What You Should Be Able to Open When You Hire an ABM Agency

Before you sign with an account-based marketing agency, ask to open seven things: the accounts, the reasons, every email, the approvals, replies and calls, holds, and the bill. The agency writes to your buyers under your name, so you want to see each one while the work can still change.

Your sellers' names sit on the emails. The buyers who reply believe they're talking to your company, because they are. A report after the fact can only tell you what happened. By then the email to the wrong person may have gone, and the account you'd have struck at a glance may already have been written to.

Trellis is the workspace our engagements run in, so the worked examples come from there. Its Today screen opens on the decisions waiting on you.

The seven things to ask to open

Ask for each one by name, in the first week.

The accounts, and why each one is there

The account list comes first because everything else is built on it. If the wrong company is on your target account list, every email, call and approval after that is effort spent on a company you'd never have picked.

Ask to see the accounts before anyone at them is written to. Ask for the reason next to each one, in writing.

In Trellis that's Radar. Each proposed account arrives as a card that says why we picked it and why it sits in tier 1, 2 or 3, with the dated signals behind both. A hiring pattern from last month and the same pattern from last year say different things about one company, and you'll often know which one matters before we do.

Nothing on Radar arrives pre-approved, so every account waits for a decision. You approve, hold or decline each one. A decline carries a reason, and we read what you decided before each new search. When our team approves an account on your behalf, Trellis records who did it and when, so the record shows which accounts you picked and which we picked for you.

Want the research itself? You can download it, one file per account on Radar, and hand it to the seller who knows that market best. (Research at that depth is the core of ABM run as GTM engineering, and it's the part you should be able to read.)

The emails, and who said yes

Read the emails before they go. All of them. What you want to read is the email itself, in the order your buyer will read it, with the branches that fire when someone replies and when they don't.

In Trellis that's Copy Review. It shows each person's whole sequence word for word, branches included. Each email shows who it comes from and who is copied on it.

Fix anything in place. Change an email after approving it and the sequence goes back to awaiting review. And one approval covers one person and their sequence, so your yes is a yes to what that person will read, start to finish.

Then the yes itself. Item four asks who gave it, in what role, and when. Every approval in Trellis records all three, and launch records what it covered. That matters months later, when someone on your side asks who signed off on an email to a member of the buying committee and the answer has to be on file.

Launch takes one more yes, from your executive or from our team, and Trellis asks for it twice. That yes also approves any email nobody has decided on yet. Our advice, and it's only ours: read the undecided emails before you give the second yes. Once an email has gone out, you can't rewrite it.

Two things sit above every approval. A do-not-contact entry beats all of them, your executive's included. The AI in Trellis can't send, approve or dial. Our team drafts with AI outside Trellis, but a person gives the yes on a campaign email, and launch is one of those yeses.

Replies and calls, on one record

The record after the send has one plain job. It's the first thing the next person on the account reads before they write to anyone or pick up the phone.

A reply changes what the next seller should say. But a seller who can't see the earlier emails starts that conversation cold.

Ask where replies land and whether the calls sit next to them. In Trellis, replies land in Inbox, one thread per person, next to the emails that went out. The calls your sellers place land on the same record. Each account's record shows as one timeline, newest first. When the seller a reply belongs to opens the thread, the earlier emails and calls are already there.

A person picks the reply type, such as Interested, Meeting booked or Wrong person. If a reply comes from an address we can't place, it lands as an unmatched reply with the original message beside it.

One caveat on approvals belongs here. Campaign emails go out only after a yes from your executive or our team, and the launch yes also approves any email nobody has decided on yet. But a reply your seller types in Inbox is that seller's own send.

This is where you can check what account-based experience comes down to: what happens after a reply, and who owns it.

What is held, and the bill

A hold is a decision too. It should carry its reason.

In Copy Review, holding a person's emails asks you to write why before it takes, so whoever looks next knows what that email waits on. On Radar, held accounts sit in their own group, apart from the ones still waiting on a decision. But Radar's hold doesn't ask for a reason, so write it down somewhere your team can find it.

The bill is the last item, and the shortest. Ask how you'll be billed before the work starts, and what each line covers. The bill is transparent, itemized usage billing. Our pricing is scoped per engagement, so that conversation happens with our team before you sign anything.

The limit

We don't promise meetings. Trellis shows you what happened, whatever it was.

Seven items leave two questions open, whether the research is good and whether the emails get replies. Opening them lets you judge both before the work goes out under your name, and it leaves a record you can open afterward. For the questions that come earlier, like what you'll own when the engagement ends, start with our questions to ask before hiring a GTM engineering agency. If you'd like to see these seven on your own accounts, talk to us.