Account-based marketing, or ABM, has become an important part of the marketing and sales strategy for many businesses. Marketo, a marketing automation company, notes, “ABM has become even more popular in the B2B world as marketers are seeing value in targeting accounts, not just leads.”
This changes the way that many businesses are approaching both marketing and sales; it also changes the metrics on how sales track success.
What are ABM metrics?
ABM metrics are, simply, the measurements of your ABM efforts in relation to their effectiveness. To measure the value and impact of ABM at your business, you need to understand the metrics and business indicators it affects.
Important ABM metrics to pay attention
Here are some of the most important overall ABM metrics to pay attention to:
1. Engagement and reach
There are certain ways to understand if your efforts are making an impact with your intended target accounts. Tracking how leads are completing specific actions is a good way to tell who your communication is reaching and impacting. You can get a good feel for engagement by monitoring email open and click-thru rate, sharing social posts, website traffic, webinar attendance, content downloads, and more. While increased engagement doesn’t automatically mean increased sales, it’s certainly the first positive step in that direction.
2. Meetings
Your ABM efforts should be leading to meetings. In-person or video conference meetings are an important part of the account-based selling strategy and a good way to measure if your marketing is helping to drive interest that could lead to sales.
3. Value
Once you’ve identified which customers are engaging the most, including sales meetings, you can look at the overall potential value that that business has to bring to your organization. This is, of course, part of how you identify the target accounts in the first place, but having another look at the value of accounts versus value investment into your ABM efforts.
How can you use ABM metrics to track sales?
Since ABM is ultimately a marketing strategy, most of the metrics are related to how well the efforts are driving the customers down the sales funnel and into the sales queue. But there are also metrics that can help you evaluate these efforts at the sales level. Ultimately, if your ABM efforts are successful, your ABM metrics will tell you that sales have increased, specifically in the amount of revenue that single accounts are bringing in, as opposed to increased new accounts. Since ABM is a tool that is meant to drive quality relationships as opposed to overall quantity, you should see changes in how your sales look in more than just revenue numbers.
Sales metrics to track ABM and sales strategy
Here are some other sales-related metrics to keep an eye on to help ensure the effectiveness of your ABM marketing and sales strategy.
a. Sales activity metrics
This examines your sales reps and the things they’re doing with account leads and existing accounts. You can measure this with CRM tools and are able to look at metrics like dials, emails, and customer interactions and contacts per day, including how frequently conversations are converting to meetings. ABM helps to provide the best and most relevant leads as well as the most personalized contents, so sales should have no problem creating meaningful contacts.
b. Measuring cross-sells and upsells
Cross-sells and upsells are an important way to increase the overall value of an account. Tracking this metric helps to show businesses the level of customer satisfaction and efficiency and effectiveness of customer marketing materials. One method of evaluation – and increasing the level of upsells and cross-sells – is to create a list of companies that sales have upsold or cross-sold and identify commonalities with other companies like budget or size to help identify the best customers to approach for potentially increasing accounts upsold and cross-sold to. This data can feed back into ABM efforts and help marketers create assets geared towards those accounts in order to help them see the value of additional products and purchases.
c. Referrals
Measuring business brought in by existing companies is an important sales tracking measure. This speaks volumes about customer satisfaction with service and product. It can help ABM marketers understand the additional assets that may be useful in post-sale marketing. Perhaps providing referral tools, incentives, and other assets will help marketing and sales identify the right accounts to target next.
The ABM metrics that matter the most for your business may vary. Ultimately, you want to make sure that your efforts are matching your engagement and that you’re seeing results like increased account revenue. Only by examining your ABM metrics can you identify areas of improvement and opportunity to grow.
Are you keeping your eye on the right measures of success? Don’t fall behind or get complacent in your ABM efforts or get stuck in the content-churn cycle and forget to analyze the impact of your creative and strategic endeavors.
