Can Your ABM Solution Measure For Your ABX Needs?

ABX is about quality, not quantity.

The traditional metrics that have been used to gauge ABM success are not useful in the experience-centric realm. The new and more complex benchmarks for measuring success revolve around:

• Relationship analytics
• Journey analytics
• Attribution analytics

Once you’ve successfully closed accounts, you want to make sure you understand which ABM programs helped to contribute to that sale so you can rinse and repeat. This is where you can evaluate how a vendor measures ABM success and the entire Account-Based Experience. You will want to choose a vendor who can help you optimize your programs from the top of the funnel to the bottom, and grow your customer’s lifetime value. You will also want a vendor with different methods for measuring attribution since not all businesses are alike.

Some examples of metrics to measure:

1. The volume and velocity of an account as it makes its way through the buyer journey. This helps you understand whether your programs are engaging enough as well as whether your sales cycle is too long.
2. Advertising campaigns and website visits – but with an account-based lens. After all, you want to understand whether your advertising is reaching the right accounts and which accounts are engaging on your website. 

Because ABX has a different set of metrics than ABM, when it comes to measuring the performance of the ABM solution from the vantage point of the customer experience, the scope also changes. If you are short staffed, some ABM vendors offer strategic services to assist your strategy and measurement.

The vendors on your shortlist should, among other features:

• Offer a dashboard to measure ABM impact from across the funnel.
• Track volume, velocity and conversion metrics for each journey stage.
• Offer customizable subscriptions for all custom reports.
• People and account based heatmaps.
• Allow you to combine first party, third party, firmographic and technographic data for segmentation and reporting.
• Allow you to compare the performance of different audiences or account lists and evaluate the impact of specific programs.
• Enable you to see the engagement and activities that influenced the different stages of a deal cycle.

Measuring a journey and a relationship in the long term requires measuring as much data as possible, so find out if they also:

• Centralize your existing data sources in one location?
• Track B2B metrics by account?
• Track and report on anonymous first-touch visitors by account?
• Have strategic services in place to help you set up ROI reporting based on your strategies? Allow you to compare different timeframes for account stages?
• Provide advanced BI capabilities for ABM?

The point of measuring is to take action based on knowledge and insights, and having an ABM solution that allows you to bring together all of the relevant data points for your decision-making is pivotal for the success of your business. Our agnostic Definitive Guide to Choosing an Account-Based Marketing Platform provides you with checklists like the one above as well as the reasoning behind the need for each of the features outlined in the ebook. Check it out and take advantage of the printable list we put together for your own use at the end of the guide.