ABM Contact List Strategy — ZoomInfo Filtering & Deduplication

Building a clean, well-filtered contact list is the foundation of any ABM campaign. The goal is to maximize initial engagement rates while avoiding the brand damage that comes from blasting multiple contacts at the same company simultaneously.

Core Principle: Start Narrow, Expand on Signal

The instinct to load up on contacts per company is counterproductive in early-stage ABM. If a marketing contact and a procurement contact at the same company both receive the same cold email, and they compare notes, it signals a spray-and-pray approach — the opposite of what ABM is supposed to convey.

Phase 1 (Initial Outreach): 1 contact per company
Phase 2 (After Engagement): Expand to 5–6 contacts per company, targeting distinct buyer roles (influencers, decision-makers, purchasers)

Once a contact at a company starts opening emails or engaging, immediately begin building out the full account map for that company.

Recommended ZoomInfo Filters

Geography

Location: US-based
HQ: US-based (filter on both — not just contact location)

Filtering on both the contact's location and the company HQ prevents pulling contacts from US offices of foreign-headquartered companies, which may have different buying authority.

Job Titles

Focus on roles that own or influence the buying decision for your product. For a packaging/e-commerce supplier like ^[1], the relevant titles are:

Marketing
Digital
E-commerce

Exclude: Operations, Quality, Store Operations — these roles are unlikely to be primary decision-makers for marketing-adjacent purchases and will dilute response rates.

Cutting these exclusions can reduce a list from ~1,000 to ~400 contacts — a smaller list that performs better.

Engagement Scoring

Apply ZoomInfo's "Likely to engage by email" filter. This surfaces contacts with behavioral signals suggesting higher email responsiveness, improving early campaign performance.

If you are not running phone outreach, filter to email engagement only (removing "by phone" from the engagement criteria)
Note: narrowing to email-only engagement may slightly reduce list size, but the quality improvement is worth it

Target List Size

A starting list of ~400 contacts (1 per company) is a practical and defensible size to present to a client for review before importing into a CRM. It's large enough to be meaningful, small enough to be manageable, and easy to explain.

Present it as: "Here's a starting list. Take a look, give us feedback, and we'll refine from here."

Expansion Strategy

Once initial outreach is underway and engagement signals appear:

Return to ZoomInfo and pull additional contacts at engaged companies
Target complementary buyer roles (e.g., if you started with Marketing, add Procurement or Digital)
Build toward 5–6 contacts per company to support full account-based coverage
Sequence outreach to these additional contacts separately — don't add them to the same active sequence

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Evidence

This approach was developed and validated during ABM strategy prep for the PaperTube client presentation (April 2026), where filtering from ~1,000 contacts down to ~400 using title exclusions and engagement scoring produced a cleaner, more actionable starting list.