How to 10x your Account-Based Marketing with the Reveal Loop

How can you 10X the performance of your Account-based-Marketing programs?

First, look beyond the sources of small, incremental performance. Testing other folks’ winning email templates and training your teams are all good starts, but the 10X leaps in ABM performance come from something greater.

Look at the bigger picture:

  • You need to scale ABM performance exponentially, not linearly (10X without 10X’ing budget, headcount, and headache)
  • You need to automate old manual (and any new) processes to get more from your existing tools and teams
  • You need to personalize your content and programs to drive higher engagement, conversion, and close rates

The common thread behind all the elements of your ABM campaign (tools, teams, content, targeting…) is data. Account-based marketing without elegant data flows becomes an incredibly manual process. Instead of wasting endless SDR team hours on Google and LinkedIn searches, we invest in data providers to help us identify, expand, engage, and measure.

The difference between basic and 10X ABM teams is how they use their data.

Basic ABM teams treat each of the four stages separately. Advanced ABM teams treat them all additively, where identification is needed at every stage and with every interaction.

Basic ABM teams see “identify” as a one-off task to create a list of accounts and prospects. Advanced ABM teams don’t stop identifying the accounts and prospects throughout their programs.

Basic ABM teams focus on more data (and more noise!) to solve their problems. Advanced ABM teams focus on syncing and cross-enriching their data between all their tools.

Basic vs Advanced ABM Teams

With advanced ABM, “not enough data" is rarely the underlying problem. You have analytics. You have a CRM. And you have already done the legwork to identify your target accounts (from an abundance of data providers). You have the data… it’s just not in the right place.

Your problem is tying all this data together.

If we want to link identification with expansion and engagement, we need to link each account with each person, and every interaction.

This is hardest at the engage stage, because not every interaction is tied to an email address.

Many companies DON’T have ABM programs with a data-rich trail of actions associated with each person (like having all their prospects logged in and tracked in a product). But most companies with ABM programs DO have engagement across assets like websites, live chat, ads and more.

If you could snap your fingers, and have all that data connected together, suddenly you'd be able to scale, automate, and personalize your account-based marketing. You could pull all three levers to drive growth.

This is what the Reveal Loop does.

Advanced B2B teams are using the Reveal Loop to upgrade their ABM programs and land over $10,000 a day (more on that in a bit…).

The Reveal Loop drives breakthrough leaps in sales efficiency and ABM performance. It enables you to orchestrate those complex data flows and arm your account-based programs with the content, the targeting and the timing to send highly personalized messages which close more deals faster, and drive revenue growth.

What is the Reveal Loop?

The Reveal Loop connects your identification, expansion and engagement all together in one, seamless data flow. It replaces the manual legwork in joining up all the different elements of ABM so you can identify individuals at every stage.

The Reveal Loop brings these three pieces together:

  1. Turn anonymous website visitors into a company name.
  2. Then a company name into a list of prospects from that company.
  3. And then return all the data about each of these prospects.

Data geeks will say, “the key is the key”. A company domain name is the key to associating data with a company. An email address is the key to associating more data with a person. By using the answers from one query to power the next, we can link these queries together using data providers that have all these answers.

Clearbit is a data enrichment provider with the three APIs needed to power the Reveal Loop. Their databases include individual’s profile data, company data, and company IP address data. Clearbit has all the data to answer your Reveal Loop queries, with an extensive mid-market dataset to provide the volume needed.

  1. Clearbit Reveal API turns an IP address into a company domain name. You can feed the IP address from your web analytics (this is recorded by most analytics tracking tools)
  2. Clearbit Prospector API turns a company domain name and list of job titles into persons profile with their name, job title, and email address.
  3. Clearbit Enrichment API turns an email address (or company domain name) into a full person’s profile with 85+ data points

By linking these together, you can engage accounts who have visited your website in a highly personalized, automated, scalable way.

How to orchestrate account-based marketing with the Reveal Loop

Here’s an example of an email template we’ve sent before…

I can see you're interested in Hull.io...

Hi {firstName},

From one data geek to another, you can understand that I track all my emails and web analytics...

And I see several dozen folks from {companyName} have been visiting Hull.io, checking out our live customer use cases and reading about our latest funding.

If you're interested, I'd love to talk - to share what companies like Trustpilot, Segment, Mention and others are using Hull to do, and how we can best help you at {companyName}. In particular, upgrading your {topTools} profiles with each other's data.

If you've got 15 minutes to talk, I'd love to schedule some time?

Look forward to hearing from you {firstName},

Ed Hull.io

With the full data profile, we can write a highly personalized message. We can take this in many different directions too - mention or not mentioning the website visit, mention details about their company (like their technologies) or not, being specific about actions taken.

This process can be scaled and automated too. Segment automated their outbound sales emails using the Reveal Loop, enabling them drastically increase both the quantity and the quality of outbound leads. This is how Segment land more than $10,000/day from their outbound campaigns - powered by the Reveal Loop.

But the Reveal Loop can power much more than email.

Email may be the staple to your ABM programs. But it’s only one element and channel in your wider ABM strategy. Using the Reveal Loop, you can enrich all your messaging tools to engage your target accounts with highly personalized messages across multiple channels in real time.

Idea #1: Enrich your CRM with account-based page views

Even if you cannot identify individual people, key page views like pricing pages, demos and particular solutions can help guide your sales reps and account executives to the clues that will close the deal.

Idea #2: Personalize your website to each account

Taking the first idea a step further, you can dynamically adapt your website to each account’s actions. Enrol the entire organization in a website variant to see versions of their webpages focus on their industry, their competitors testimonials, the most relevant solution and so on.

Idea #3: Target every stakeholder in an organization with 10X retargeting ads

Traditional retargeting ads only reach the website visitor. With the reveal loop, you can sync all your enriched prospects from an account to ad audiences, build familiarity across the organization with more impressions on personalized ads. 1 lead becomes 10 leads!

Idea #4: Trigger account-based live chat to target accounts

Most live chat for lead gen struggles to be relevant because they can’t identify accounts and trigger personalized messages. With the Reveal Loop, it becomes possible to identify these accounts and personalize the triggers and content.

These can also tie quickly back to your reps to respond individually and personally too (with all the cues and clues they need added to their CRM and sales tools). See this story on Drift how the Reveal Loop to turn live chat into their #1 source of qualified opportunities.

Idea #5: Notify your reps when an account takes action

The best time to reach out is when someone takes action, so use notifications to prompt reaction. Whether you’re using email or team tools like Slack, let your team know when key actions (like a pricing page view or demo request) are completed right away.


With an outline of what the Reveal Loop is and how it can orchestrate results, how do you implement it?

Three challenges with setting up the Reveal Loop

The first challenge with the Reveal Loop is it doesn't include your existing relationships - customers, opportunities, partners, competitors, and so on. This needs to be cross-referenced with your Reveal Loop so your ABM programs exclude these. Otherwise, your program performance will forever be plagued by confused and irritated partners, customers, and so on.

To solve this, we need to connect the Reveal Loop with your sources of this data. Where it lives depends on how your company is setup.

  1. For companies with a free trial or low priced self-service option, the main source of this data will be a product database, built and maintained by product and engineering.
  2. For companies whose price point pulls them above self-service, the primary source of this data will be their CRM, built out and maintained by sales or sales ops.

To make the Reveal Loop work effectively, your CRM or backend database should be cross-referenced immediately after you get a company domain - there’s no point spending money enriching your partners, customers or competitors domains again.

The second challenge with the Reveal Loop is qualifying accounts before enrolling them in your campaigns. We want to exclude companies who may have visited your website, but are a poor fit for your ABM programs. Without this, you can end up overwhelming your inside sales reps with poor fit leads who won’t convert into opportunities and closed deals.

To solve this needs a tool that can take in the data you have (website visits, company and prospect data) and filter to exclude a poor-fit accounts:

  • Create a segment from your enrichment data
  • Create a score from your enrichment data
  • Manually review each new account via email, Slack actions or more.

This also needs to be linked with the Reveal Loop data and with your CRM or database for excluding customers, opportunities, partners, and competitors. With your exclusion rules set up, you can control who gets enrolled in your ABM programs and maximize your inside sales reps chance of success.

The third challenge with the Reveal Loop is it is complex to setup the data flows. To make this work, you’ve got to tie together more than half a dozen moving parts:

  • Clearbit Reveal API
  • Clearbit Prospector API
  • Clearbit Enrichment API
  • At least one analytics tracking tool (to feed the IP address) via API
  • Your CRM (via API) and/or your backend database, connected to your other services
  • Possibly a lead scoring tool
  • Every single messaging platform you’re using for your ABM programs

This data is also very time sensitive. It’s far more valuable to email three minutes after a website visit from your target account than emailing three months afterwards, so it needs to be processed and synced quickly to unlock the value.

This is hard.

Despite having all the data, most companies struggle integrating and maintaining these complex data flows without developers. For companies already implementing ABM (with the content, data and teams behind it) orchestrating the data flow behind the Reveal Loop to solve these three challenges is the biggest blocker to 10X'ing your acocunt-based marketing.

Reveal Loop Identify stage

Customer Data Platforms make the Reveal Loop Seamless

Unlike other integration methods, B2B customer data platforms like Hull focus on building and maintaining one “master profile” for each person and account. Each step of the Reveal Loop, including cross-referencing with your CRM, database, and scoring mechanisms builds on this profile.

The Reveal Loop adds to each profile in a logical order.

  1. Visitor lands on your website. They are anonymous
  2. Hull creates a “guest” profile with their webpages and IP address
  3. Hull sends this IP address to Clearbit Reveal
  4. Clearbit returns the company name. This is added to the Hull profile
  5. The updated profile is merged with any existing customers, partners, opportunities and competitor accounts in Hull.
  6. The updated profile passes through the segmentation engine where the fit criteria (score, specific data, etc.) are specified. Eligible accounts enter a segment (e.g. Reveal Loop - Send Account to Program)
  7. Hull sends all accounts in this segment to Clearbit Prospector with target job titles.
  8. Clearbit returns many new profiles of prospects.
  9. Hull creates new profiles for each of these (and merges with any existing profiles of each individual)
  10. Hull sends each of these new prospect profiles back to Clearbit for enrichment
  11. Clearbit returns an 85+ point data profile for every prospect.
  12. Hull adds the Clearbit enrichment data to every profile
  13. Hull then syncs all your prospects to all your connected tools accepting that segment to enrol them in you email cadences, ad audiences, website audiences, live chat audiences, and more.

With a simple, sensible data flow to manage the complexity, B2B customer data platforms like Hull make it possible to set this up in a few clicks.

Setup the Reveal Loop for your account-based marketing

If you have an established ABM program, chances are you’re working with a rapidly growing company. You’re short of time and resources, but still trying to scale, automate and personalize your ABM programs to drive better performance. Hull + Clearbit can help. Setup a demo today to implement 10X account-based marketing with the Reveal Loop at your company.

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What you should do now

  1. Request a custom demo - and see how to unify & sync all your tools, teams & data (like we did for all these companies), or book a demo with a product expert.

  2. If you'd like to learn our best practice for customer data integration, read our free Guide to Getting Started with Customer Data Integration.

  3. If you enjoyed this article, perhaps your team will too? Why not share it with the links below.

Ed Fry

Prev 'Ed of Growth at Hull, working on all things content, acquisition & conversion. Conference speaker, flight hacker, prev. employee #1 at inbound.org (acq. HubSpot). Now at Behind The Growth

If you've questions or ideas, I'd love to geek out together on Twitter or LinkedIn. 👇