Most B2B teams treat LinkedIn like a billboard, and LinkedIn ABM is the fix. They post, hope someone sees it, and wait for inbound. That fills a content calendar and leaves the pipeline empty.

The pipeline comes from comments on the posts of people who can buy. This is ABM (account-based marketing, where you pick the accounts first and market to them by name), run through comments instead of a media budget. Demand Gen Report covered 2020 research from the ABM Leadership Alliance and ITSMA in which 76% of marketers using ABM reported higher ROI than with any other marketing. The comment version needs no ad spend and no cold email sequence.

Andrei Zinkevich and Vladimir Blagojevic lay out the full ABM process that needs no new budget or headcount.

Full-Funnel B2B Marketing

🕵🏻‍♂️ How to implement ABM strategy 3.0

After we published the ABM strategy 3.0 piece last week, we received a couple of questions…

6 months ago · 28 likes · Andrei Zinkevich and Vladimir Blagojevic

TLDR

Pick 10 buyers a day from one world you know, and keep them in a plain spreadsheet.
Leave 6 to 7 specific comments on each person over a week, about 60 comments a day.
A like or a reply on your comment is the hand-raise that triggers a DM.
Send a two-line DM within 6 hours, while the comment is still fresh.
Follow up on Day 2 and Day 4, then stop.

A Week of Comments Beats a Week of Posts

Take one seller and one week. Method one is a daily post to a general audience. Method two is a chosen list of buyers and a comment on their posts every day.

A daily post earns peer likes, while comments on ten chosen accounts end in a Day 4 meeting ask.

Here is what each week looks like:

With the post-a-day method, the likes come from peers and no buyer writes to you. Friday has no meeting on it.
With the comment-first method, each person on your list sees your name under their own post six or seven times.
One of them likes or replies, and you send a two-line DM that same day.
The meeting ask lands on Day 4 and goes to a name that already knows yours.

Watch out. This post gives the method and a template. It does not show a screenshot of a real prospect's reply, because a buyer's name and words belong to the buyer.

Step 1. Pick 10 Accounts a Day for Your Dream List

You pick 10 profiles a day, 70 a week. Every profile comes from one world you can talk about for real. Mine is Cloud-Native, Kubernetes and DevSecOps, because I write technical content and run webinars for AccuKnox, a cloud-native security platform.

The titles are the people who hold a budget and own a problem:

CISO
VP of Infrastructure
Platform Engineering Director
Any other title that owns the pain your product solves

Filter each name with BANTC (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline, Champion, a checklist for judging whether a person can buy). Your target is the Sales Champion, the person inside a target company who already feels the pain. Skip the merely curious.

The BANTC filter narrows 70 profiles a week into a Dream List of likely sales champions.

Log every name in a plain spreadsheet. That spreadsheet is the Dream List, and every later step works from it. The Appendix lists the columns. Refresh the list every 2 to 3 months and drop the accounts that went quiet.

One post on X shares a prompt doc that a Claude project follows to find contacts, research each one and draft outreach.

If you want a daily visit list without the spreadsheet, the LinkedIn Monitor on atharvashah.com spreads profiles across the days of the week and opens a day's batch in new tabs. It does no automation, so you do the commenting yourself. The page offers a custom version loaded with your own accounts.

The LinkedIn Monitor page on atharvashah.com describes a 7-day monitoring system and a 20-minute daily workflow.

To score and research a list of prospects with Claude, I built the Dream 100 Outreach skill. It cost $49 on 2026-10-13. It does not send anything, so you send each message yourself.

The Dream 100 Outreach skill page on atharvashah.com describes research on one public fact per prospect.

Step 2. Comment With Something Worth Reading

You leave about 60 targeted comments a day across the Dream List. Each profile gets 6 to 7 comments over the week. That repetition is what gets your name noticed.

"Great post!" is filler. Nobody opens your profile because of it. A comment earns a click when it says something the author did not say:

Explain a Zero Trust decision from your own experience.
Say why eBPF changes runtime security.
Name the gap between static scanning and real runtime protection.
Point to the product module that fits the topic of their post.

Rule of thumb. Write the comment so that it still makes sense if the author never replies. A comment with no ask in it is the one they read.

Use the same shape every time: restate their point in half a sentence, add one fact or one contrast from your work, and stop. I also use context-rich comment tooling. I wrote up what I almost paid for LinkedIn auto-comments in I Almost Spent $250 on LinkedIn Auto-Comments.

Step 3. Read the Like or Reply as a Hand-Raise

A prospect who likes or replies to your comment has raised a hand. They filled in no form and booked no demo. They noticed you in a space where attention is scarce.

Paolo Scales claims that 8 to 12% of the people who comment on a post turn into booked calls. He shows no data, so test the number yourself.

The hand-raise only means something when the Dream List is built right. BANTC does that work before you comment, so every like comes from a person who fits.

A comment becomes a DM only when the buyer likes or replies, and otherwise you comment on the next post.

The figure is a template of the loop. It is not a capture of one real exchange.

Step 4. Send a Two-Line DM Within Hours

Send the DM within 6 hours of the hand-raise, not the next day. The reaction has a short half-life, and a message 48 hours late reads as a stranger's.

The DM runs two lines, three at most. Attach nothing and skip the request for a quick chat. One signal is enough: you did the homework and you have something relevant to say.

Example. "Hi [Name], saw your reaction to my comment on [Topic]. I follow your work at [Company]. We help teams automate Zero Trust runtime security. Would love to show you how we simplify that for K8s."

Step 5. Send Two Follow-Ups, Then Move On

Most leads do not convert on the first message. The cadence is built for that.

Each touch waits two days, from a personal DM to a useful item to a meeting ask.

Day 0. The personal DM, straight after their interaction.
Day 2. One useful item, such as a case study on alert fatigue or a CNCF whitepaper.
Day 4. A 15-minute sync, or a referral to the security team.

Silence after Day 4 means you move on. The Dream List holds 69 other profiles this week.

The same logic of watching public posts for buying signals runs through The Zero Dollar Lead Gen Channel Your Competitors Ignore. That post starts from posts you find. This one starts from a list you choose.

Questions B2B Teams Ask About LinkedIn ABM

Is ABM only for large companies? No. ABM means you pick the accounts before you market. A solo seller with a list of 70 names runs it with a spreadsheet and daily comments.

Does this need ad spend or a sequencing tool? No. The input is comments and a Dream List. A tool can open the day's profiles for you, but a person writes every comment.

What if a person never likes or replies? Send no DM. Keep commenting on their next post. The next hand-raise is worth more than a cold message to someone who ignored you.

Why 6 hours for the DM? A like is a fresh signal. Within a day the context of your comment fades, and the DM reads as cold again.

The Appendix Holds the Dream List Columns and the DM Template

The columns for the Dream List spreadsheet, one row per person:

Name | Title | Company | Profile link | Pain they likely own
Comments this week (0 to 7) | Hand-raise date | DM stage (0, 2, 4) | Next action

The DM, with the three fields you fill in:

Hi [Name], saw your reaction to my comment on [Topic].
I follow your work at [Company]. We help teams [specific outcome].
Would love to show you how we do it for [their stack].

LinkedIn ABM in 5 Steps With 10 Accounts a…