Stop Running ABM Like It's Demand Gen: How to Build the Real Motion with Brandon Redlinger

#48 - Most ABM programs don't fail because of tactics. They fail before a single campaign runs — because the accounts were wrong, the structure wasn't there, and nobody agreed on what success actually looked like.

Brandon Redlinger has spent his career inside account-based marketing — from building ABM strategy at Engagio and Demandbase to running it across a portfolio of companies today as founder of Stack and Scale. In this conversation, he cuts through the noise on what ABM actually is, when it's the right strategy for your business, and the framework he uses to bring real structure and accountability to how resources get deployed against target accounts.

If you're thinking about launching an ABM program or trying to understand why your current one isn't producing, this episode gets into the details most conversations skip.

About Brandon Redlinger:

Brandon Redlinger is a fractional CMO and the founder of Stack and Scale, where he leads marketing strategy across companies ranging from seed stage to $200M in revenue. He spent years inside some of the most influential ABM platforms in B2B — including Engagio, Demandbase, Chili Piper, and revenue.io — and now applies that experience across a wide range of go-to-market environments.

In this episode, we cover:

• What ABM actually is — and how to tell it apart from just doing demand gen more carefully
• The ACV and TAM thresholds that signal ABM is the right motion for your business
• The account entitlements framework: how to deploy resources against target accounts with real SLAs and accountability
• How to run a thoughtful ABM pilot — and the mistakes that sink most early programs before they get started
• ABM for expansion: why going deeper into existing accounts is often the highest-leverage starting point
• What's actually working in ABM right now — events, direct mail, experiences — and what isn't
• The GTM engineer role and how it's changing what's possible in ABM execution
• Stage-based attribution and how to prove ABM is working before the deal closes
• Brandon's emerging model for account-level sentiment analysis using AI — and why it may be where ABM measurement is heading
• Why sales and marketing alignment still breaks ABM programs — and how incentive structure is almost always the root cause

Chapter Markers:

• (00:00) Welcome and Guest Background
• (04:13) Defining ABM and When It's Right
• (10:22) The Account Entitlements Framework
• (21:15) ABM Pilots, Expansion, and What Works
• (33:38) Measuring ABM and AI-Powered Signals

Resources:

Brandon Redlinger on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonredlinger/

Stack and Scale newsletter: https://stackandscale.ai

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Growth Activated is produced by Mandy Hornaday.

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Transcript

Mandy Hornaday:

Welcome to Growth Activated. I'm Mandy Hornaday, your host with 15 years of experience leading marketing teams ranging from small startups to large service organizations. I've built high-performing teams of all sizes and have seen firsthand how fast the landscape is evolving, making marketing leadership more complex than ever. Today, I help marketing leaders elevate their strategies, lead with confidence, and build careers they love. If you're ready to drive impact and unlock growth for yourself and your company, you're in the right place. Let's get started.

[EPISODE INTRO]

Mandy Hornaday:

Most ABM problems start with a wish list — a set of logos the CEO wants to win, a handful of accounts that feel exciting, and a plan to figure out the rest along the way. Brandon Redlinger has watched that approach fail enough times to have a very different take on where ABM actually goes wrong. And it usually has nothing to do with tactics.

Mandy Hornaday:

My guest today is Brandon Redlinger, fractional CMO and founder at Stack and Scale. With stints at Engagio, Demandbase, Chili Piper, and revenue.io, Brandon has been inside ABM strategy since before most teams knew they needed one. Today he runs it across companies ranging from seed stage to $200M in revenue. In this conversation, we get into how to evaluate whether ABM is even the right strategy for your business, a framework Brandon has developed for bringing real structure and accountability to how resources get deployed against target accounts, and how AI is starting to change what's possible in terms of measurement and knowing what to do next.

Mandy Hornaday:

If you're thinking about launching ABM or trying to understand why your current program isn't producing, this one gets into the details most conversations skip. Let's get into it.

[INTERVIEW]

Mandy Hornaday:

Hey, Brandon, welcome to the Growth Activated show. I'm so excited to have you here today.

Brandon Redlinger:

Thank you so much for having me.

Mandy Hornaday:

This is such a timely conversation. One of my clients is about to kick off an ABM program, so I'm really excited to pick your brain on how AI is changing things. But let's start with your background.

Brandon Redlinger:

I've been in B2B my whole career, mainly selling to sales, marketing, and revenue operations teams. I was early at Engagio, which was later acquired by Demandbase — I ran ABM there. Then I was at revenue.io and Chili Piper. These days I'm fractional, which means I get to lead marketing for a few companies at a time. I get to see a much wider range of strategies, plans, and systems instead of being inside just one company. I've got one client who's been around 150 years and is almost $200M in revenue — a big organization. I've got another that's seed stage. One that does million-dollar deals. Others doing high-velocity deals. You learn from each of those and can pull strategies and playbooks across environments. It's a big advantage both for the companies that hire fractional and for the fractional leaders themselves.

Mandy Hornaday:

Totally agree. Being fractional for about two years now, I feel like it really accelerates learning. You're constantly testing in different environments. Before we dive in, I want to level set on what ABM actually means to you. I sometimes hear marketers describe things I'd call targeted account demand gen. In the context of what we're discussing today, how do you define true ABM?

Brandon Redlinger:

It really has to be a strategy that supports your overall business goals — not just a campaign. And what that actually means is an entire different go-to-market motion. For it to make sense, you need a defined set of target accounts that you care about, and then you're doing more personalized, relevant, and timely outreach to those accounts. It doesn't have to be more complicated than that.

Brandon Redlinger:

Where people complicate it most is the number of accounts. That's where the line blurs between ABM and just doing demand gen smarter. It's a spectrum, and it's slightly different for every company. But companies doing larger deals with a smaller, more defined TAM — that's when ABM really makes sense.

Mandy Hornaday:

What about the different tiers — one to many, one to few, one to one? With AI, does one to many basically just become demand gen?

Brandon Redlinger:

Exactly. With AI, one to many almost becomes your demand gen. That's what demand gen was supposed to be — and what it really should be now instead of just reaching anyone and everyone. It's doing it smarter, much more targeted. Technology, and especially AI, lets us scale things we couldn't do before because we were limited on resources and tools. Now that we can, it's essentially just demand gen.

Mandy Hornaday:

I saw you posted recently on LinkedIn about some things you used to say or believe about ABM that feel cringe-worthy now. How has your perspective changed?

Brandon Redlinger:

Two things have really changed, mainly with AI. The first is where you draw the line. The old general rule of thumb was: if your ACV is six figures or more, that's when ABM works. But I've seen companies make ABM work at $10K ACV. Getting into semantics — is that really ABM or is it targeted demand gen? In the sense that you have a defined list, you're moving through accounts at higher velocity, you have a good system for cycling them out and refreshing the list, and you have a dedicated team — yeah, that's my biggest shift there.

Brandon Redlinger:

The second is personalization. There's a right way and a wrong way to do it, but we can now personalize at scale with AI. The magic formula has always been personalization, relevance, and timeliness. If one of those is off, it throws off your entire messaging. Someone saying "Brandon, we root for the same hockey team" — sure, that's personalized. But you can't say the same thing to Mandy. And even if you could, it's not relevant. The personalization has to be tied to actual business objectives. And the timing piece: if you're selling infrastructure on a three-plus-year contract and you get someone at the wrong moment, you're not back in a deal cycle for another year or two. So all three of those elements matter.

Mandy Hornaday:

If we focus on true high-touch ABM — one to one, one to few — who is that right for? And how should marketing leaders evaluate whether it's the right investment?

Brandon Redlinger:

For true ABM, I'd start with this: your reps need to have fewer than 20 accounts to work. And the mistake I see constantly — I saw it ten years ago, I still see it today — is that people always want more accounts. More, more, more. But when you have more, it's hard to actually focus. The best companies I've worked at have that focus. The best reps within those companies have the best focus.

Brandon Redlinger:

At Engagio, we used something called account entitlements. There were SLAs on both sides. For example: every target account has to have a personal touch — not a Marketo touch, an actual personal touch — at least once a week for key stakeholders. Lead response time has to be within three business hours. If you can't meet those SLAs, you have too many accounts. On the other side, we had resources dedicated to each account. Tier one might get $500 to $1,000 of direct mail per account per month. Tier two gets less. And then there are things like executive alignment, executive workshops — available at the tier one level, director-level support at lower tiers.

Brandon Redlinger:

If your reps are only using two of your ten entitlements, something is wrong — either the entitlements weren't right, or they have too many accounts and too many things competing for their attention. You also have to make the business economics work. And that's tricky early on, because if you're just getting an ABM program running, you don't have a baseline for conversion rates, velocity, volume across the funnel. So it's hard to forecast. But after two or three cycles, you start to get a sense for it. Then you can say: to hit these revenue targets, these are the things that have to happen, these are the accounts we need, and here's where we need to incrementally improve conversion rates.

Mandy Hornaday:

The entitlements idea is interesting because it almost reframes it as incentives — you're incentivizing sales to do things that maybe used to feel forced. In a tier one scenario where you're dedicating spend and resources, is it up to the rep to take advantage of those? Or is marketing also driving things in parallel?

Brandon Redlinger:

My approach has shifted in the last year or so toward being more data-driven. Early on it was: here are all the things, let's list out all the resources, break them up so we don't go over budget. But I never want to underspend either — if you underspend and miss your number, that's a bad outcome for you as a marketing leader. So if direct mail gets a certain budget, I want to make sure people are actually using it, and I want to make it as easy as possible for them to do so. Now direct mail can be done much more programmatically. But for things like executive workshops and executive alignment, it's more: this is available to you. And now, with better data and attribution, I can say — if you run an executive workshop at this stage of the funnel, your likelihood of closing this deal goes up by this much. Here's that information. Do with it what you want. And if they're smart, they'll use it.

Mandy Hornaday:

So let's go back to someone who has validated their setup: high ACVs, clearly defined TAM, a dedicated sales team with a manageable number of accounts — 20 or fewer. Has anything changed about what true ABM looks like at that level?

Brandon Redlinger:

Things have actually changed less at the true ABM level, because it's more built on relationships — and you can't automate a relationship. I think trying to would break the trust between you and the buyer. It's higher risk. There are absolutely things we can automate on the operations side — reminders, pre-researched briefing documents — but the actual human judgment still has to be there. This is where human in the loop really matters. I have mixed feelings about human in the loop in general when it comes to AI, but for high-value relationships, it's essential.

Mandy Hornaday:

Capacity is always the thing I hear as the biggest barrier to ABM. Say you've got five AEs, each with 20 accounts. As a marketing leader without a dedicated ABM function, how do you start without overcommitting?

Brandon Redlinger:

Here's what I see a lot: a company closes a few big logos, and suddenly everyone says we should do ABM. Or the board says, just go do ABM. But you have to prove it out first. You can't just spin up ABM overnight.

Brandon Redlinger:

One of the biggest mistakes: we need to do ABM, so let's take our best sales rep and turn them into an ABM rep. But they've never done ABM, they don't know the motion, they're not built on relationships — they're your best transactional rep. Now you've lost your best SMB rep and they're struggling at ABM without the right support. ABM fails, and you've lost that rep's productivity in the process. This is where agencies or fractionals can come in — to actually lead the ABM motion while you figure out whether it's worth the full internal investment.

Brandon Redlinger:

But it goes back to: have a strong hypothesis grounded in actual data. Was it one account that randomly closed and made the team think they could do ABM? Or is there real data behind it — we've actually won more accounts like this, here's the threshold, here's our hypothesis on why it works? Be thoughtful about account selection. The mistake I see people make is that it becomes a wish list — "I'd love to have Google or Amazon as a customer, let's put them on the list." That's not how it works. Use data to verify that target accounts actually look like customers with a high propensity to buy from you.

Mandy Hornaday:

What are the green flags for an ABM pilot? How do you encourage people to start proving concept?

Brandon Redlinger:

Start with a close-win and close-loss analysis, and get CS involved. Your best accounts might be your biggest deals, but they might also be your biggest resource suck. I want CS involved because they see things pre-sales can't — which accounts onboard faster, which ones expand, which have the profile that makes them successful long term. And practical things too: does your software actually support what large enterprise accounts need? Compliance, security, implementation resources? I was at a company where we closed a significant account — they never got onboarded. One quarter in, everyone realized it wasn't going to happen due to things we didn't foresee. They abandoned it entirely. The best thing we got out of it was their logo on our website for a year.

Mandy Hornaday:

I've also thought about ABM for expansion — we're already in large accounts but only have a small piece of the pie. Is that a good place to start proving concept?

Brandon Redlinger:

A hundred percent. Do a white space analysis. If there's real opportunity there, expansion ABM is a great proving ground — and it doesn't have to be either net new or expansion. They're not mutually exclusive. I worked at a company where we had a multimillion dollar account and could sell more products and the same product to other business units within the same organization. That was actually our biggest opportunity. We couldn't publish case studies externally, but we hired a video crew, went in, had our champion do a full case study, wrote it up, created video — and then circulated it internally to other business units. We had one person dedicated entirely to that account and that expansion. They didn't touch anything else. And it was one of those situations where we stumbled into something that turned into significant revenue.

Mandy Hornaday:

What's actually working in ABM today? People default to thinking it's just outbound email or event invites. What's the real menu of options?

Brandon Redlinger:

Events are big again right now. People are getting a lot better at creating experiences, and I think there are a few reasons. One is that remote and hybrid work means people genuinely miss in-person connection — there's something about getting out of the normal work environment where the guard comes down and you get to be a little more real. My favorite is the dinner experience. There's something about breaking bread with people that connects you at a different level. The same applies to internal culture-building for remote companies — nothing replaces a real offsite where you spend time with people in the evenings. At the real one-to-one enterprise level, it's all about building relationships, and experiences are how you do that.

Mandy Hornaday:

What about direct mail — is that still working?

Brandon Redlinger:

Absolutely. Direct mail has gotten much easier to do at scale, but what still really works is personalized direct mail. I'll give you a story from Engagio. One of our SDRs found out that a buyer at a target account really loved stress balls. He went to Amazon, found some very unique ones, sent them over. Ten dollars. That person responded and they got the meeting. And Sendoso makes it really easy now to buy and send and track back into your CRM. But the personalization is what made it work — not the cost, not the brand. He did his research.

Brandon Redlinger:

On the swag side: if you're sending a lot of it, make sure it's high quality. People really don't care about your logo big and front and center. They care about quality. Every time they use the item, it'll remind them of you — but the logo doesn't need to be loud to do that. If it's not quality, I'm not going to wear it.

Mandy Hornaday:

How are you seeing the team structure work? Dedicated ABM roles, or does the existing marketing org absorb it?

Brandon Redlinger:

For any ABM these days, I'm seeing the GTM engineer role become a lot more relevant. I almost think of it as the next evolution of a mix between growth hacking and revenue operations — someone who's a bit more technical and revenue-focused, building repeatable systems with the tools and technology available. Clay is a great example. Their Claygent — their AI web scraping agent — plus their native sequencer means you can write a personalized snippet and push it directly to Gong Engage, SalesLoft, or Outreach. A GTM engineer can architect a lot of that. And it also helps with account research, so reps spend less time on manual tasks and more time actually building relationships and selling. There's a line I love from Impossible to Inevitable by Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin: reps are like airplanes, they make money when they're in the air. The GTM engineer role helps keep your reps in the air.

Mandy Hornaday:

With a 12 to 24-month sales cycle, what are the early green flags that say this is working — keep going?

Brandon Redlinger:

It starts with having your systems and data set up properly so you can actually measure. I'm really big on stage-based attribution rather than full-funnel attribution — value, volume, velocity, and conversion rate across each stage of the funnel. Then you can see what's actually working to move accounts from one stage to the next. Is time in stage increasing? Is it segmented by territory or rep? You can dig into that.

Brandon Redlinger:

I'm also big on campaign-based attribution — because what we're doing in practice is never isolated to one channel. If I apply campaigns to the different funnel stages, I can see what's actually effective at moving companies from one stage to another, and I can see the dollar value of those opportunities. That's how I make sure things are on track — so a 12-month sales cycle hypothesis stays 12 months, not 18, which would mean I'm going to come up short at year end.

Brandon Redlinger:

Activity metrics used to be something I strongly avoided. But now I think there's something there if you're thoughtful about it. Overall email count — I don't care that much. But touches per account starts to play a role. And what I've been experimenting with — and this is actually the first time I'm talking about this publicly — is sentiment analysis by account over time.

Brandon Redlinger:

Sentiment analysis has existed in tools like Gong for individual calls or emails, but now with AI and tools like Claude Code, you can look at sentiment across all of the different touch points — email, call transcripts, first-party engagement data on your website, even third-party intent data. You patch that together and use AI to build a sentiment model that gives you a sentiment score by account, and even by contact within the account. Track that over time and you start to see things: fewer executives are engaging with your content, but technical buyers are ramping up — that shift can tell you the deal is moving from exploration to implementation. Or maybe it's stalled in procurement. Combined with who's engaging and when, that data can start to tell you what you should do next. Should we put more energy into executive alignment? Is our champion strong enough or do we need another contact? That's the thing we care about most — not just the data, but what do we do next.

Mandy Hornaday:

As you're describing that, it sounds like it could be its own software product if you built it out.

Brandon Redlinger:

Yeah. And my honest take is: I'd rather buy it than build and maintain it myself. What happens is the API changes, the model gets upgraded, the backend changes — and now I'm troubleshooting across every client I work with. Managed software wins. Right now the tooling doesn't exist for what I'm describing, so I'm building a basic model. But eventually someone will productize this, and I'll happily be a customer. That's generally where I land on the build versus buy question. Simple point solutions — sure, maybe build. But at the systems level, I don't think most teams are going to build their own CRM. And even AI-native CRMs are hard to build, maintain, and support at scale. Big companies with significant resources can start to do that in house. Most teams? Play with it, learn from it, and buy when something better is available.

Mandy Hornaday:

Any final pitfalls you'd warn people about — things we haven't covered yet?

Brandon Redlinger:

The biggest one — and I'm tired of saying it because it's so basic, yet I still see it everywhere — is sales and marketing alignment. I've got two clients right now where marketing and sales are still operating in silos. They're getting in the room, they're talking, which is good. But it's not enough. What I've seen happen twice recently: we agree on a plan together. Marketing presents it. Sales says great, we're doing ABM, here's our plan. I agree. Then next week: here are our target accounts — we decided on them ourselves. And it goes against the plan we just aligned on.

Brandon Redlinger:

Sales often isn't leveraging marketing enough — because marketing has the tools, the technology, the data to make sure the foundation is set up correctly for success. And ultimately I'd point the finger at the CEO more than anyone, because the root of the problem is usually incentive structure. What are you paying your marketer on? What are you paying your sales leader on? If I'm incentivized on meetings set and they're incentivized on closed deals, we're going to be fundamentally misaligned. The closer you align incentives — and that's a CEO-level decision — the closer your teams will be.

Brandon Redlinger:

And for me personally, I'll gladly be compensated on revenue — but only if I have real control over what drives it. Right now, marketing typically has influence up to the opportunity stage and then very little after that. ABM helps narrow that gap, but until marketing has more control over training, methodology, enablement, onboarding, and implementation — it's uncomfortable to be fully on the hook for revenue. The idea is right. The execution isn't quite there yet.

Mandy Hornaday:

It almost feels like we're trying to escape the MQL world and move toward revenue accountability, but we haven't fully bridged the gap on what that looks like. Brandon, thank you so much — this has been really fun. I've learned a lot. If people want to follow along, LinkedIn and your newsletter?

Brandon Redlinger:

Yes — the newsletter is called Stack and Scale, at stackandscale.ai. I write about what I'm learning and try to give away as much as possible — Clay templates, frameworks, whatever I'm building. Connect with me on LinkedIn as well. Happy to help other marketers out.

Mandy Hornaday:

Love that. Thanks, Brandon. It was so great to have you.

[OUTRO]

Mandy Hornaday:

Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of Growth Activated. I hope this conversation sparked new ideas, challenged your thinking, and gave you practical tools to help elevate your impact as a marketing leader. If it did, I'd love for you to pass it along to a friend or colleague in B2B marketing. The more we grow together, the more we raise the bar for what marketing leadership can look like. And as always, in the meantime, keep activating growth for yourself and your company. See you next time.