When Brittany Wolfe first joined Lokalise, the company had a sales team of around 30 SDRs and 10 AEs—a significant imbalance between the pre-sales and sales functions.

The sales reps were also choosing their accounts ad hoc, which wasn't a scalable or strategic approach. "The reps were randomly choosing their accounts on their own. Sales already saw a pain in that and knew that that wasn't a scalable or strategic way to operate."

She also found her sales team were focusing their outbound motion on accounts that would end up signing for their lowest priced plan and led to no ROI anytime in the distant future.

Something needed to be done to improve their GTM efficiency.

Lokalise proposed a big change: rather than casting their net across all companies in their addressable market, they were going to focus only on a few key industries who they'd seen sales success with.

By focusing their resources on these industries, they’d be able to quickly and effectively sell to lookalike customers. 

Revisit Objectives and ABM Approach 

The first step included identifying clear, alignable goals with sales. Ultimately, their ABX motion needed to warm their target accounts so they were familiar with Lokalise before the sales team started reaching out to them.

They also focused on one specific industry that historically had the highest ARR. This allowed them to use a one-to-many approach rather than a 1:1 or one-to-few approach that many ABM programs use.

“Traditional 1:1 or even one-to-few ABM might just not be very efficient for companies with low ACV,” shares Inga Keizare, Performance Marketing Lead at Lokalise.

Besides being a budget-friendly approach, this approach also allowed them to target many accounts at once with the same campaign content.

“The industry approach for us became the most profitable or like time and money savings because we could hit so many different accounts with that approach,” says Brittany.

Create A Clear Account Qualification Framework

To help them take a more scalable approach to revenue, Lokalise mapped out their ABM journey.

During their research, Lokalise found engaging multiple individuals within a target account drove more conversions. This led them to split the funnel before handing off leads to sales: Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) and Sales Qualified Accounts (SQA).

MQLs factor in a single lead at an account who’s engaging with their campaigns and website content. After they're found to engage, ABX begins to target and advertise to additional leads within that account.

MQAs are accounts where multiple contacts are actively engaged in ABX campaigns, signalling that there is significant interest at the account level and multiple people ready for a sales conversation.

Brittany found that by having multiple leads at the same account who are aware and interested in Lokalise’s offering, they would see an increase in the close-rates and a shorter deal cycle. Win-win for the ABX and sale team.

This updated funnel qualification allows them to allocate the right amount of resources to accounts that still need more marketing, and know when to pass certain accounts off to the sales team to close.

Facilitate Quick Wins for Sales

Now that the ABX team had an updated qualification funnel and a clear strategy for how they’d support sales, they needed to implement the changes and get buy-in from the sales organization.

They needed their sales team to experience quick-wins.

Each week, the ABX team would pull in intent data from their ABM platform to share qualified accounts with sales.

This included:

• Sharing what stage of the funnel each account was in

• Giving sales new leads already in the buying or evaluation process that they weren't aware of

Brittany trained the sales team to use the intent data platform at the beginning of each week to help with weekly account selection.

This collaboration worked seamlessly because everyone’s incentives were aligned: ABX had warm accounts to give to sales, and sales had a prioritized list of target accounts who had a high likelihood of closing.

Create Scaled ABM Campaigns to Warm-Up Qualified Leads

Once Lokalise had the sales team running with qualified accounts, Brittany and Inga looked to other ways to qualify target accounts.

The ABX team began using intent data to create personalized content that helps drive awareness and interest across different ad formats.

For example, Lokalise runs industry-targeted ads that call out the industry by names and relevant pain points.

Then once they see specific target accounts engaging with these ads and reading their content, sales reach out — leading to significantly better outbound response rates. 

They also have ad campaigns that factor in tradeshow events Lokalise plans to attend. These ads go to target accounts to help drive brand awareness. That way, any in-person conversations are smoother.