Account-based marketing offers plenty of benefits for most businesses. However, most of these benefit from a successful ABM approach, which isn’t an easy task for many organizations.
The only way you can ensure that your efforts to ABM are successful is by closely monitoring the essential metrics that signal your progress.
Here are the top five account-based metrics that you can track:
Target Accounts Engagement Rate
In a traditional marketing strategy, generating a thousand engagements is already a success. However, with account-based marketing campaigns, the number of engagements is less critical. What’s important is the length of engagement and how meaningful every interaction is.
Account engagement is usually measured on time spent by users interacting with you. The longer the time, the more engaged an account is.
Here are some interactions used to measure engagement:
- Pages visited
- Ad impressions
- Time spent on the site
- Email open rates
- Number of downloads
- Number of sign-ups
Higher degrees of engagement mean a deeper understanding of your company and a stronger interest in knowing more. The more time you spend on an account, the better your chances of fostering a long-term relationship.
You also need to score the engagement quality based on your parameters. For instance, a sales manager participating is a highly engaging activity. On the other hand, a homepage visit generates low engagement. Depending on how you score it, your ABM metrics will vary. However, it should be something that will define your trial program.
Faster Sales Growth
One of the primary goals of your ABM strategy is to increase sales. Because ABM has been shown to shorten the sales cycle and generate more leads, it makes sense to have a successful strategy to help you accelerate sales.
Sales velocity helps your team know how precisely their efforts are affecting revenue. You can also break down every activity and content channel to know which campaign generates the maximum impact.
Higher Conversion Rate or Win Rate
Your win rate is a metric that reflects the quality of accounts that you’re choosing and how well an ABM process performs. If you’re opting for high-fit target accounts and providing them with the best experience possible, they should close at a higher rate than your inbound leads coming in.
Usually, inbound leads come in because they’ve taken an interest in your business before being evaluated by your sales team. Naturally, there should be more leads in a group ruled out as a poor fit. This is maybe because they don’t fit your ideal customer profile or buyer personas.
Regardless, more leads should be ruled out in your inbound process than in your ABM process.
An Increase in Return on Investment
Do your ABM campaigns cost more returns than your target accounts? Do you need to enhance your average deal size to make it worthwhile? Your ROI is another ABM metric that you need to track. This will ultimately track the effectiveness of your campaign.
You should have benchmarks if you have previous data from your marketing and sales efforts. When launching a new campaign, make a rough estimate of how much you’re going to spend on average before you close any deals.
Now, if your new campaign costs you more than average without the ROI to back it up, you might have to reconsider your target accounts or the tactics you’re using.
Improved Sales & Marketing Alignment
ABM encourages sales and marketing teams to work hand in hand, identify target accounts, create customized campaigns, and place individual accounts through the pipeline before and after the lead conversion.
In the long run, better sales and marketing alignment significantly reduce the chance of inaccurate marketing campaigns. It also considerably reduces the sales cycle and allows sales to connect with qualified leads more quickly.
Retention Rate
Your repeat customers are more valuable than new customers since they cost far less to sell again.
So, if the gap between the total number of repeat customers to the number of customers is significant, meaning the retention rates are low, then the “churn rates” are high. Over time, if your numbers aren’t improving, you could have failed to build connections with target accounts after the initial sales.
Thus, a solid understanding of how your ABM strategies influence customer retention is vital in helping you determine your actual ROI.
Over to You
As with everything you do with marketing and sales, you should constantly measure and track your ABM efforts. This allows you to make necessary improvements along the way.
Although many metrics can affect an ABM strategy, taking a look at all of them gives you a better picture of what’s happening to your target accounts. It also lets you evaluate whether you chose the right companies and contacts to start with or if there are any issues down the funnel that you have to address.