Most B2B companies I work with have an ABM list. A couple of hundred target accounts, carefully chosen, sitting in a spreadsheet. And for a long time, treating every company on that list fairly evenly was simply the sensible thing to do. You couldn’t easily see which ones were warming up, so you spread your effort and made sure no one fell through the cracks.
The thing is, the list is static and your buyers aren’t. At any given moment, a handful of those accounts are warming up and the rest are sitting quiet. The data to tell which is which has actually been available for a while now. What most companies haven’t done is turn it into decisions. And without that, an even spread quietly becomes an opportunity cost. The same weight on a company actively circling you as on one that hasn’t thought about you in a year.
In my last post I wrote about how engagement data shows you which companies are warming up, even when the click data looks empty. This is the natural next question. Once you know which accounts are moving, what do you actually do about it?
Seeing the signal is the easy part now
The harder question has always been what to do with it. For years the engagement data was either invisible or buried, so even when you sensed an account was warming up, acting on it specifically was difficult. It was easier to keep working the whole list and hope the warm ones surfaced on their own.
That’s the part that’s finally getting easier. You don’t need a bigger list. You need to know which companies on the list you already have are showing intent right now, and then move on them while that’s still true.
Pinpoint the accounts that are actually moving
LinkedIn’s Companies Hub (https://www.linkedin.com/help/lms/answer/a6884751) has shown this kind of engagement data at company level since late 2024. But looking at the data and actually building advertising off it are two different things, and most companies have stopped at the first. The newer Smart ABM Segments are what close that gap in practice. Instead of working your whole list flat, you can group accounts by engagement and recency and pull out the ones showing momentum. The companies that have moved recently, not the ones that have been sitting at the same level for months.
My read on why LinkedIn built this is simple. The real value of the engagement data was always in using it to steer your advertising, not just in looking at it. Building a one-click path from insight to audience makes that obvious, and it probably nudges a lot of companies to discover data they’ve had in front of them for over a year without acting on. If LinkedIn felt the need to build the shortcut, that tells you how many people weren’t using the data at all.
So you go from two hundred accounts treated equally to, say, the twenty that are warm this week. That’s a different kind of list. It’s not who you’d like to sell to in theory. It’s who is paying attention right now.
One practical note. LinkedIn audiences need at least 300 people, so a very small set of warm accounts won’t always be large enough to activate as an audience inside LinkedIn itself. Which leads to the more important point anyway.
Strike while the iron is hot, in more than one channel
A warm account is only warm for a window. The whole value of knowing which companies are moving is that you can concentrate pressure on them while the interest is fresh, instead of hoping they remember you later.
And that pressure doesn’t have to stay on LinkedIn. The list of warm accounts is really just a list of where demand is building, and you can act on it anywhere. If a company has been engaging with your ads and visiting your site, you can run Google radius targeting around their head office so more people in that building start seeing you during the same period. You can lift your bids on the search terms they’d use. You can keep the LinkedIn activity running alongside it.
The idea isn’t to chase individuals around the internet. It’s to recognise that a buying decision involves several people in the same organisation, and when that organisation is clearly in motion, showing up across more of the surfaces they touch is how you tip the balance before the window closes.
The hard part isn’t the click
Pulling a Smart Segment takes a few minutes. Coordinating the same set of accounts across LinkedIn, Google radius targeting and search, with the timing lined up so the pressure lands while the accounts are still warm, is a different job. That’s orchestration, not a preset.
Knowing which segments are worth activating, what to say to them once you do, and how it connects back to what sales is doing is judgement built on having run a lot of these. The tools surface the warm accounts. Turning that into coordinated pressure across channels, at the right moment, is the work.
Your list told you who you want. The engagement data tells you who’s ready. Strike while that’s still true.
If you want to discuss effective marketing, just reach out to me.
Joakim Ebstein
Head of Digital Marketing
+46 725 555 984
joakim.ebstein@sfinxagency.se
