Intro
When it comes to measuring ABM, it can be hard to know where to start.
Within a traditional lead-based model, it’s easy to understand leads created, conversion rates, opportunities opened, pipeline, closed won revenue, etc.
But within ABM, since you’re already focused on the accounts that matter, some of those early-stage metrics have less meaning. I don’t know many CEOs that reported lead numbers to their board, anyway…
The important thing to remember is that everything should tie back to pipeline and revenue! And revenue isn’t a sales-owned number or a marketing-owned number. It’s an everyone-owned number.
If you’re already tracking against Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) like Revenue Won, Opportunities Created, or Average Deal Size, you should definitely use them as a baseline to compare against your ABM efforts.
But there are four additional KPIs that your ELT will care about:
- Engaged Accounts
- Marketing Influence
- Opportunity Accounts
- Deal Velocity
Engaged Accounts
The tippy top of the ABM funnel starts with creating engagement within accounts that might not know about your product or services yet, but keeping those accounts engaged throughout your funnel is also paramount.
You can measure “engagement” in a myriad of ways, but at Terminus, we define an account as engaged when they have at least one web visit or a campaign response in SFDC. This is a good indication that:
- There’s active interest in Terminus from that account
- Our outbound channels are working (because these are all accounts within our target list that are proactively being marketed to)
In addition to Marketing Influence (which we’ll cover next), account engagement is our best view into whether or not our marketing efforts are working.
Marketing Influence
If Account Engagement is a measure of whether or not your marketing is working, Marketing Influence is a measure of whether or not you’re doing enough marketing to the right accounts.
At a basic level, Marketing Influence helps show how much of your existing pipeline and closed won revenue have been “influenced” by marketing. This should be an aggregate of all your marketing channels, including email, direct mail, virtual events, etc.
This is also a great indicator of marketing and sales alignment. If marketing and sales are working completely disparate sets of accounts and their activities aren’t in lockstep, you’re probably going to see more revenue and pipeline come in that hasn’t been influenced by marketing.
Within Terminus, you can slice and dice this data based on your different target account lists to understand where you’re making progress and where there’s still more work to do.
And to get more granular, you can also review individual deals and open opportunities to see where marketing is providing good coverage (or isn’t).
Opportunity Accounts
Leads and conversions from ABM accounts can still be a worthwhile metric to track, because after all, nothing is better than a hand raiser coming from a best-fit account!
But to truly measure the effectiveness of your marketing and sales efforts with ABM, you want to track Opportunity Accounts from your specific target segments. An Opportunity Account is any account within a target list that has had at least one opportunity opened.
This is a priority KPI because it shows how successful you are at converting engaged accounts to opportunities.
Is your definition of “engaged” too broad? Are your sales reps acting quickly and correctly on the engagement signal you’re providing? Are marketing and sales truly working the same accounts? These are all questions to answer if you aren’t successfully converting your engaged pipeline to opportunity pipeline.
This becomes an even more powerful metric when compared to your non-ABM list of accounts. With marketing and sales efforts aligned, you should be seeing a higher percentage of accounts with opportunities within your target segments, compared to those that aren’t receiving the same level of attention.
Deal Velocity
Within Terminus, Deal Velocity is defined as the average number of days between opportunity open and closed won.
Simply put, deals within target account segments should be closing faster than deals from non-ABM accounts because:
- You know these accounts are best-fit for your brand
- You know these are accounts that sales wants to qualify and work
- There is often existing in-market signal coming from these accounts showing that they’re ready to have a conversation (intent and engagement data, for example)
- You should have more targeted content for these accounts based on persona, vertical, opportunity stage, etc
- There is a more concerted effort between marketing and sales to drive engagement at these accounts and to move them quickly through the funnel
But perhaps most importantly, deal velocity allows you to take the next step to understand your average days in each opportunity stage to see where deals are more likely to stall out or hit roadblocks. It’s within these stages that you might need to drive more marketing and sales activity, or better engage different personas within the buying group.
(hint, hint, Terminus advertising is a great way to do this!)
Next Steps
These may not be the only KPIs your business cares about. But if you’re just getting started with ABM (or are running ABM programs with no good indication of holistic success), then they’re a good place to start.
Get the conversation started with your revenue team, because a successful ABM program requires consistent measurement.
