Quick question before we get into it. Are you in any b2b communities or LinkedIn groups?

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Because if you are, you'll know that simply existing in one of those spaces is apparently enough to qualify you for: a masterclass on scaling your agency to seven figures, a free audit of your personal brand, and at least one invitation to learn juggling, axe throwing, or some other vaguely team-building-adjacent activity that has absolutely nothing to do with anything you've ever expressed an interest in.

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The irony is that most of this outreach comes from people running ABM campaigns. Targeted. Personalised. Completely irrelevant.

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And that's exactly what I want to talk about this week.

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ABM has a personalisation problem

There's been a real push in B2B marketing to personalise everything. Reference someone's LinkedIn post. Mention their funding round. Drop in their job title, their company headcount, the name of their most recent hire. Anything that signals 'I did my research'.

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The logic makes sense in theory. In practice, it's backfired badly.

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Most of this personalisation has become completely hollow, and buyers are wise to it. A line about someone's recent podcast appearance doesn't signal genuine interest anymore. It signals that someone ran a Clay enrichment flow and hit send. People aren't flattered. They're bored.

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The messages I actually respond to tend to have almost no surface-level personalisation at all. What they have is relevance. A framing of a problem I'm genuinely wrestling with, or an offer that's so specific to my situation that I'd feel silly ignoring it. That's a completely different thing.

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So if personalisation isn't the answer, what is?

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ABM is becoming an awareness play, not a lead gen play

This is the shift I think a lot of teams are still catching up to, and it changes almost everything about how you should be running these programmes.

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The old model of ABM was essentially a more targeted version of outbound. Identify a list of accounts, build a sequence, push for the meeting. The assumption was that a well-targeted, well-timed message would convert a cold prospect into a conversation.

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But buyer behaviour has changed. People don't connect with someone they don't know. They don't book calls with companies they've never heard of, no matter how good the personalisation is. Trust has to exist first. And trust takes time to build.

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What's actually working now is thinking about ABM as a two-stage play. The first stage is awareness and credibility. Getting your content, your thinking, and your point of view in front of the right accounts before you ever reach out. The second stage is outreach, but to people who've already seen your name, read something you've written, or engaged with your thought leadership. People who are warm rather than cold.

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That changes what success looks like in the early stages of a campaign. It's not leads. It's content engagement, ad impressions to target accounts, event attendance, LinkedIn follows from people at the companies you're going after. These aren't vanity metrics. They're the groundwork that makes your outreach land when you do send it.

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Why account selection still matters more than most teams think

All of this only works if you're putting it in front of the right accounts. And most teams aren't.

They build a list based on firmographic criteria. Company size, industry, revenue band. They run awareness content at that list and wonder why the engagement is low and the outreach still isn't converting.

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The issue is that fitting your ICP on paper doesn't mean a company is ready for the conversation. What you actually want to know is who has the problem you solve, right now. Who is actively in a moment of change or pain that makes them receptive to what you're offering.

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That's a much harder list to build manually. And it's exactly where AI starts to earn its place.

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How AI makes outreach relevant rather than just personalised

I want to be clear about the distinction here, because I think it's important.

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Personalisation is surface level. It's knowing someone's name, their job title, their company, maybe something they posted recently. It makes outreach feel less generic, but it doesn't make it meaningful.

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Relevance is something different. It's understanding the specific situation someone is in, the trigger that's likely driving a decision or a problem right now, and connecting your offer directly to that. That's what makes someone feel like you genuinely get them.

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This is where I think about Jobs To Be Done. When someone starts looking for a solution like yours, they're not just responding to a feature list. There's usually a trigger. A moment that made the status quo feel untenable. A new hire who's exposing a gap. A board conversation that changed priorities. A competitor move that's created urgency. Finding that trigger and using it to frame your outreach is what creates real relevance.

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AI helps you get there faster. Rather than trying to personalise with generic data points, you can use it to:

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• Identify trigger events at account level: leadership changes, funding rounds, hiring patterns, product launches, shifts in content themes
• Apply a Jobs To Be Done lens to what those signals tell you about the problems that company is likely trying to solve right now
• Match each account to the most relevant case study, piece of content, or offer based on what's actually happening in their business
• Prioritise your account list by who is showing the strongest in-market signals, so your team spends time on the accounts most likely to convert

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Done well, this means your outreach arrives at a moment when it's actually useful. Not because you mentioned someone's LinkedIn post from last week, but because you've identified a real trigger and connected it to something genuinely helpful. That's relevance. And it's far more powerful than personalisation.

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What to automate and what to keep human

This is the practical question, and the answer isn't 'automate everything you can'. It's more nuanced.

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• Automate: account research and enrichment, trigger event monitoring, intent data tracking, list prioritisation, sequencing and scheduling
• Keep human: the interpretation of what those signals mean, the framing of your outreach around a specific trigger, the thought leadership content that builds awareness, and every real conversation once someone engages

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The bit that often gets automated when it shouldn't is the thinking. AI can surface the trigger. It can tell you that a company just hired a VP of Sales, or that their job postings suggest they're building out an outbound function. What it can't do is decide what that means for how you should show up, what you should say, and what you should offer. That still needs a person.

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And the awareness stage, the thought leadership that warms your accounts before you ever reach out? That definitely needs a human. It's your genuine point of view, your experience, your take on the problems your audience is dealing with. AI can help you repurpose and distribute it. But it can't create the credibility that makes someone want to hear more from you.

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To bring it together

• ABM is increasingly a thought leadership and awareness play before it's an outreach play. Warm accounts convert. Cold ones don't
• Most personalisation is surface level and buyers are wise to it. What actually creates resonance is relevance, specifically speaking to the trigger that's driving someone's need right now
• AI earns its place in account selection and trigger identification. Use it to find the right accounts at the right moment, and to match outreach to the most relevant content or case study
• Keep the thinking, the framing, and the relationship-building human. Those are the bits that actually build trust

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If you're rethinking your ABM approach and want to talk through what this could look like in practice, just reply to this email. We'd love to have that conversation.