In the dynamic world of B2B businesses, ABM can help you garner high-value leads. How will you determine whether the campaign served its purpose?
Account-based marketing is a shift from the traditional approach of casting a net on a large pool of clientele. Instead, it allows you to focus on specific customers with the end goal of converting high-value interests into leads. Whether you are looking to acquire more clients or expand your brand presence, ABM’s customer-centricity paves the way for business growth.
Your sales and marketing teams can focus on acquiring clients that add value and promote business success. When you implement ABM campaigns, you will observe an increase in revenue generation, from the top of the sales funnel to a closed-won deal.
Top three Benefits of Account-Based Marketing
93% of SaaS marketers have found this inbound strategy to be successful in meeting business objectives. Let’s look at the three key reasons explaining why ABM matters:
Aligned sales and marketing teams
One of the plus points of account-based marketing is that it orients sales and marketing teams. When these two teams align, they become unified to identify the target customers and develop strategies for campaigns. This collaboration improves communication and work efficiency, leading to better business outcomes. You also create open lines of communication between these two teams, delivering better communication with the target accounts.
Enhanced customer experience
The importance of customer experience may be overlooked while promoting business offerings. Consider this: If a company is happy with your deliverables and communication style, they are likely to opt for your offerings again. With an ABM approach, you can focus on exchanging tailored messages specific to the audience, which conveys that your brand can solve their challenges. When clients’ needs are met, they will not hesitate to come back for your services/products.
Shortens the sales cycle
Your sales and marketing teams probably spent hours reaching out to customers, let alone identifying the target accounts. When you choose ABM, your main focus shifts to identifying high-value prospects, thus eliminating unqualified ones early on. So, you end up having more high-quality leads, which elevates the overall ROI cycle.
Key ABM Metrics that Matter
Although ABM has been around for a while, the recent digital transformation allows businesses to utilize it over a broad scale. With this inbound strategy, you can reach more accounts, meaning more data at your fingertips. But what to do with all this information? How do you segregate the data that matters? For filtering the right information and identifying essential data, you have these ABM metrics to choose from:
Close Rate
Here’s the harsh truth— the success or failure of any marketing strategy is predominantly defined by whether or not a deal was closed won/closed lost. ABM moves the focus away from the volume of leads generated to the target accounts acquired with active buyers. When your prime attention is on reporting the close rate, you are no longer obsessed with the number of leads in the pipeline. The emphasis is on concrete and measurable ROI corresponding to your efforts. Bottomline—an effective ABM program may result in a few, high-quality clients rather than many low-value customers.
Sales Velocity
Once you draw your attention to more closed won deals, the next ABM metric to measure is how long it took to acquire them. In the rapidly expanding B2B market where time is money, we strive not to waste resources on uninterested and unengaged leads. You can accomplish this by using an account-based marketing approach, where you create more personalized, direct, and relevant content based on intent. The marketing and sales also function holistically to engage the audience better. Utilize the sales velocity ABM metric to gain insights into business outcomes that can be measured, such as more clients, better engagement, or higher ROI.
Deal Size
Since ABM is more targeted, it can boast closing deals and help you get larger deal sizes. The inherent value of this inbound strategy lies in the customer-centricity that drives informed decision-making. It uses a different dialogue that prioritizes adding value to the customers rather than merely selling your offerings. You can measure the overall impact in terms of deal size through increased revenue and better brand exposure.
Pipeline Coverage
This fancy term denotes a ratio representing the number of target accounts expected to close in a quarter and your sales quota for the same period. To measure the pipeline coverage, take your total pipeline for a given period and divide it by your sales quota for the same quarter.
Account Engagement Score
If you want to quantify the engagement of customers with your business, this score is your ideal metric for ABM. It will give you the big picture of the response received across different channels like websites, email response/open rates, content downloads, event sign-ups, and social media.
Account Penetration Rate
In the process of account penetration, the sales team first owns the account, then builds a meaningful relationship, and finally directs the account through the sales funnel. It requires serious time and commitment from the sales team to be 100% aligned with all windows of communication open for successful account penetration. How can you estimate whether your sales team is systematically navigating the territory or simply ‘milking’ target accounts? You can get an answer to these by calculating the account penetration rate— a percentage of accounts from which orders are secured.
Marketing Qualified Accounts (MQAs)
You may encounter accounts that show interest in your offerings but may be unwilling to convert into paying accounts. If you track with MQAs, you can identify your potential customers in the early stages of the account-based marketing strategy—
- Determine the accounts that can be categorized as MQAs
- Keep tabs on these accounts and evaluate them using lead scoring based on their engagement with your content and interactions with your brand
- Track how many MQAs have progressed through your sales funnel
Total Addressable Market (TAM)
Although 74% of ABM campaigns are known to result in improved business revenue, how can you ensure a high revenue potential for your business? TAM ABM metric offers clarity about your brand to the stakeholders. It helps you identify every potential customer for your solution in a particular segment and measure their existing market share. To calculate the TAM value, all you have to do is multiply the average sale price by the number of potential customers.
Final thoughts
A personalized communication style is a highlighting feature of account-based marketing, fostering positive brand-customer relationships. Applying the right ABM metrics in your business strategy will increase the chances of your success. While a closed won deal is a straightforward metric, your business may be well-fitted with other ways of measuring campaign performance. You can determine which ABM metric works best for your brand based on your business goals, target audience, and roadblocks. It is important to periodically review and analyze an ABM program