Measuring the Sales and Marketing Effectiveness of your ABM Campaign
The power of an Account-based Marketing campaign can be unleashed when sales and marketing teams not only optimize their ABM structure as one unit, but when they build processes fueled by the best-fit ABM platforms and data.
Furthermore, when sales-marketing leaders and teams align on the priority-parameters that matter most to their business while doing this, it can help measure the effectiveness of their ABM process and overall ABM strategy.
Understanding the Core of a Good ABM Strategy
An Account-based Marketing (ABM) approach serves to be a precision led strategy that aims to better align sales and marketing processes and functions by getting these teams to first identify on and agree on a list of high-priority target accounts.
With a list of accounts in place, an ABM plan has to be rolled into action using different cross-channel techniques that align in terms of messaging and themes.
A 2020 State of ABM Report showed that 94.2% of respondents now have an active ABM programme (an increase of 77% from 2019) with mature ABM programmes now accounting for 79% of all inbound-outbound sales opportunities.
Account-based Marketing as a concept is only set to pick up pace and as ABM platforms become more sophisticated and fuse with better data capabilities that allow deeper insights into their target account’s decision-makers and buying behaviors, it becomes more crucial for marketing and sales teams to not only understand how best they can use ABM technologies and newer processes to optimize their plans, but to also know how to measure the true effectiveness of every part of their ABM campaign.
ABM differs from traditional marketing concepts, with its precision-first approach that boost personalization and relevance in every conversation; it is important for marketing and sales leaders to know what needs to be measured when in order for them to take the right corrective or preventive measures at the right time. A well aligned ABM campaign that has the right measurement processes in place will enable better results and allow marketers and sales teams to further capitalize on opportunities that they otherwise could have lost out on, rendering their ABM efforts below par.
A few tips to keep in mind:
Identify your own Key Metrics
Every marketing and sales team runs an ABM campaign to meet certain near-term or long-term goals. For some companies, an ABM strategy could be their chosen approach to fuel high-value deals more effectively, for others, ABM could be their go-to strategy because they want to tap into a certain segment or niche using a targeted approach, each company will have their own goal or reason to pursue an ABM model.
This is what defines the key metrics that matter to each team. For a company that is focused on improving the numbers of high-value deals they bag, assessing the total cost of their ABM campaign versus how many accounts from their target list successfully converted into paying clients will be more important; for teams that are using ABM to compliment other marketing models – assessing the value of total accounts won through an ABM strategy versus other marketing strategies that are being executed at the same time will give them a better idea of what needs to be fixed and why.
This is what will help sales-marketing leaders understand how much priority to accord to typical top-of-the-funnel KPIs like conversion rates, paid ad metrics and other mid funnel KPIs and bottom of the funnel KPIs like engagement metrics like time spent on campaigns or on your website, pipeline velocity, etc.
ABM Set-up and Execution Costs versus ABM Campaign Output
Several marketing and sales leaders use account-based marketing to fuel their core marketing processes, many others deploy ABM campaigns in addition to other marketing strategies and campaigns that they could be running.
For either team, the marketing-sales leaders will incur a cost to set up a unified data platform (a must-have in any ABM campaign), to hire the right people to plan and execute the campaign, to invest in the right platform to help run targeted ads and associated steps that fuel the overall ABM strategy.
This is where marketing and sales operations leaders need to understand how much they invest into running, executing and putting in place a strong ABM structure while comparing it to the near-term output from these campaigns.
Closely assessing ABM spends from the first touchpoint to the last will also allow sales and marketing leaders to know where adjustments need to be made.
Read More: SalesTechStar Interview with Dana Bjornson, Chief Financial Officer, Mylo
Measuring the Effectiveness of your ABM Tool to your Overall ABM Strategy
ABM is not a new concept. It’s a concept that is now largely written about, heavily researched on and one that has attracted a fair share of defined tech innovations and platforms to fuel its overall growth and adoption.
There are no dearth of ABM platforms that can deepen ABM strategies and processes and help automate most of the elements needed to execute and track high-value campaigns, all with the aim of scaling efforts.
But each company and sales-marketing team has to align their choice of ABM tool to their budget, their immediate goal and overall feasibility in terms of how well the tool integrates with other marketing operations and sales operations technologies.
For an ABM campaign to flourish, marketing technologies and sales technologies have to be aligned, they need to communicate with each other, connected tools need to be set up to share customer data and other business and campaign insights with the right stakeholders at the right time. This helps sales and marketing teams measure their ABM ROI, track their entire customer journey and make the necessary tweaks to cost, structure, messaging and processes in real-time.
Platforms like the Terminus ABM ROI Calculator, Marketo Engage, HubSpot Marketing Hub, LeanData and many others provide the right capabilities and features to track ABM KPIs, cross-channel engagement and even opportunity close rates.
In order to find and adopt the best-fit ABM platform that can meet your specific business goals, it is first important for sales-marketing leaders to identify closely on their immediate goal from their ABM campaign and what metrics they hope to boost or track during this process. This is what will further help fuel a better decision in choosing the right ABM platform catered to these needs.
Getting The Best Out of your ABM Efforts
Account-based marketing and account-based selling provide a more hyper-focused approach that allow marketing and sales teams to prioritize efforts and resources. To ensure that an ABM campaign is always churning out the best possible ROI, constant measurement and tracking and improvements (in terms of use) of ABM platforms are needed.
A robust ABM strategy can increase a company’s average deal size while leading to a growth in overall revenue. According to a study, 60% of companies report at least a 10% increase in revenue in year one of their ABM programme.
Marketing-sales leaders who constantly set new measurement parameters in place to evaluate their customer’s ABM journey across the different buying stages can drive more results and deeper engagement from their campaigns.
Read More: How To Change When Change Is Hard
Catch the latest B2B Marketing and Sales Conversations with these latest episodes of The SalesStar Podcast Featuring Metadata.io, ON24 and more!
Episode 91: Top Trends And Concerns Of B2B Revenue Teams: With Sylvia Ananicz, Head Of Revenue At Lilt
Episode 90: Boost Your Customer Engagement And Marketing Process: Tips And Thoughts By Steve Daheb, CMO At ON24
Episode 89: Demand Gen And B2B Marketing Tips: With Gil Allouche, Founder & CEO At Metadata.Io