Account Based Data
Article | August 19, 2022
As Account-Based Marketing (ABM) continues to grow and develop into a powerful marketing strategy, the conventional question remains: How to prove and measure my results?
Diving into your account-based marketing metrics to understand your results is all about asking the right questions. The metrics focus on quality over quantity. This means that looking at engagement levels above traffic volume and opportunities over leads have a close association with sales. Thus, it summarizes activity metrics and outcome metrics together.
If you implement a new sales methodology without adopting new sales metrics, you’ll have a much harder time tracking the progress of your marketing efforts. That’s why the companies, shifting to an account-based framework, should update their KPIs, as these are the leading indicators of success.
So, the account-based marketing metrics highly focus on the activity of an individual lead and look at crucial accounts that would likely drive the most revenue for your organization.
How are Account-Based Marketing Metrics Different?
The rate at which digital marketers have moved towards the ABM model by creating successful ABM campaigns is quite surprising. While many thought, ‘Will this thing stick?’ or ‘Is this just a whim that will go away in the future?’
But it’s 2021, and ABM has become even more popular in the B2B world as marketers see value in targeting accounts and not only leads.
Recent research from SiriusDecisions states that 93% of marketers consider ABM extremely important to their overall organizational success. With any marketing strategy, you are going to be asked whether your campaign is performing well or not. It indeed takes time for the programs to run for any marketer who has built an ABM strategy. So, what should you consider more in creating an ABM strategy?
Think quality, not quantity
A team working on the ABM model understands the priority—influencing customers who matter as crucial accounts. So instead of focusing on new lead creation, ABM focuses on activating and engaging the right leads (even if it’s smaller in number).
Similarly, your ABM team needs to focus on growing revenue from every single account. This means what would your team value more: ten random marketing professionals downloading a whitepaper or having a meaningful conversation with a decision-maker?
It’s About Engagement
SiriusDecisions states that there has been a 24% increase in the average B2B sales cycle length since 2019. It means that the larger the deal size, the longer the cycle. With such a lengthy process, you need to measure what’s happening during the progressing phase.
So, how do you do that?
It is engagement on which you need to focus on. Track how deeply the right account gets engaged with your brand. This way, you’ll have a measurable way of showing development in your business.
Engagement in ABM results in immense benefits for most businesses. Here is a list of the latest ABM statistics that shows companies that utilized the strategy saw incredible results, such:
200% rise in ROI
50% of sales teams were more productive and able to optimize qualified leads
30% boost in revenue
66% augmented the number of leads generated
83% saw amplified engagement from targeted leads
Shorter sales cycles grew by 27% and more
However, such benefits of implementing an ABM strategy are only the results of a successful ABM approach, as it’s not an easy task for every organization. The only way to ensure that your business’s ABM efforts are successful is by meticulously monitoring the most important metrics.
The 4 Crucial Metrics to Track
Reading further, you will come across the six crucial types of account-based marketing metrics.
Engagement
How are your prospects get interested and engaged?
The more attention they pay to your company, the more committed they tend to be. Measure the time they spend with your brand or on your website. Monitor when they respond to your marketing programs socially or when they use your product and connect with your sales team.
As one of the account-based marketing metrics, the amount of engagement will be the closest and essential. Therefore, your focus should be to measure how contacts are involved with your content, including the type of content. The following areas will help you understand it deeply:
Email metrics: Track the activities of your audience with your email marketing campaigns. You will want to know the open and click-through rates and look at the number of responses received from each email. Also, how email recipients are sharing your messages with others.
Social metrics: You can check with contacts from your targeted accounts if they have liked, shared, or commented on your posts. Are they following your business page and social accounts?
Consumption rates: Similarly, you can look at how contacts from your targeted accounts consume your online content, specifically information provided on your website and blogs. This shows several page views, average page time, and specific content being viewed and downloaded.
Offline Activity metrics: Beyond your digital information, track your targeted accounts engaging with you offline. Are they attending events you sponsor, readily contacting, and responding to direct mail?
Therefore, these account-based marketing metrics' primary goal is to know where your contacts are in their buying journey. In fact, through these metrics, you can uncover what information (content) your website lacks to support communications in their research.
Awareness
Do your prospects are aware of your company’s name and offerings? Web traffic is an ethical reflection of keeping prospects aware, specifically, traffic coming from within your target accounts. You should also track whether your contacts are opening your emails, attending your events, and contacting through calls, or using any other medium you provided.
Target-Account Reach
Are you able to reach specific target accounts in the right way? Where do you lack in your efforts?
These account-based metrics help you to track success by channel. In case of point, in a webinar campaign, you would measure its success by analyzing event attendance. So, track the percent of target accounts that have successfully enrolled in each program as well. And, finally, track your focus. What is the percentage of all program successes coming from key accounts? This will help you understand how many target accounts reach you through your ABM campaigns, ABM strategies, and other marketing functionalities.
Influence
Your marketing strategy’s influence on a targeted account will be measured mainly by your interactions with each account. However, some of the account-based marketing metrics mentioned above will help check your ABM strategy's influence metrics. But the big question is whether your efforts are working or not. To understand this, you need to evaluate some parameters such as:
The conversion rate for contacts in your targeted accounts
Converting of your targeted accounts in the marketing funnel
Frequency and volume of meetings or calls with each account
With whom you have the discussions— account influencers or final decision-makers
Finally, the results of your meetings
These parameters will divulge what efforts are working and where you need to change your approach or the information you provide to make your business successful.
Types of Account-Based Sales Metrics
Marketing and sales often measure success differently. Account-based metrics can help bring these closer by aligning their focus on a specific list of target accounts.
With an Account-Based Sales Development (ABSD) strategy, there are two types of metrics. These would help you understand whether your sales team is performing well in an account-based sales plan or not.
Activity-based sales metrics
You need to check and understand whether your sales team is doing various marketing activities in the right way or not. This will be specific for each account to be targeted and includes activities like task completion, emails, contacts per day, account coverage, meaningful conversations, and appointments.
Outcome-based sales metrics
It is generally considered under post-sale account-based marketing metrics. Now the time is to track the result of the activities mentioned above. Also, include the rate of accounts accepted from the pipeline created and revenue generated.
In short, the goal is to measure the monetary value of each transaction and to track your performance and successes over time in business. This information is also helpful in identifying new accounts to target.
To know how read through in the next!
Value
Measuring value is more important than your total sales volume, as it is a part of ABM metrics. The goal is to understand the worth of each account to your bottom line—how they compare to other accounts and see the performance of each sales representative. In this context, your account-based marketing metrics should uncover the following:
What is your average selling point value?
What is the average account sales volume?
What is the swelling value of each account?
What is the total sales volume?
How much revenue generated?
What is the value of each deal?
Having a clear answer to these aspects reveals the most tangible insights into your results. By looking at specific accounts, you can measure where you are growing, where opportunities exist and show underperforming accounts. Thus, it will make your work accordingly.
Retention
As account-based marketing metrics measure quality over quantity, retention is one part where this comes into play. In addition, it measures the possibility of a targeted account and their satisfaction level.
Measuring retention is a decent indication of the strength of your account relationships. Accounts that stay for a long term are generally satisfied. Thus, they provide the most value to your business.
On the flip side, dissatisfied accounts won’t stay with you very long. But they are virtuous indicators of areas you need to change and improve — either with the process, products, or account types.
ROI
The most crucial account-based marketing metrics is your return on investment (ROI). Eventually, you measure your ABM campaigns and marketing strategies—if they are effective. So, ROI is the percentage of your investment to earnings.
What makes these account-based marketing metrics so challenging in reality? Several factors influence each transaction or sale. Take a step back and consider these questions:
Has your closure rate improved over the past month, quarter, or year?
On average, how long does it take to close a sale?
What was your ROI for each campaign you launched?
The purpose behind considering these aspects is to know what marketing campaigns were successful and better understand inclusive marketing and sales effectiveness.
Putting all ABM Metric to Work Together
A successful ABM strategy requires various activities, technologies, and outlooks for B2B marketing or demand generation. Here, the use of ABM metrics becomes important for measuring pre-sale success and revenue potential. For this, B2B marketing organizations should monitor post-sale metrics to track client satisfaction.
Therefore, by monitoring the entire ABM funnel, you can incessantly optimize marketing activities and improve customer relationships for your business.
Conclusively, account-based strategies present an incredible opportunity for organizations to make marketing and sales more relevant, focused, and effective. However, to apprehend the benefits, it’s important to measure what matters.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is account-based marketing success measured?
To measure account-based marketing success, here are some important ways:
Understand targeted accounts and needs
Regularly check content analytics statistics
Account engagement
Rate of interactions
Amount of in-depth conversations
Conversion metrics
Sales cycle lengths
What are excellent ABM metrics?
Awareness, engagement, conversion, and outcome are some of the excellent ABM metrics. Putting them together, a business can arrive at a complete set of elementary account-based marketing metrics and attracts more customers.
How are ABM campaigns measured?
The value of your ABM campaigns is scaled by the lifetime value of each targeted accounts. When measuring these, elements such as customer retention, awareness, reach, pipeline velocity, and influence are responsible for making an ABM program successful.
What are key metrics in marketing?
The various key metrics in marketing are:
Viewership metrics
Lead-based metrics
Engagement metrics
Pre-sales metrics
Post-sales metrics
Conversion metrics
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | October 7, 2022
Data-driven strategies for increasing time to market, pipeline, and revenue impact.
The B2B environment is incredibly complex, so it’s no surprise that more than three-quarters of B2B buyers describe their purchasing journey as very complex or challenging. A significant majority (67%) of the B2B buyer’s journey happens digitally, but B2B buying does not play out in any predictable, linear order. Unfortunately, much of today’s ABM technology lacks the capabilities required to provide personalized experiences across multiple channels, platforms, buying centers, geographies, and lines of business. This puts the target account into an undesirable linear campaign and assumes all accounts progress through the funnel at the same speed.
Instead, customers engage in “looping” behaviors during a typical B2B purchase, revisiting multiple buying stages at least once. Buying stages do not happen sequentially but rather simultaneously. This means that ABM success depends not only on a deep understanding of its audience’s needs but also on precisely orchestrating the delivery of the right message in the right channel at the right time - and on a global scale.
In the face of these complexities, ABM is rapidly maturing as a practice. New research shows that almost half (45%) of companies consider their ABM programs to be fully adopted versus experimental – up a third compared with 2020. But even as ABM programs mature, the headwinds of change are accelerating, leaving more than two-thirds of ABM marketers thwarted in their mission to drive significant revenue impact.
B2B marketers must contend with and overcome a slew of challenges that can feel beyond their immediate control. A recent study by Demand Metric and MRP found that more than three-quarters of marketers’ report that the pace of their campaigns has intensified over the past year. That percentage is higher still, at 83%, at enterprise companies that operate with high levels of complexity on a global scale. Four in ten marketers report that changing account profiles poses a challenge, as does the emergence of new channels and demand for new content formats.
Responsive buyer experiences and relevant content across channels have always been the top criteria for mature, high-performing, omnichannel account-based orchestrations. But much of today’s conversation revolves around linear, top-down campaigns, where the target account is placed in a marketing or sales play, operating within a siloed platform throughout the buyer’s journey. The result is often antithetical to the desired buyer “experience.” Addressing this reality requires rethinking how marketers engage with accounts.
The most mature account-based orchestrations are adaptive, understanding a target’s changing needs, aligning content to those desires, and delivering personalized experiences consistently across multiple channels. This demands a new approach to data management, better use of intent and predictive insights, and fully synchronized orchestration.
To make meaningful connections with prospects and customers amidst these changes, enterprise marketers are evolving their ABM initiatives to focus on highly personalized experiences tailored to the account level and individual locations and buyer roles. Increasingly, ABM leaders employ a set of principles and processes that are consistent from company to company – giving others a blueprint for success. The most critical steps for marketers to achieve significant results with their ABM programs include:
Collaborate Closely Across the Organization
Enterprise marketers must share insights widely across interdisciplinary teams. This allows campaigns to be coordinated across shared accounts. A study of top ABM performers found that nine in ten reported close cross-functional collaborations between marketing and sales. ABM leaders need to establish a standardized measurement framework so everyone is working toward the same goals and success.
Establish a Single Source of Truth
Not only are ABM leaders’ teams highly integrated, but so is their data. A single view of data allows for a deeper understanding of audience needs and improves collaboration. Eight out of ten (80%) top performers use data from three or more systems to guide their ABM practice, and even more, 84%, say that their tech stack is mostly or completely integrated. This is more than double the number (30%) of those whose ABM impact was negative or couldn't be measured.
Deliver Messages Consistently - and Across Touchpoints
Successful ABM marketers can customize the buyer’s experience based on the specific product or solution under consideration and factor in their stage within the buying journey. Almost half of leading ABM practitioners (46%) go beyond personalizing messages by industry to adapt their messages to the recipient’s job role and stage of the customer lifecycle. Highly personalized content delivered at the right time is more critical than ever since customers often skip “steps” on the buying journey and require digital experiences to adapt accordingly.
Grasping at New Buzzwords Isn’t the Answer
Calling an initiative “ABX” instead of “ABM” doesn’t make it easier to execute successfully. In fact, in a rush to accelerate the delivery of 'account-based experiences', the platforms that support it have become a critical bottleneck, creating yet another siloed system. This not only adds to the complexity but also undermines the outcomes it is intended to improve.
Today’s B2B marketers face unprecedented challenges but the enterprise must approach ABM as a guiding strategy rather than a limited tactic. Synthesizing data across multiple sources, eliminating tech and people silos, and taking a collaborative approach to ABM can give marketers a deeper understanding of what target accounts need and where to deliver it. The right tech solutions can trigger omnichannel actions based on account insights, simplifying the complexity of ABM and executing mature, omnichannel orchestrations that have a measurable impact on revenue.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | August 23, 2022
Many marketers define ABM as good B2B marketing. Targeting the right accounts at the right time with an appropriate message is the golden aim of account-based marketing (ABM). ABM ensures not only reach but also accuracy.
In an interview with Media 7, Ryan Phelan, Marketing Chief / Fractional CMO at Origin Email, talked about the importance of ABM technology and the challenges in marketing after the COVID-19 pandemic began.
"B2B companies should adopt ABM technology to level up their communications and react quickly."
ABM technology enables marketers to hit pipeline and revenue targets swiftly while working alongside sales teams.
Salesforce provides ABM automation to its clients using AI Einstein technology in their Customer Success Platform. But what does Salesforce’s ABM platform look like? How are they finding accounts that need a sophisticated AI-run ABM marketing platform?
How Salesforce Created Its ABM Program
Salesforce considered B2B buyer behavior (purchase intent and engagement) to deliver a solid marketing and sales experience for each of its strategic accounts. Accordingly, it took the following steps to kick-start its ABM program:
Defining ABM
Salesforce ABM marketing team handles campaigns that target 300 or fewer accounts.
An ABM program can have many approaches. It can be 1: Many, 1: Few, or 1:1. The smaller the radius of the process, the more hyper-focused the campaign, content, budget, and customer journeys are.
By simply aligning their approach strategy with defined ABM, Salesforce achieved larger deal sizes, higher sales win rates, higher ROI, and faster revenue growth compared to other marketing strategies. It suitably approached accounts that it thought were high value and showed buyer intent for their products and services.
Choosing a Suitable Account-based Platform
Salesforce was aware that it would have to engage a variety of vendors and platforms to run its ABM program smoothly. It had to go beyond building a foundation for its program. For that, it needed dedicated tools and resources. Without account-based partners that could provide them with these tools and resources,it would be difficult to implement their program. They chose RollWorks as their account-based partner, to set up their ABM program.
Putting Together a Dedicated Team to Ensure ABM Program’s Success
Creating a single team to support and execute the ABM program was crucial before launching the ABM campaigns Salesforce had planned. They had teams who knew what ABM was all about; they even ran campaigns in silos. So, Salesforce pooled its ABM resources and formed a single team to carry out ABM-related operations.
Identifying Strategic Target Accounts
With the support of technology, Salesforce validated the list of target accounts and filtered out accounts that weren’t such a good fit using their first-party data. They made sure they looked at all the possible data they had, including third-party, so there was no scope for error. As a result, they had a list of high-value accounts with an ideal customer profile (ICP).
Engaging the Target Accounts
After the target accounts were identified, Salesforce ran campaigns of highly customized content for each stage of the sales journey to entice prospects. Once the prospects entered the sales pipeline, hyper-personalized messages, ads, and emailers were sent to them using AI.
Using Data for Continued Engagement
Salesforce ABM campaigns used all available data to create new or repurpose existing content assets like customer stories, consultation forms, research reports, and blog posts to nurture the leads at every stage.
Cultivating Customer Relationships
Using a specially created ABM dashboard, Salesforce monitored its campaign results to understand which content its leads engaged with the most. Then, it removed the content that did not generate engagement to streamline engagement with previous unengaged leads. The secret was to create humane content that didn’t have buzzwords, consistently maintain brand voice and tone, and make special content that the leads could resonate with.
Educating and engaging the leads increased the deal sizes and customer lifetime value. Holistic reporting helped them evolve their ABM strategy continuously.
By creating a robust ABM program that took care of its targeting accounts’ evolving needs, pain points, and expectations, Salesforce saw a 24 percent faster revenue growth and an 87 percent higher ROI.
How Salesforce Got a 30 Percent Close Rate by Using ABM Technology
While promoting their Boston World Tour Series, Salesforce used ABM campaigns to get registrations. One out of their fourtarget accounts engaged with their content, and an average of five contacts per account engaged with them. In six weeks, they got in touch with 410 target accounts, of which 110 engaged with them. They achieved a 30 percent close rate for their campaign.
Creating an ABM Program like Salesforce
Salesforce has come a long way by using ABM technology to expand its offerings. It has AI-powered products, tools, and services that provide ABM automation to other companies. For example, their ABM Salesforce Marketing Cloud product has helped brands like Herman Miller achieve a 200% increase in their email revenue.
To create an effective ABM program like Salesforce, you can use their steps as a blueprint. These steps apply to all kinds of businesses, but if you still don’t know how and where to start, find the answers to the following questions to comprehend what you can do next:
Do you think ABM is right for your business?
Are there any customer accounts that require special attention?
Can your business fund expert consultation for ABM and eventually an ABM program?
Once you find the answers to the above questions, you can take your first step towards building an effective ABM program that can help you scale your business.
Conclusion
ABM technology is revolutionizing B2B marketing by harnessing AI and targeted approaches, personalization, and automation using high-quality intent data. Implementing an effective ABM strategy is crucial to driving ROIs and growth.
FAQ
How does ABM differ from a traditional lead generation marketing strategy?
ABM helps you target high-value accounts with hyper-personalized content, instead of presenting generic content to unclassified accounts.
What is an ABM platform?
An ABM platform is a technology that helps marketers run their ABM programs at scale.
Why is ABM important in your marketing efforts?
With the help of ABM, marketers may be able to shorten their sales cycle, increase their marketing involvement in the sales funnel, and achieve a high ROI.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | June 24, 2022
Selling more and selling faster is the goal that drives B2B marketers. Strategically implementing account-based marketing (ABM) to target individuals with hyper-personalized messaging across different channels is what helps them achieve it. But what is Buying Group Marketing (BGM), and why do B2B marketers need to keep up with it?
Buying-Group Marketing (BGM): Taking ABM up a notch by focusing on an entire buyer group instead of the account as a whole, it’s called buying-group marketing (BGM).
According to a recent Forrester survey, 94% of B2B organizations sell to groups of three or more. They do this instead of spending time identifying a set of ICPs and making a purchase decision.
Let us take a look at what BGM is all about.
Buying Group Marketing: The Next Evolution of ABM
To implement BGM, you first need to understand what buying groups are. A purchasing group is a group of people within a target account who have a say in the purchasing decision. This makes them crucial in B2B targeting. Once B2B marketers learn about their target personas, they can come up with an effective marketing plan and approach them strategically.
In large enterprises, purchase decisions are never restricted to one individual. The larger the purchase decision, the larger the size of the buying groups. When a decision involves new technologies, services, or products, an individual struggle to make a purchase decision swiftly.
According to Gartner, more than 75% of customers describe these purchases as very complex or difficult. With the help of BGM, the decision-making process can be streamlined and shared among multiple people within an organization.
Driving Success with BGM
To better execute BGM, organizations need to change their mindsets, processes and technologies and work to understand how buying groups work together. Until demand management matches the ways buyers are making purchasing decisions, marketing and sales alignment will not be possible.
Organizations need to first understand how buying groups work together, then align their mindsets, technologies, and processes to efficiently execute BGM. When the marketing and sales teams align their demand management goals with the decision-making groups, only then can they drive success in their campaigns.
Interest from more than one person from a single company can lead to more success and influence in the buying phase. B2B marketers need to move beyond the idea that only the first person to respond from a company should be entertained as a lead if a second person from the same company shows interest in their product or services. They need to understand that no matter how tempting account-based advertising may seem, it doesn’t guarantee success. They should focus on engaging the actual decision-makers of their target accounts.
When customer personas are mapped according to their buying roles within a group, organizations will have the much-needed intelligence required to make personalized sales. The success of BGM demands the delivery of content that resonates with an individual as per their role in a buying group. B2B marketers must meet them where they are with the content that they need.
Organizations can have crucial intelligence on their customers after mapping their personas and considering their roles in the buyer groups. Delivering content that the target individual can relate to is a prerequisite of BGM.
BGM may not be new as a concept, but B2B marketers see improvements in their performance by harnessing it as their principal strategy. Adapting to BGM will give them the edge that they seek, while the rest try to keep up with the changing trends of the ABM industry.
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