How to Build an ABX Machine in B2B SaaS in cyber ?

When it comes to B2B SaaS marketing performance, the problem is almost never the budget. Teams have LinkedIn Ads budgets, pipeline objectives, and sometimes strong convictions about which channels to activate. What they’re missing is the infrastructure that turns all of that into concrete, repeatable results.

CyberVadis was in exactly that situation at the start of the engagement. The company, specialised in third-party cyber risk management (TPCRM), was targeting a demanding audience: CISOs and IT Directors at large European enterprises subject to NIS2, DORA, and GDPR. The LinkedIn Ads budget was in place, the campaigns were running, but the pipeline remained nearly empty. The cost per lead was climbing, while the leads being generated had little real commercial value.

Four months later, the ABX infrastructure was built, the first priority accounts were engaged, and CyberVadis’s in-house team was autonomous enough to run the machine without relying on external resources.

Here’s how we moved from a channel that wasn’t working to a B2B acquisition machine that runs on its own.

Before changing anything, the first step was to understand precisely why the existing campaigns weren’t converting. It seems like an obvious reflex, but many teams skip this step and go straight to bid optimisation or creative refreshes.

The cybersecurity market has a characteristic that marketing teams regularly underestimate: its buyers are technical experts, often deeply sceptical of anything that looks like institutional marketing. A CISO or Head of IT Security can recognise a message designed for a general audience within seconds, and they’ll ignore it with the same speed.

CyberVadis’s corporate campaigns suffered from a deep mismatch between the brand’s register, oriented toward regulatory compliance and institutional positioning, and the register expected by the audience, which is far more operational and grounded in the reality of third-party risk and audit constraints. The message was technically reaching the right people, since the LinkedIn targeting was correctly configured, but it wasn’t speaking their language.

Adding to this was a second, structural problem: the complete absence of account-based logic. Campaigns were broadcasting to a broad, homogeneous audience without any prioritisation of high-potential accounts. In a serious Account Based Marketing strategy, spreading your message to everyone effectively means targeting no one, because you dilute energy and budget across accounts that have neither the intent nor the profile to convert.

The diagnosis pointed to two distinct workstreams: deeply reworking the format and voice of the campaigns, and building an ABX targeting infrastructure capable of concentrating effort on the accounts that truly matter.

The answer to the register problem is the Thought Leadership Ads format, commonly called TLA in growth teams. It’s a LinkedIn format that allows advertising content to be distributed under the name and profile of an identified expert, rather than under the brand’s logo. This may seem like a cosmetic difference, but it fundamentally changes the nature of the interaction.

For an audience of IT security professionals, this format shift is particularly decisive. A CISO doesn’t respond to institutional advertising, no matter how well targeted. But they will readily stop on an analysis signed by an expert that concretely addresses the operational implications of NIS2, the blind spots in vendor auditing, or the limitations of automated approaches to cyber risk management. It’s no longer advertising: it’s a conversation between peers.

Setting up this approach required several concrete steps. First, identifying two to three internal experts at CyberVadis whose credibility on target topics, particularly regulatory compliance and TPCRM, was genuine and documented. Then, defining a precise editorial line for each of them, with a distinct angle, an adapted tone, and a list of recurring topics aligned with their audience’s concerns. Then producing high analytical-signal content, built on regulatory analysis, real-world experience feedback, and sector data, carefully avoiding any repurposed brand content. And finally, distributing that content via LinkedIn Ads in TLA format, with refined account-based targeting, which is covered in the next section.

The goal of TLA is not to generate an immediate click toward a demo form. It’s to build, over time, a memorable presence among priority accounts, establishing CyberVadis’s experts as references in their field before the commercial cycle has even started.

An Account Based Marketing strategy can only work if the target account list is genuinely rigorous. That’s the foundation of the whole ABX logic: you choose your accounts carefully, you work them in depth, and you concentrate your energy where it actually has a chance of producing qualified pipeline. The problem is that building this list manually, going through LinkedIn, cross-referencing firmographic data, qualifying contacts one by one, represents a significant volume of work that B2B SaaS marketing teams almost never have the internal capacity to absorb.

That’s precisely why Clay was integrated into the setup.

Clay is a data enrichment and automation tool that builds ultra-qualified account lists by automatically cross-referencing dozens of data sources, including LinkedIn, Salesforce, firmographic databases, intent signals, published job postings, and company news. What previously required an hour of research per account now takes a few seconds per row, with a level of precision that manual work didn’t consistently reach.

The stack deployed for CyberVadis was organised in four steps. The first was defining the relevant ICPs (Ideal Customer Profiles) for the engagement, incorporating not only classic criteria like company size and sector, but also specific cyber risk signals: companies that had disclosed a security incident, entities directly subject to NIS2 or DORA, and international groups with subsidiaries across multiple jurisdictions. The second step was automated list building via Clay, with full firmographic enrichment and identification of key decision-makers, CISOs, DPOs, and CIOs, within each account. The third step was Salesforce synchronisation, ensuring that every qualified account was pushed into the CRM with its enrichment data and a priority score that the commercial team could act on. And the fourth step was LinkedIn Ads activation: the Salesforce account list directly feeds LinkedIn audiences via Matched Audiences, guaranteeing that Thought Leadership Ads are served exclusively to the accounts identified as priorities.

The practical result is a closed, coherent ABX loop: ad targeting is aligned with the accounts the CRM considers priorities, LinkedIn interactions feed back into the CRM, and the commercial team has real-time visibility on which accounts are engaging, well before any formal sales cycle begins.

Building this infrastructure in-house would have represented a multi-month undertaking, involving targeted recruitment, a significant learning curve on tools like Clay and on TLA logic, and coordination between profiles that are rarely found together on the same marketing team: a paid media specialist, a marketing ops professional with genuine mastery of enrichment tools, and a content strategist capable of working in the register of a cyber expert.

Hirondo deployed a three-person taskforce on the engagement, combining a B2B LinkedIn Ads specialist, a Clay and marketing ops expert, and a content strategist with concrete experience in the cybersecurity sector. Each with a clear scope, defined accountability, and a handover objective set from the very first day of the engagement.

This last point is genuinely structural in the way Hirondo designs this kind of intervention. The collective model is not a form of outsourcing where you delegate a problem and receive a solution. It’s a time-bound engagement with a finish line understood as an objective, which is the moment when the in-house team is fully capable of running what has been built, on their own.

This approach concretely changes the day-to-day working posture. Every decision made during the engagement is documented and explained, not simply executed. Every campaign parameter is contextualised so the in-house team understands why it was chosen. Every Clay workflow is annotated so it can be picked up and modified without needing to start from scratch. The objective isn’t to deliver a one-off result, but to hand over a method that keeps producing output after the engagement ends.