How do you build trust in strategic accounts before the first sales conversation?

Irina Chernova, Demand Marketing Manager EMEA & LATAM at NetApp, and Olga Bondareva, Founder of ModumUp, walked through a year-long case study at our online event on July 8.

Below is a recap of the session.

NetApp sells into enterprise accounts with long sales cycles and large buying committees. New roles keep showing up on those committees too: AI, DevOps, and cloud leaders. For NetApp, ABM came down to figuring out who actually influences a deal and connecting with them through people already inside the company. They treated it as customer experience and sales alignment, not a standalone marketing program. The pilot ran across 10 strategic accounts in finance, oil and gas, services, and telco.

Olga walked through how Social Selling fit into that. The team already had a target account list, so the next steps were finding buying committee members on LinkedIn, picking the right internal profiles to represent the company, and using content and events as a natural excuse to open a private conversation. The rollout started with Irina's own profile, then moved to exclusive content, an executive profile, and eventually BDRs.

They tested the approach around NetApp Insight, warming people up before, during, and after the event. Irina then shared gated research where people had to comment or message to get it. That soft mechanic, paired with an already-warmed audience, brought in people from target companies who could be handed to sales as SQLs. Seeing that human layer between marketing and sales work is what convinced the team to scale it. From there they added an executive profile for peer-to-peer outreach with decision-makers, and a lot of C-level prospects went straight to DMs. BDRs joined last. One of them said social media gave him access to people he never could have cold-called, because they already recognized his profile.

The result: around $20M in deals tied to large AI deployments, and roughly 3x growth in leads.

Watch the full session: https://youtu.be/AX51HlQ5c3E
Read the detailed recap: https://modumup.com/blog/netapps-approach-to-social-selling-and-abm