Your GTM approach needs to match your ICP
A $10K SMB deal and a $100K+ enterprise deal require fundamentally different approaches
Hi friends - Hard to believe I’ve been writing this newsletter for over 2 years now! I am starting to go back and refresh some older content. First up: How to define your ICP (v2).
Alright, so last week, we touched on two ways to make outbound more effective than the traditional ~1% cold conversion rate — signal-based outbound and account-based marketing. We broke down what signal-based GTM actually is, how to identify your signal profile, and the landscape of first-party and third-party tools available to you.
But here’s the thing — which GTM approach fits your business depends entirely on who you’re selling to. Your ICP doesn’t just determine your messaging and positioning. It determines your entire go-to-market motion.
Your ICP determines your GTM motion — and your available signals
One thing I don’t want to gloss over when talking about signal-based GTM content is - the signals available to you vary dramatically based on your ICP.
If you’re selling to enterprise or public companies, there’s a rich set of observable public data — earnings calls, hiring plans, press releases, SEC filings, analyst coverage. You can build a pretty detailed picture of what’s happening inside that account before you ever reach out.
If you’re selling to a 50-person private company? That signal set gets a lot thinner. They’re not doing public earnings or revenue reporting. They may not be generating enough news to build a meaningful picture from the outside. Your available buying signals might be limited to funding events, leadership changes on LinkedIn, and whatever you can pick up from your first-party data.
That’s not a reason to skip signals at all — it’s just a reason to be realistic about which signals are actually available for your ICP and build your motion accordingly.
Precision is the other dynamic that matters here based on your ICP.
As you move upmarket, the accounts get harder to break into and the sales cycles are a lot longer. There are more stakeholders involved, more internal procurement process, and more competition for the buyer’s attention. You simply can’t afford to be broad at this level. The bigger company you’re selling to, the more precise and coordinated your approach needs to be.
With those two realities in mind — available signals and required precision — here’s how I think about matching your motion to your ICP (and ACV):
High-volume / low ACV (under $2K)
At this price point, the math is simple — you can't afford to have a human in the sales loop for every deal. This is generally product-led and marketing-led territory. Your growth comes from self-serve signups, free trials, freemium conversion, content marketing, and paid acquisition. The product itself needs to do the selling. Signal-based outbound and ABM don’t apply here — the unit economics don't support the level of effort either approach requires. Your job is to remove friction from the buying process and let volume do the work.
SMB / high-volume ($2K–$15K ACV)
At this deal size, you’re still typically running a product-led or marketing-led motion. The purchase is less considered, the sales cycle is shorter, and you’re optimizing for volume and speed. There may also not be many signals to track at this tier, and that’s okay — the economics of the deal don’t require the same level of precision.
That said, if there are signals available to you — a target account visiting your pricing page, a leadership change at a company in your ICP — leverage them. That kind of data can only help you prioritize and convert. But your primary growth levers here are digital marketing and product experience.
Mid-market ($15K–$100K ACV)
This is hybrid territory. Deals involve 2–4 stakeholders and take a few months to close. You need more targeted outreach relatively speaking, but you may not be in full ABM territory.
There still may only be so many signals you can track and leverage at this tier, but whatever is available to you — take it. Even a thin signal layer of first or third-party data will meaningfully improve your conversion rates when you’re running outbound into mid-market accounts.
This is the tier it’s hardest to speak to broadly – the specifics of your company, industry, etc will influence the best answer.
Enterprise ($100K+ ACV)
This is where volume-based outbound breaks down entirely. You’re selling to buying committees of 8-13 people across sales cycles that can stretch 9-18 months. Generic cold emails don’t move the needle.
You need ABM — a coordinated, multi-channel approach that surrounds a specific set of accounts with personalized messaging. The good news is that at this tier, there are more signals available to you because enterprise companies generate more public data. The challenge then becomes using those signals to time and orchestrate a much more complex sales motion.
What ABM actually looks like for a startup
Most ABM content is written for companies with a 20-person marketing team and a six-figure budget. That’s not you. And that’s fine — ABM at startup scale is simpler than the industry makes it sound.
Here’s what it actually looks like at $1–5M ARR:
Start with a tightly defined ICP. You can’t run ABM if your targeting is vague. If you haven’t already, go back to the basics and get SUPER specific about who you’re going after — industry, size, geography, tech stack, buying triggers. I wrote a full breakdown on how to define your ICP that walks through this step by step.
Build a defined target account list. Based on that ICP, identify 50–100 accounts you’re going to focus on. Not 500. Not 1,000. A list small enough that you can actually be intentional about how you engage with each one. We’ll cover how to build this list in the next article in this series.
Coordinate sales and marketing touches. This is what separates ABM from regular outbound. Instead of sales sending cold emails to one set of accounts while marketing runs ads targeting a broader company profile, you’re running ads to the exact same named accounts — your founder or AE is reaching out while marketing is serving targeted content to the same account, while you’re engaging their team at an industry event. Multiple touches, multiple channels, same account.
Track engagement at the account level. Most startups track leads. ABM requires you to track accounts. The question isn’t “did this one contact open my email?” It’s “how many people at this account have interacted with us across any channel in the last 30 days?”. That shift in measurement changes how you evaluate what’s working — and it’s backed by data. Forrester research found that when three stakeholders from the same company engage with your brand, you’re 50% more likely to convert that account to closed-won.
None of this requires enterprise-grade tooling. You can run a solid ABM motion with HubSpot, LinkedIn, and disciplined coordination between sales and marketing. It’s more about the alignment and approach than the tech stack.
The signal layer that makes ABM even more effective
ABM on its own is a strong approach for enterprise sales. But when you combine it with real-time buying signals, you accelerate account penetration significantly.
Here’s why: even if you’ve built a great list of 100 target accounts, startups often don’t have the budget or bandwidth to run a full-court press on all of them simultaneously. Signals tell you which 15–20 of those accounts are showing buying behavior right now — so you can concentrate your limited resources where they’re most likely to convert this quarter.
Without signals, you’re spreading effort evenly across the entire list. With signals, you’re doubling down on the accounts that are actually in-market while keeping lighter but intentional touches on the rest until they heat up.
This is the exact problem we built ABM Intel to solve — combining multiple signal sources into a single view so you can see which target accounts are actively showing buying behavior across multiple dimensions, not just one. If you’re running ABM and want to know where to focus this month, it’s worth checking out.
But even without dedicated tooling, the principle applies. Whatever signals you have access to — first-party engagement, third-party intent data, job changes, funding events — layer them on top of your ABM motion. The combination of a coordinated approach and real-time prioritization is significantly more effective than either one alone.
When your motion matches your buyer, everything gets more efficient
The core point of this article is simple: don’t run the same playbook regardless of who you’re selling to. A $10K SMB deal and a $100K enterprise deal require fundamentally different approaches — different levels of precision, different channel mixes, different signal strategies.
When your motion actually matches your ICP, everything downstream gets more efficient and effective. Your sales team spends time on the accounts in-market. Your marketing budget goes further. Your content speaks to the right problems at the right stage of the buying cycle.
With love and gratitude -
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