ABM for CFOs and CIOs: Where to Start | ChannelSpring

Why Does ABM Matter More for MSPs and MSSPs Right Now?

It matters because the buying group your outreach has to satisfy has quietly gotten bigger and harder to align, and generic lead gen was never built to handle that. According to Gartner's May 2025 sales research, B2B buying groups now range from five to 16 people across as many as four functions, and 74% of buying teams show measurable internal conflict — disagreement on the right course of action, or a member getting overruled by someone else at the table — during the decision process. Gartner also found that buying teams who reach real consensus are 2.5 times more likely to report a high-quality deal.

That conflict shows up specifically at the CFO/CIO seam. G2's 2026 Buyer Behavior Report found that finance's share of participation in software buying decisions jumped from 31% to 46% in a single year, while information security's share fell from 32% to 25% over the same period — and that 49% of B2B software buyers say their CFO has reversed an already-approved deal within the past 12 months. In other words: the CIO can be sold, and the deal can still die in a finance review the sales rep never sees. ChannelSpring designs ABM programs around that reality rather than around the fiction that one champion carries a deal.

Which Accounts Should You Actually Put on the List?

Start smaller than feels comfortable — a real ABM list for a $5M–$40M MSP or MSSP is usually 30 to 75 named accounts, not 500. Every account on it should clear all of the following:

1. Fit the ICP on hard criteria, not aspiration. Employee count, industry, current tech stack, and compliance exposure (HIPAA, PCI, CMMC) should match accounts you've actually closed and kept, not accounts you wish you sold.
2. Have a real trigger. A recent breach in their industry, a compliance deadline, new leadership in IT or finance, an acquisition, or a lapsed contract with a competitor. No trigger means no urgency, and no urgency means the CFO has no reason to move it up the list.
3. Have both a reachable CFO and a reachable CIO/IT director. If you can't identify and reach both roles by name, the account isn't ABM-ready yet — it's still a cold list.
4. Have deal economics that justify the effort. ABM is labor-intensive per account. If the expected contract value doesn't clear a threshold that pays for a multi-touch, multi-title program, it belongs in general demand gen instead.
5. Show buying-committee activity you can observe. Job postings for IT roles, recent funding, new compliance hires, or LinkedIn activity from finance and IT leadership are all signals the account is actively evaluating, not just theoretically in-market.

Score accounts against these five and rank them. This scoring model gets built with clients before a single outreach message goes out, because the account list is the single highest-leverage decision in the whole program — better targeting beats better copy almost every time.

How Do You Reach Both the CFO and the CIO at the Same Account?

You reach them with two different messages running in parallel, not one message sent to two people. The CFO responds to a budget-and-risk framing; the CIO responds to an operational-and-technical framing. Sending the same pitch to both is the single most common reason ABM programs for MSPs stall — Edelman and LinkedIn's 2025 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, based on nearly 2,000 buyer interviews, found that more than 40% of B2B deals stall due to internal misalignment within the buying group, often because the people involved never received a message built for their actual concern.



Every field engagement Anne Mitchell has run confirms the same pattern: when the IT side is sold and finance never gets a parallel, finance-specific case, the deal doesn't die loudly — it just goes quiet. Multi-threading isn't a nice-to-have refinement on top of ABM; for a two-title buying seam like CFO/CIO, it's the whole point of running ABM instead of a single outbound sequence.

What Channel Mix Actually Works for This?

Three channels, run together on purpose, not three channels run in isolation and hoping they overlap. ChannelSpring runs LinkedIn outreach and cold-email nurture programs directly for clients — hands-on execution, not a strategy deck someone else has to implement — and the mix that consistently performs for MSP/MSSP ABM breaks down like this:

• LinkedIn direct outreach is the primary channel for both titles, but the message differs by role as shown above. CIOs and IT directors respond to technical specificity; CFOs respond faster to a peer reference ("we work with three other [industry] companies your size") than to a feature list.
• Targeted content — a short brief, benchmark data, or a risk calculator relevant to the account's industry and trigger — gives the LinkedIn outreach something concrete to point to instead of a cold pitch. This is where the CFO/CIO split content from the table above gets used, not written and then ignored.
• Sequenced email runs in parallel to LinkedIn, timed so a CFO and CIO at the same account receive complementary touches within days of each other, not months apart. Coordinating that timing is a program-management problem as much as a copywriting one — it's the piece most in-house teams skip because nobody owns the calendar across both tracks.

Forrester's account-based marketing research, published December 2024, found that ABM accounts carry larger average deal sizes than non-ABM accounts across every region studied, with North American respondents most commonly reporting an 11–20% uplift. That uplift doesn't come from doing one channel better — it comes from the coordination between channels landing both buyers in the same window.

How Does ABM Fit Alongside a Broader Demand-Gen System?

ABM is the account-specific, high-touch layer on top of a demand-gen system — it doesn't replace the system, and running it in isolation from your broader lead gen and nurture is a common way it underperforms. A full-funnel system — lead capture, lead generation, and staged nurture — tuned to a channel business's specific market and sales cycle should already be running, and ABM accounts should feed into that same nurture infrastructure rather than living in a separate spreadsheet a rep manages by hand.

Practically, that means:

• Accounts that don't respond to direct ABM outreach shouldn't be dropped — they should roll into your standard nurture sequence, where a slower-moving CFO or CIO can still convert months later.
• Content built for the CFO/CIO ABM track (risk data, benchmark comparisons, technical briefs) should also populate your general content and email nurture, not sit in an ABM-only silo.
• Test multiple channels per account and track cost per meeting and meeting-to-opportunity conversion by channel, then reallocate effort toward whichever channel is actually converting for that account tier — the same discipline that governs a broader demand-gen program applies inside ABM, just measured account-by-account instead of campaign-wide.



How Do You Actually Start?

1. Pull your closed-won list from the last 24 months and identify the five hard-fit criteria those accounts share.
2. Build a 30–75 account list scored against those criteria plus a real trigger event.
3. Identify a named CFO/finance lead and a named CIO/IT lead at every account on the list — no account moves forward without both.
4. Draft two content and message tracks per account tier: one built around cost and risk, one built around operations and technical fit.
5. Sequence LinkedIn outreach and email so both titles at the same account are touched within the same window, not months apart.
6. Route non-responders into your standing nurture program instead of abandoning them.
7. Track cost per meeting and meeting-to-opportunity conversion by channel and by title, and shift effort toward what's converting.



Frequently Asked Questions

Anne Mitchell is the Founder/CEO of ChannelSpring, a fractional CMO practice built for growth-oriented MSPs and MSSPs. She brings 25+ years of marketing leadership experience, including Fortune 100 roles in tech and telecom, to helping IT and security providers build marketing systems that actually convert.