Context
I led marketing at Trademo, a trade intelligence and supply chain data company. This was an in-house role: I owned the demand function from inside the business. The data product was genuinely useful, but there was effectively no inbound motion, so growth depended on outbound and the founders' network.
The constraint
There was no inbound funnel to speak of. Traffic was thin, there was no content engine pulling in the buyers who search for supply chain and trade data, and nothing captured or qualified the few visitors who did arrive. Every opportunity had to be chased; almost none arrived on its own.
What I built
I built the inbound funnel from scratch, then added an ABM layer for the accounts worth direct effort:
- An inbound funnel from zero: content and SEO aimed at the searches Trademo's buyers actually run, plus the capture and qualification steps to turn that traffic into leads.
- A traffic engine that compounded over the build and lifted website traffic 450%.
- An ABM layer on top of inbound, targeting priority accounts using LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, Apollo, and Lusha to find and reach the right stakeholders.
- AI across the workflow: keyword and content research, drafting, and outbound personalization ran with AI tooling, which is how one operator stood up a full funnel at this pace.
Inbound did the volume; ABM did the precision. The funnel filled the top with buyers who came looking, while ABM concentrated effort on the accounts where a closed deal was worth a tailored approach.
The numbers
Organic inbound leads grew 275% from a standing start. Website traffic grew 450% over the same period. The ABM layer lifted sales-qualified opportunities 67%, built on top of the inbound base rather than instead of it.
What transfers to your company
If you have no inbound motion, do not start with ABM. Build the funnel first so demand has somewhere to land, then point account-based effort at the names worth it. The order matters: inbound gives you compounding volume and a place to capture intent, and ABM works far better when it sits on top of that base. The tools (LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, Apollo, Lusha) are interchangeable; the sequence is not.