The first SPAM email (although not called email at the time) was sent in 1978. It was an ad for a new computer sent to 400 people. It was unsolicited junk and likely the first email to ever hit the rubbish bin.
Since then, marketing hasn’t really changed for many businesses. While messaging and high-end concepts have developed, thousands of companies rely on quantity over quality.
Every day, millions of emails are sent straight to junk, and their contents—likely carefully crafted over many hours—are utterly ignored. Meanwhile, important messages are often bundled in with unimportant ones, which can lead to unexpected costs or other business risks. This is one of the most significant pain points for B2B marketers regarding inbound marketing.
By changing to an Account-based marketing approach that focuses on engagement rates, deal impact, and account penetration, you can dramatically influence how clients and prospects interact with your business.
This improves your marketing ROI as well as the relationship you have with your customers. The ultimate outcome is a better bottom line.
How Does Account-Based Marketing Work?
Account-based Marketing (ABM) is a comprehensive strategy that treats high-value accounts as unique and individual markets. Operating with a targeted approach, ABM maximizes revenue opportunities because it is a quantifiable, data-driven methodology.
A core component of ABM’s success is metric tracking. Metrics are also a key part of traditional marketing strategies; however, their usefulness is limited. Traditional focus is on metrics like direct lead generation and audience behavior (for example, click-throughs and time on page).
These are easy to collect and easy to benchmark, but they lack precision, which makes it hard to ascertain ROI. Moreover, precision is essential for maximizing penetration in a high-value account.
ABM metrics, on the other hand, are more nuanced. They look at specific marketing activities at a point in the sales cycle. For your business, it means that Sales and Marketing are aligned in their efforts, providing greater depth and insight for accounts, which translates directly into more positive client relationships and better business performance.
What Are the Key Categories of ABM Marketing Metrics: The Three Rs
Relationships
Anyone who has had conversations in the business world will know that the relationship can make or break an engagement.
Ensuring you are in front of the right people with the appropriate influence and authority is critical to success. Not getting this right can lead to massively wasted effort and a lack of insight into what is really happening within the account.
We’ll examine some key metrics in more detail below. Still, as a rule of thumb, the number of new executives introduced within the account and the frequency of your meetings with them are excellent ways to measure the health and penetration of your relationship. Something else worth looking at is their participation in events, webinars, and conferences. The more they attend, the stronger the relationship.
A falling off in any of these categories may warrant special attention towards that account. Poor relationships lead to degraded loyalty and a higher risk of churn, fewer referrals, a lower level of influence, and ultimately, lower conversion rates.
Reputation
Ensuring that your brand is valuable and relevant is a crucial component of any good ABM strategy. It encourages referrals, improves your credibility, and, therefore, your conversion rates. Collectively, these reflect your brand’s reputation.
Reputation metrics are easier to collect because you can ask customers directly what they think of you. Net Promotor Scores (NPS) or Customer Satisfaction scores (CSAT) are quantitative and qualitative surveys that provide direct feedback on your products and services.
You can also use engagement rates and impressions to understand how many stakeholders are actively invested in your marketing activity – the more time they spend with your brand, the more valuable it is. This in turn, suggests a stronger brand reputation.
Revenue
While it’s good to track metrics in each of the previous categories, they all point to the same goal—generating more revenue for the business. While some metrics within the revenue category are obvious, such as Customer Lifetime Value, retained revenue, and churn, others will provide insight that will improve deal values and time to close.
These will improve your profit margins and growth as well as cash flow. For the customer, they begin to see value in your products or services sooner which improves the relationship with your customer.
You also strengthen your relationship with investors by closing deals at a higher value and on an improved timeline and tracking these metrics through your ABM methodology.
What Are the Top Metrics to Track for ADM Success?
Engagement Metrics
The more time an account spends with your brand, the better. It means that they are engaged and find value in your offerings. The number of interactions is essential and refers to phone calls, email opens, meetings, webinars, events, etc.
Linked to this is the time that the account actually spends in these interactions. An account that lingers on specific content is typically more engaged. Another great metric is senior managers’ and executives’ involvement with your organization.
Many CRMs amalgamate these scores into an Account Engagement Score, which combines all of these metrics into an overall health score.
This means you can generate revenue by understanding areas of interest and protect against churn by focusing resources on at-risk accounts.
Reputation Metrics
Feedback matters, and the metrics gained firsthand from your customers’ experiences are invaluable. Net Promotor Score (NPS) is a very popular tool for understanding who is an advocate and who is a detractor. Customer Satisfaction is a slightly different metric and tends to include more qualitative information about specific experiences.
By identifying and then acting on feedback, you can ensure that customers feel listened to and meet their needs. This increases loyalty and repeat business.
Revenue Metrics
The most important metric for stakeholders is how much revenue your marketing efforts generate. But other metrics will help you stand out against your competitors.
Time to close (or deal velocity) will provide insight into the efficiency of your sales organization while tagging relevant activity in your CRM, which will provide a reliable P&L against each of your marketing activities. This means you can be laser-focused on the things that work and pivot quickly from things that don’t.
Revenue metrics are normally the most important for stakeholders, especially shareholders. They will ensure that your ABM strategy is aligned with wider business objectives and that your opportunity is maximized.
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How to Implement ABM Metrics in Your Strategy
There are two primary considerations when implementing a strategy like this. The first is the what. Using a tracking system like Terminus or Demandbase will enable you to start collecting data that is relevant to your ABM metrics.
Once the information is collected, you can decide how to deliver data to business stakeholders. Advanced analytics can be built into dashboards, which can be further tailored to provide the information needed by each part of the team. For example, the ABM metrics for an account manager will be different from the ABM metrics seen by the Marketing Director.
These tools can be pivotal in the boardroom when deciding strategy or budgets.
How to Integrate ABM with Existing Tools
ABM success comes from the close integration between your ABM tool and your CRM, your marketing automation tools, and anything else touched by Sales and Marketing.
This is important because these tools will enhance the data that feeds your ABM strategy. Good data is critical to good strategy. It’s possible to succeed without it, but companies will never excel.
The most effective method for pulling your ABM metrics is through a data repository. This unifies your data to ensure that it’s accurate and real-time. Something like Mulesoft or Segment is applicable here.
The other key integration consideration is how to track your interaction across channels. This is essential for tracking revenue across your activities so you can decide where investment should go and where it should be pulled back. Tools like Bizible or Marketo can be helpful here.
FAQs
1. What are the key metrics to evaluate the success of account-based marketing (ABM)?
The following are considered essential metrics for successful ABM:
- Target Account Engagement
- Conversion Rates
- Pipeline Velocity (Time To Close)
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
- Account Coverage
A softer metric but still very important is the extent of marketing-sales alignment.
2. What metrics are commonly used to determine marketing success?
When deciding how to measure marketing success, the following are good metrics to consider:
- Overall Impressions
- Lead Generation Response Rates
- Cost-Per-Lead
- Cost-Per-Sale
- Return On Investment (ROI)
· Return On Engagement (ROE)
3. What are the three R's of ABM measurement?
Relationships, Reputation, and Revenue are the key things to measure in ABM. The creators of ABM, ITSMA, created these categories to help define successful marketing and ensure that marketing departments can deliver consistently.
4. What benchmarks are used to measure ABM metrics?
Normally the benchmark for ABM comes back to the three Rs. Whereas traditional marketing has decades of benchmarking data, ABM was relatively new. However, after 20 years, there is a lot of good benchmarking data out there to help you understand if you are being successful.
Comprehensive Account-Based Marketing Metrics
If you want more from your higher-value accounts, shifting your marketing methodology to an Account-Based Marketing Strategy would be worth considering.
The best way to ensure the success of this strategy is to use Account-Based Marketing Metrics. These center around the 3 R’s: relationships, Reputation, and Revenue. Key ABM metrics in each ought to be tracked, such as the number of executive meetings, time spent with your brand, and time to close.
Advanced analytics and dashboard tools are crucial for tracking and using this data effectively. However, they will be useless without a high-quality integration into your other marketing tools.
This roadmap can be challenging to accomplish alone. Fahrenheit offers consultancy and technical skills at every step of the ABM journey and has helped organizations transition from traditional marketing to a more elegant and effective strategy.
Fahrenheit can help with everything from comprehensive project management to building integrations between your existing tools and your analytics. Contact us here to learn more.