Account-based marketing (ABM) has seen a huge surge in recent years within the professional services industry, and it’s easy to see why. This highly focused strategy concentrates marketing resources on a clearly defined set of accounts and runs personalised campaigns specifically targeted directly at them. So, rather than casting your net wide in the hopes of appealing to as many targets as possible, ABM allows you to be laser focused on that high-value prospect from the off.
But what about evaluating the success of your ABM campaigns? It can actually be simpler than with many other strategies, as it’s easier to draw conclusions from small, more concentrated sets of accounts. Saying this, adopting a new go-to-market strategy without concurrently adopting your sales metrics will make it harder to track your progress, so our first piece of advice is to implement new KPI’s from day one of your ABM campaign. Traditional funnel metrics such as conversation rates simply don’t work here, as ABM focuses on harnessing a small number of the right leads
Indicators for Success
In order to track your campaign, start by identifying your indicators for success. These will vary from business to business, but here are a few universally applicable indicators in which we can determine ABM success.
- Revenue – A simple one to start with. The whole aim of ABM is to bring in more revenue for less cost. So this is your first marker.
- Speed – How long did it take to close that new deal? One of the strengths of ABM is its ability to speed up the time from first contact to a closed deal.
- Engagement – ABM is all about changing how you engage with your customers – the strategy is built on using a personalised approach to reel in more high-value accounts, so measuring engagement is a great indicator of how well you are connecting with them.
- Upselling – Beyond thinking about those new accounts, a key benefit of ABM is selling additional goods and services to those customers you’ve already captured.
The 5 Key ABM Metrics
Now we’ve worked out what success looks like within account-based marketing, we’ll go through some of the metrics we can use for measuring these indicators. As we’ve said, the traditional demand funnel doesn’t really work for ABM, so try these KPIs instead.
Coverage
Firstly, consider if you have enough of the right people in your database – how many of the people associated with those accounts are the right stakeholders? Are you prepared if that stakeholder leaves? Have you identified potential successors within the team? Ensure you have identified the main stakeholders and points of contact within every account. If you need to develop better relationships with those higher up role-players, ask yourself which activities got the first leads engaged initially.
Reach
Are you actually reaching your target accounts or wasting your efforts? Monitor your reach across your target business. Who is attending your events? Who is downloading your reports? Traditional metrics will come in handy here too – open and click through rates are still good indicators. If you are tracking reach online, IP recognition is vital as it allows you to see whether individuals from the right accounts are visiting your website.
Awareness
Look at how many of your target accounts know your company’s name and what you offer. Web traffic, email opens, report downloads and event attendance are good reflections of this. Positive trends in brand awareness and time spent engaging with your company are marks of healthy ABM.
Engagement
How engaged and interested are your prospects?
The more time they spend with your company, the more committed they tend to be, so you’ll need to dig deeper than when looking at measuring reach. Don’t just measure engagement in clicks as it tells you nothing about how much time target accounts are spending with your content. Instead, measure the number of minutes that someone spends with your brand. Count when they are responding to your marketing activities, when they interact socially, when they use your service/solutions, and when they talk/meet with your sales/consulting team.
Influence
What activities are generating the right results?
Look at how your ABM campaigns are affecting your accounts’ sales outcomes. Some deep data mining will allow you to look for the differences between your ABM campaign and others. Among measures to look for here are:
- Sales cycle time
- Deal velocity
- Average contract values
- Win rates
Account based marketing can change an organisation’s approach to sales by broadening the understanding of a potential customer’s key players and structure.
Essentially, what we need to learn from these metrics is if you are actively engaged in cultivating relationships with the key-players within your target and landed accounts. Good luck using these techniques in your firm and if you need more advice you can contact us here.