ABM Measurement Best Practices

If you are currently running your own ABM strategy and you are looking for some of the best ways to measure success, Brenda Zenaty did an amazing job explaining her process at Terminus at our recent ABM-a-thon and we will cover the secrets here with you today.

It might be a safe guess that if you are running an ABM program you are familiar with a traditional marketing funnel shown on the left-hand side of this graphic.

What is "Full Lifecycle"

In that traditional model, marketing's role is typically to cast a wide net at the top and attract and convert as many leads as possible, move those leads or prospects through some sort of progressive nurture stream, and ultimately transition prospects into closed revenue.

Metrics like conversions and MQL's typically measure the success of this process, and this seems to be a pretty common story for most marketing programs.

This funnel still has its place in modern marketing organizations, and it may even be the best way to drive growth in some companies, but over the years, there's been this massive shift in the B2B buying process. Buyers are more educated, the market is more saturated than ever, and what you find is less than 1% of those B2B leads are actually turning into customers.

As a result of this shift, we're also seeing more and more businesses moving away from exclusively running lead gen or demand gen. Instead, they're adopting this full lifecycle approach that blends both inbound or demand gen and account-based strategies, represented by the graphic on the right here.

In this model, marketing's job doesn't stop at the top of the funnel. So with full lifecycle, sales, marketing, and customer success are all working together to support the entire customer journey from initial brand awareness through to expansion and retention. One of the major underlying principles and key differentiators of ABM or account-based marketing is driving efficient and effective revenue growth where really the goal is to progress opportunities to best fit accounts rather than driving a ton of lead volume that maybe doesn't even equate to revenue, in the end, or people you actually want to talk with so ABM is really all about creating that surround sound experience

What Makes Good Measurement

This graphic breaks down the different engagement signals and key metrics or performance indicators you should be looking at for each life cycle stage.



Often, the focus tends to be on accounts that may have had some early engagement with your brand, so the play here is really to educate the target market and get them interested enough to take that next step. Then learn more so from a measurement standpoint. However, this process tends to be rushed, and metrics are highlighted that don't translate into revenue. We would all love a strategy with a two-week turnaround, but that's unfortunately not how it ends up working out.

So instead, you should be focused on driving outcomes that align more closely with an account's life cycle stage. So channel-level metrics like impressions, clicks, and chat conversations are great but considering account-level engagement signals like web visits and high-value content interactions are what you are aiming for.

The ultimate goal would be to have them submit a request for a demo or first call. So Hopefully, this is a useful asset for planning out kind of your life cycle programs.

A quick recap so far:

Data, Data, Data
+ How clean is our data? What is our confidence level in its accuracy?
+ Where does our data live? Who needs it and where?
+ How well are our systems integrated?

Setting Baselines
+ How are we measuring marketing today, and how does that compare to an account-based strategy?
+ What KPIs will we want to measure against?
+ What are our most successful channels/content/CTAs today?

Cross-Functional Alignment
+ What does sales need from marketing?
+ What does marketing need from sales?
+ How are we going to set expectations on the timing of our goals?

If you can answer these questions you are well on your way to identifying your full lifecycle and narrowing in on the metrics that will continue to help build a strong and successful ABM strategy.
 

How to think ABM Measurement

Identify Business Objectives

The first is measuring against your overall business objectives that we talked about so we should really be using this as our North Star in our measurement strategy.

These are the critical business goals that you’re trying to drive with your ABM strategy. This is what your C-suite cares about.

Examples: Pipeline created in the current quarter, logos won, customer retention, CSAT

Analyze Program Metrics

The second area is program metrics. So these are really metrics that will show the success of individual programs and their overall influence on those larger business objectives, so this could be your overall ABM Program.

Examples: Opportunities created, closed-won revenue influenced, deal velocity

Address Channel KPI’s

Channel KPIs help you see if individual channels are creating ROI. These are critical for iterating and planning future programs.

Examples: Ad click-through rate, chat conversations completed, pipeline influenced by direct mail

Whether it's for your ABM strategy or just marketing in general, understanding what, how, and why you're measuring your data is going to be the most direct way to identify and produce continuous results.

If you would like to learn more about ABM check out all 20 ABA-a-thon sessions here