You may have zeroed in on your target account audience, produced all your sales and marketing assets, and even launched your first account-based marketing (ABM) program. But how can you be sure that what you are doing is generating results?
This guide covers 5 account-based marketing metrics that revenue leaders need to consider when measuring the success of their account-based strategy.
ABM Metric #1: Target Account Reach
Account-based marketing campaigns rely on a clearly defined ideal customer profile (ICP). An ICP defines your most valuable potential customers and is often defined in terms of specific companies’ firmographic, technographic, and behavioral data.
An effective ABM strategy emphasizes quality over quantity by aligning sales and marketing to focus their time and effort on high-value accounts. So, determining if you can successfully get in front of those accounts is critical to running an effective campaign. This is where target account reach comes into play.
Target account reach is the percentage of your target account audience touched by your ABM campaign efforts.
A touch can be any measured effort by sales and marketing that signals that the account has been reached successfully.
If you are working with a programmatic display platform such as RollWorks or 6sense, a common way to measure target account reach is by measuring the number of target accounts that have received ad impressions.
The result is a percentage of how many target accounts you reached with your efforts and is typically measured over a month or quarter.
Measuring your target account reach is a great metric to lay the foundation of an ABM campaign. As your ABM program continues to grow, you should see target account reach increase at a steady rate over time.
ABM Metric #2: Target Account Engagement
Once you have the foundational metric of target account reach, the next metric to establish in your ABM reporting is target account engagement.
Target account engagement measures which accounts are engaged with your ABM efforts.
Account engagement is one of the most effective ways to measure if your efforts are working, especially regarding messaging. Engagement can be categorized as any 1st party data touchpoint you are collecting, such as an ad click or website visit. As an account-based agency, we measure engagement as multiple touches (3+) on the account level.
By measuring which accounts are engaged with our campaigns, you can ensure that sales are directing their efforts at in-market accounts with personalized messaging that resonates with the account.
Engaged accounts have gained familiarity with the brand and its offerings within a digital environment. As this engagement builds, these accounts become more receptive to sales outbound efforts.
The current B2B buyer journey is digital-first. According to Gartner, members of the buying committee spend 27% of their time researching independently online and only 17% of their time talking to potential vendors. And that 17% of their time is often divided between 3+ vendors. So, these digital touches and the messaging used within your campaigns need to make an impact long before sales even get a response to an email or phone call.
ABM Metric #3: Pipeline Influence
As engagement increases and your pipeline starts expanding, the next ABM metric to account for is pipeline influence.
Pipeline influence is an attribution metric determining which marketing activities created pipeline opportunities.
In our ABM model, we’re looking to determine which converted opportunities were impacted by our ABM efforts vs. opportunities created outside campaign efforts. This means aligning the dollar value of net new deals created within your CRM with target accounts by channel.
By measuring pipeline influence, revenue teams can measure success by associating a dollar amount with their ABM campaign efforts.
This is excellent information to have in your hands.
This type of reporting turns the focus of leadership onto revenue-generating activities and can improve alignment across CMOs and CSOs as qualified accounts move through the sales pipeline. Additionally, pipeline influence reporting allows teams to determine which channels are working best to provide influence on in-market accounts. This creates a template for new campaigns and establishes the engine that keeps ABM programs running.
When setting up pipeline influence reporting, it is crucial to consider the entire buying journey, which is not linear, and assign appropriate value to channels that drive the movement through the pipeline rather than just considering first- and last-touch conversions.
ABM Metric #4: Length of Sales Cycle
One of the most common results of a good ABM campaign is accelerating your traditional sales cycle. This is a direct result of identifying in-market accounts and targeting them with personalized messaging through united efforts by sales and marketing.
You can directly measure this anticipated result using sales cycle length as a key metric.
The length of a sales cycle measures the time it takes for sales to convert a new opportunity to a closed-won deal.
Our ABM agency sets up reporting in one of two ways.
The first way looks at sales cycle lengths across your entire CRM and compares the average sales cycle length before and after the launch of your ABM campaigns. This method is helpful when ABM is your only, or primary, go-to-market strategy.
The second method compares the average sales cycle length of target accounts within an ABM campaign vs. those that do not have any ABM influence. This method is more common for companies running multiple go-to-market strategies or are new to ABM programs.
The efforts of marketing to build brand awareness and deliver personalized content in the early stages of the buyer’s journey means that when sales contacts an account, they are armed with data and insight on that account that will help them move things faster.
Shorter sales cycles create more time for sales to focus on genuinely in-market deals rather than taking a ‘spray-and-pray’ approach. Saving your team time and effort while increasing their possibility to close more deals per fiscal year.
ABM Metric #5: Average Contract Value (ACV)
Like measuring the sales cycle, measuring the average contract value (ACV) before and after your ABM strategy is put into place is a great way to measure the success of any ABM program.
Average contract value (ACV) represents the average revenue generated from each customer over the fiscal year.
Since ABM targets in-market high-value accounts, you should expect a substantial lift in the deal size from accounts included within your ABM campaign. According to a report by SiriusDecisions, 91% of ABM marketers reported an increase in the average deal size.
This insight allows leaders to dig further into revenue-generating outcomes and directly shows how a targeted ABM program can positively affect your bottom line.
Kick-start Your ABM Reporting
As an ABM agency, we spend a lot of time educating teams on account-based marketing metrics and why these new metrics are more reflective of real B2B growth. While there are many more possible metrics to include in your reporting, these five metrics are a great place to start to show the value of your ABM or ABX program.
Ready to improve your pipeline numbers? Reach out to our team of ABM experts today.
