Chris Moody
VP, Brand Marketing, Demandbase
In the past five to ten years, B2B CMOs around the world have made great strides in improving marketing analytics. But with the rise of account-based marketing (ABM), B2B marketers need new metrics — ABM metrics — to guide how they measure and prove their results.
While leads and opportunities are essential for B2B marketing metrics, they are insufficient to measure account-based marketing. ABM requires account-based metrics. Enough said. (OK, but here’s why:)
There are three main categories of tracking and measuring your ABM success:
Let’s cover each.
Think about what matters to Sales. Reps want relationships with the right people at the right accounts. They want decision-makers to know who your company is when they call.
Hence, engagement analytics is an ABM metric that measures relationship quality, not quantity. They answer one fundamental question: Are we creating and deepening relationships with target accounts?
To measure how you’re creating and deepening relationships, measure where target accounts spend time, as well as how engagement increases over time. Don’t just look at web data; drill into all activities, including attending events and taking sales meetings.
Deeper engagement means deeper commitments.
In a perfect world, we’d only need to measure revenue. It’s the one ABM metric everyone agrees on. But while revenue is the holy grail, ABM also requires leading indicators to show progress during long sales cycles. For this, B2B marketers define stages of the account journey and measure funnel dynamics using the key metrics of balance, volume/flow, conversion, and velocity. These leading indicators show when, how, and why target accounts become aware, engaged, qualified, closed, and more.
Fundamentally, these kinds of ABM metrics answer one question: How do accounts move through the buying journey to produce outcomes we care about?
Perhaps the most common marketing question is, Did my programs have an impact? ABM practitioners use attribution analytics as an ABM metric to make better decisions about budget allocation. By investing in the highest-performing programs, they maximize overall return by answering one fundamental question: What is the return on my marketing investment?
For example, when looking at ROI metrics for Journey Stages, Demandbase One™’s Journey Stage analytics can be used to track account progression, conversion rate, and velocity. You can even compare results for accounts receiving an ABM approach vs. a demand gen approach to evaluate success (spoiler alert – According to TOPO, opportunities from accounts receiving an account-based approach closed at 53% versus 19% for demand generation).
So you see, vanity, activity, and cost are not the metrics we should be focusing on. We need to put actionable ABM metrics into place. Marketers who use ABM metrics — like engagement, journey, and ROI analytics — speak the same language as other executives.
By effectively quantifying marketing’s value, you earn budget, gain credibility, and deliver high performance.
Interested in learning more about the specifics of which metrics matter when it comes to a strategic assessment of ABM initiatives? Check out this webinar: Leadership Series: Reporting Best Practices
Good rules to follow when choosing metrics should help drive actionable change in your sales campaigns, moving the needle in the right direction. Before you create the perfect ABM campaign, you need to know your goals and how you’re going to track success. To track its success, you need to understand what makes a good metric in the first place.
Are the right people at the account spending time with your company, and is that engagement going up over time?
Engagement describes something fundamental about the customer’s connection to your brand: Higher degrees of engagement means a deeper commitment. More time. More emotion. More of a relationship. More activity, like buying and advocating. In short: Engagement matters.
But, like awareness, it’s not easy to measure engagement completely.
The number of minutes that someone spends with your brand is a reasonable way to track engagement. These minutes should cover not only when they respond to your marketing programs but also when people interact socially, use your product, and talk with the sales team. By combining these interactions at the individual and account levels, we get a good proxy for engagement.
Track all the meaningful activities for each of the contacts at your target accounts.
Typically, the data sources will include:
More advanced data sources include:
Many sales tools track interactions (such as email) as activities in the CRM tool, so those are straightforward to pull in. We can also connect to a sales rep’s calendar and corporate email to track when they are having meetings and other interactions with target accounts.
Count the meetings. A great ABM metric is to count the number of meetings scheduled and held at target accounts. Just make sure you have in place a good mechanism to track these!
Take each lead’s activity and identify which account he or she should be part of. You can manually do a simple match on email domain or automate it with technology like Demandbase that uses more sophisticated methods for lead-to-account matching. Getting this right is a critical step in all ABM analytics.
Take each of the various activities and assign a number of minutes to each. You often won’t have the exact number of minutes, so it’s OK to use estimates for each activity type, such as:
Visualize all the activities into an account timeline.
It’s often useful to map all the key activities for a given account into a visual timeline. This can be especially valuable to have during a quarterly business review to show precisely how marketing has touched the account. It’s also useful when a deal closes to look back and see the touches that helped influence the account.
To create an account heatmap, track which parts of the organization are engaging with you. Add up the number of minutes spent in total from each cell of the matrix and color code for their engagement level. You can also do this for a group of accounts to see broader trends. With this data visualization, you can identify which personas are most engaged (darker areas on your heatmap) and where you need to deepen engagement (lighter spots). Use the heatmap to see which parts of the organization engage with you and where you may have blind spots.
You can also:
Combine the minutes for all the contacts at an account to come up with a measure of aggregate account-level engagement. This combination is typically not a simple sum or average. For example, sometimes you’ll want to give more weight to senior or important contacts.
From there, track the aggregate engagement trend over time, similar to an electrocardiogram (EKG) chart for account health.
Imagine being able to go to the head of sales to show that target accounts spent 4,289 minutes engaging with marketing activities this quarter, up 122 percent from only 1,932 last quarter. And imagine being able to drill into the data to show the specific sales territories, industry segments, and personas with the biggest growth. This is certainly a sign that things in the middle of the funnel are progressing in the right direction!
With this insight, you can identify marketing qualified accounts (MQAs). You want to determine which are the most engaged accounts and alert sales about any accounts whose engagement is spiking up or down versus their recent trend.
At Demandbase, we think that account-level engagement is a better indicator of potential buying activity than individual lead scores. That’s why we use a new metric, the marketing qualified account (MQA) instead of the person-based metric, marketing qualified lead (MQL).
Marketing qualified account: An account (or discrete buying center within an account) that has reached enough aggregate engagement in a given time period to merit a sales outreach.
When you accurately track the minutes from your account-based marketing activities, you’ll understand how target accounts are engaging. Over time, you’ll gain valuable information about how engagement minutes correlate with your most valuable accounts — so you can refine your strategies and create even more engagement.
Account-based metrics, such as those described here, don’t replace traditional metrics like leads, pipeline, and revenue. Those are still important, and you should track them for both new and existing customers.
But, as we’ve seen, traditional metrics are not sufficient for ABM. So marketing and sales teams should be adept at using additional metrics to show success.
Congrats! If you made it through all six steps of this series and have applied some of the best practices in your B2B practice, you are well on your way to executing efficient sales and marketing strategies that power revenue growth.
So now what? Here are three things that come to mind:
If you’re just digging your feet into ABM and looking for pointers on how to build a successful account-based strategy, then “How to ABM Like a Boss” is the definitive blog series for you. No need to read through a stack of posts from a dozen bloggers. This is it. It’s like reading an eBook but in an easier, more digestible way. The blog series covers how to create a budget, build an ABM team, get your data ready, select your target accounts, personalize your content, and measure and realign. Check out the rest of the posts in the series and own your ABM!
Chris Moody
VP, Brand Marketing, Demandbase
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