Irrespective of the marketing technique, ensuring the success and effectiveness of a marketing campaign relies heavily on how you measure and evaluate the effectiveness of each step.
Usually, the key metric in evaluating usually revolves around the return on investment, i.e. for X amount spent how much revenue or profit did the campaign generate. Though to make sure that your campaign runs successfully it is important that you measure each step of the campaign, using the data to improve the iterations for better results.
ABM can not only be used for new customer acquisition but also to retain and expand existing accounts. In other words, ABM not only 'reverses the funnel,' but it also flips the objective, since it is no longer just about customer acquisition, but about specifically identifying and nurturing specific accounts and connections.
As such, the ABM metrics can be grouped into two types,
The KPIs under the acquisition group are measured to track the number of new and converted prospects, whereas the expansion KPIs evaluate the number of customers returned after engagement and the overall growth in CLV, or customer lifetime value.
Here are a few that you should definitely track,
ABM usually starts with an account list that you want to target. The objective being reaching out to decision makers in these target accounts to drive sales and revenue.
While it may seem your marketing team is reaching out to the majority of the target accounts to increase the traffic on your site, it does not mean they will be converted into customers.
One of the earliest metrics to track to check if your campaigns are working is “Target Account Reach”, i.e. how many target accounts have engaged with your content/outreach, essentially to check if all the accounts in the list had atleast 1 level of interaction with your clients.
This can be calculated as
Target Account reach = Total engaged accounts/Total Target accounts in the list,
where Total Engaged Accounts = Number of accounts where a decision maker engaged with your content
This metric helps in evaluating your ABM efforts by analysing the returns by measuring the percentage of engaged stakeholders. Marketers may even leverage the metric by assigning attribution to identify the most successful content that is driving the best conversions. The basic formula for calculating this metric is:
Number of accounts whose decision-makers who engaged with your content/total number of accounts
Your team would need to understand which target accounts can be regarded as decision-makers, which increases the importance of gathering account data.
Improvement in revenue is undoubtedly the most important objective of any marketing campaign. Unlike traditional marketing, in ABM, the sales cycle is comparatively shorter because only highly qualified leads enter and go through the sales stages.
One of the best ways to check if ABM is doing what it is supposed to do i.e. get high value, high intent leads into the pipeline is to see how fast does qualified leads move through the lead stages.
Pipeline Velocity = (total # of opportunities x average deal size x conversion rate)/sales cycle length
Where
Total number of opportunities = Total number of qualified leads also called opportunities or SQLs
Average Deal Size = Average revenue per deal
Conversion rate = Historic conversion rate for Qualified lead to customer conversion
Sales Cycle Length = Number of days on an average it takes to convert a qualified lead to paid customer
Usually, higher Pipeline velocity is better.
When it comes to constructing your ABM approach, measuring closed/lost rates can be as helpful as monitoring closed/won rates for evaluating opportunities. By measuring the win rate, you can demonstrate how your ABM approach drives prospects that ultimately lead to closed winning sales and assist your company meet revenue targets.
The conversion rate is the proportion of accounts that are converted into paying clients during a specified time period.
However, it takes time to calculate the conversion rate since ABM targets large accounts, whose sales cycles are usually longer than retail or small-value clients.
Similar to the acquisition metrics that track and monitor the number of leads funnelling in, the expansion metrics also determine how the client relationships are being influenced by the marketing efforts. Since ABM is rather an ongoing process and shouldn’t end after a single conversion, understanding the driving factors can help in modifying the strategy for better results.
Cross-selling and upselling are two important factors that help in increasing the CLV along with retaining the existing customers. By adding upgraded products and services to the current offerings, businesses can leverage the opportunity to increase order values with further sales. Cross-selling and upselling are useful in determining how effectively your marketing efforts are influencing the customer relationship.
The average deal value is one of the ABM metrics that can be measured based on the long-term results of the campaign. In an ABM campaign, the average deal value of your accounts should be higher than the other customers your sales team is closing. Make sure you are targeting accounts that are challenging to close and are of high quality. Because your sales representatives will be spending more time with these accounts, you must ensure that the ROI and deal size are greater than the average lead your sales team usually closes as well as the acquisition cost. To calculate this metric, you can closely monitor the pipeline revenue, closed revenue, and sales pipeline.
Customer retention can be a smart way to generate sales since repeat customers are more valuable than first-time buyers and it takes less time to buy again. Marketers have reported that an effective ABM strategy generates a 35% higher retention rate than average marketing strategies.
To calculate the retention rate of your ABM campaign, you need to divide the total number of customers by the number of repeat customers.
If you find the gap between the total number of accounts converted and the number of repeat customers is quite high, then it indicates a low retention rate. A low retention rate can also mean that the marketing efforts are not enough to cultivate a relationship with the accounts, especially in the early stages of the pipeline.
Evaluating specific marketing metrics is crucial in order to help businesses determine the efficacy of their campaigns and provide critical data to modify future campaigns. Measuring marketing KPIs enables marketers to comprehend how a marketing approach is influencing and driving toward the business objectives and optimise accordingly to achieve better outcomes.
Apart from determining the performance of the marketing campaigns, analysing such metrics also helps in identifying the factors that have been hindering the overall conversion growth. This enables marketers with sound decision-making in order to adjust to the campaigns in real-time.
Marketing metrics are also important indicators that imply certain marketing efforts are having a significant impact on the overall outcomes. In traditional marketing, KPIs like lead generation, return on investment, and impression share are enough to determine the success of a campaign. A complex B2B marketing strategy like ABM entails advanced metrics such as sales cycle length, customer success metrics, pipeline velocity, customer retention, MQAs, average deal size, and more in order to properly assess the success rate of the strategy.
By implementing ABM processes into existing marketing technology, your team will be capable of enhancing audience management, providing complex reports and data modelling, and generating proprietary intent data. For instance, intent data can be an important addition to existing customer data through third-party user data. Incorporating intent data into the existing technology enables the teams to establish buyer personas by using the information from behavioural and demographic data. Through thorough reporting and analysis of key ABM metrics, B2B businesses, irrespective of their size, can evaluate the influence of this strategy and make it easier to strategize further, along with optimising and measuring the campaigns.
