Multi-touch models disagreed with each other. The team eventually stopped chasing a perfect model and just tracked: did pipeline and win rate improve for tiered accounts, yes or no.