ABM Plays by Account Stage, With a Play Card Template

An ABM play is a repeatable set of touches aimed at a defined group of named accounts. A trigger starts it, an exit condition ends it, and one person owns it.

A playbook is the short list of plays your team actually runs. (New to the term? Start with what account based marketing is.) Below, each account stage (select, open, engage, convert, expand, revive) gets one play with its trigger, first move and exit.

Disclosure: my team runs cold email and LinkedIn outreach for B2B companies, so the plays below lean on those two channels and not on ads.

Most ABM play lists assume an ad budget, a platform and an events team. Email and LinkedIn carry most of the work in my team's campaigns. In one month for a UK firm offering software development and IT consulting, cold email turned up 41 positive replies, 13 sales calls booked and 2 closed deals, while LinkedIn turned up 62 positive replies, 18 sales calls booked and 3 closed deals.

What goes into an ABM play, and how is a playbook different?

A play is one sequence for one stage and one trigger. "Win back closed-lost accounts after a new operations director arrives" is a play. "Do ABM in the UK" is a wish.

A playbook is the handful of plays your team runs for real, written down so anyone on the team can pick one up and run it the same way. Small teams need far fewer plays than vendor libraries suggest. I would rather see one offer aimed at one audience and kept for 12 months than a dozen plays pulling in different directions.

Every play needs five parts:

1. Trigger: the event that moves an account into the play.
2. Accounts and titles: which companies, and which people inside them.
3. Touches: the channels, their order and the time between them.
4. Owner: one named person per account.
5. Exit condition: what ends the play for that account.

Teams often skip the fifth part, so the same buyer keeps hearing from them for months after the answer is clear.

Which ABM play fits each account stage?

Run the play that matches where the account sits today. When it exits, the account moves forward to the next stage's play or into the revive watchlist. It never restarts the play it just finished.

Select. Every list I build begins with the clients you already have, and then I look for lookalikes. Your best three clients describe your market better than any filter in a data tool. To build the full account group from there, see how to build an ABM account list.

Open. Before the first message goes out, I review past deals to learn who really signed off on each one. Then I search with the titles that niche really uses and strip out Assistant, Manager and Associate entirely. A person whose role in your deal you cannot name stays off the list.

Engage. One contact per account is rarely enough. According to Forrester's State of Business Buying 2026, a typical purchase brings in 13 people from inside the buyer and 9 outside influencers (Forrester). In Forrester's 2025 buyer survey, 73% of purchases involved three or more departments (Forrester). The 2024 survey names five roles worth mapping, which are the user, champion, influencer, ratifier and decision-maker (Forrester).

So the engage play starts from the person who replied and adds roles one at a time. Write a separate line for each role, because a finance lead and a head of operations care about different things. For the head count, see how many people to contact at one company.

Convert. The same 2026 Forrester report finds procurement among the deciders in 53% of business buying cycles. The convert play puts the proof pack in place before procurement asks: a case study with real numbers, two references, company registration details and whatever insurance or security documents your sector expects.

If your close rate on today's meetings is low, more meetings will only push it lower, so fix this play before you widen the open play.

Expand. A second team or site inside a client you already serve is a warmer start than any cold account, because people there already know your work. Open with that client's own results, because a number the reader's colleagues produced beats any outside case study. The trigger is the result itself: no result to show yet, no expand play.

Revive. Closed-lost and gone-quiet accounts come back only after something real changes: a new decision-maker, a contract ending, a new site, a funding round. Without a change, you are sending the same pitch that already lost.

What does an email and LinkedIn only ABM play look like when it runs?

Below is an illustrative open-stage play card. The company and the message are made up; the shape needs nothing beyond LinkedIn, an inbox and a CRM.

The touch order is deliberate. I prefer LinkedIn to go first in an open play: the warm email follows a LinkedIn touch, so the name is familiar when it lands. A flawless message from a ghost profile loses to a plain one sent from a strong profile, so the profile gets fixed before touch 1.

I plan at least 5 to 6 touches across both channels and leave real time before each follow-up. Most plays I see give up too early. Two touches and a stop measure the owner's patience. They say nothing about the play.

Every message sells the meeting, and a service pitch in the first message is the quickest way to get ignored. Touch 2 in the card above might read like this:

Hi Claire, thanks for connecting. If claims tooling is on your list for next year, would a 15-minute call next week be useful?

It is under 30 words and asks one question. The proof line waits for touch 4, where it names a client like them and what changed for that client. For how the two channels hand over to each other, see running LinkedIn and email as one sequence.

Run both channels together: in the UK month from the intro, each one closed deals on its own. Put both under one owner, so the email and the LinkedIn message never contradict each other.

Who owns each play, and when should it stop?

Ownership comes first. Each account gets one named rep, and no two reps work the same company, so one buyer never hears the same pitch twice. Split sending accounts the same way, or one director gets two pitches from your company in the same week.

The stop rule works at two levels:

1. Per contact: any reply stops the automated sequence for that person, including "not now" and "send me something". A human reads it and answers from there.
2. Per play: the play exits for an account when it books a meeting, gives a clear no, finishes its touches, or moves stage. Then the account goes into the next stage's play or the revive watchlist.

Before launch, decide who on the client side takes each booked meeting, so no reply waits for an owner.

The stop rule has a legal side too. Under PECR you can email any corporate body, but individual subscribers (sole traders and some partnerships, treated like private people) need prior consent under Regulation 22, and the rules cover social media direct messages. The existing-customer exception holds only if every later message offers a simple, free way to refuse (legislation.gov.uk). The ICO advises screening new lists against a suppression list of businesses that have objected (ICO).

Under GDPR Recital 47 and Article 21, people can object to direct marketing (EUR-Lex). An objection is a permanent stop for that person, in every play. In Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic, my team uses LinkedIn. We skip cold email there unless a compliant basis exists. This is not legal advice.

Which ABM plays need ads, events or software, and which do not?

Read the table as a budget filter. The first five rows cost time, a list and a CRM. The rest need an ad budget, a marketing team or a vendor contract. Those five rows are the core of my team's work. With no marketing team, they are your whole playbook.

Intent data gets its own rule. I use it when the target market is large, and skip it when the market is small, for example about 2,000 target companies with signals on about 10 of them, building an offer that fits the whole market instead.

What results can an outbound ABM play realistically produce?

These are ranges I see in my team's own campaigns, useful for checking a plan rather than forecasting yours:

1. Reply rate: usually about 1%, and often 0.5% when sending runs to thousands of emails a day.
2. Booked meetings: usually 10% to 50% of replies.
3. Narrow, heavily personalized plays: 15% to 17% reply rates, with about 75% of those repliers interested.

Bigger volume pulls the averages down, so judge a tight play on a few hundred named accounts against the upper ends of these ranges, and a large send against the lower ones.

Going too small has a cost too. With 50 to 100 perfect-fit accounts a month, every result is a coin flip. Some of those people are busy, some are not ready and some are not interested. At that size, luck decides the month.

Good copy cannot save a poor list or a weak sender. Clever wording sent to the wrong titles from a struggling inbox still gets ignored. The list and the sending setup come before the wording.

Volume comes last. If a play does not convert on 100 accounts, it will not convert on 1,000. Fix the funnel first. Then scale: widen the account group, and log replies, meetings and deals on the play card.

Blank ABM play card template you can copy

One play per card, one offer per audience. Copy the fields and fill each one before the first touch goes out.

1. Play name: a plain sentence a new rep would understand without asking.
2. Stage: select, open, engage, convert, expand or revive. Pick one.
3. Trigger: the event you can see that puts an account in, such as a new hire, a renewal or a reply.
4. Account group and count: who qualifies, and how many accounts that is today.
5. Titles in: the titles that signed or approved your past deals.
6. Titles out: the generic or wrong titles you remove before sending.
7. Owner per account: one name per account, recorded in the CRM.
8. Channels and touch order: which channel opens, which follows, and how many touches in total.
9. Offer and proof line: the meeting you ask for and the one client result that earns it.
10. Exit conditions: the outcomes that end the play for an account.
11. Stop rule: what ends touches for one person, and how objections are logged.
12. Review date: when you look at the numbers and decide to keep, change or kill the play.
13. Result logged: replies, meetings and deals, counted per account group.

Not sure which ABM play to start with for your accounts? Book a call and tell me the stage most of them sit in. I will say which play I would run first.