We’ve all heard the stories (maybe you’ve even told some yourself) of sales and marketing teams working in unison, launching hyper-targeted account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns that resonate with ideal customers — and drive the type of revenue that makes your team legendary.
But in order to make the case for ABM, you’ve got to show results. To accurately report on your ABM campaign, you need three important elements: benchmarks, metrics, and reporting. And these need to be agreed upon by all stakeholders.
“It’s an equation,” says Mitchell Hanson, senior director of demand generation at ZoomInfo. “You can fulfill the promise of ABM by making certain metrics do certain things. But they have to be the right metrics.”
If you want to deliver on the promise of ABM success, make sure to establish ABM benchmarks, track your progress, and set up a system to report on the outcomes. Otherwise, you risk losing buy-in from executives, your marketing budget — or worse.
Monitor These ABM Success Metrics
ABM is a sales-oriented marketing approach that leverages data to identify, target, and engage priority accounts. It’s designed to close bigger deals, shorten sales cycles, and increase your average selling price (ASP). ABM success metrics can be broken down in many ways, including where they fall in the sales cycle.
Because B2B sales cycles can stretch months or even years, you typically won’t see a return on investment (ROI) for a while. However, certain metrics that you can monitor throughout the process will indicate if you’re on the right track or not.
Though many of these metrics may sound familiar, they have a slightly different interpretation when viewed in the context of ABM. For example, look at the marketing funnel: an ABM strategy focuses on marketing-qualified accounts (MQAs) rather than marketing-qualified leads (MQLs).
“ABM requires there to be critical mass at the account among the buying unit, versus regular marketing efforts where you may just need a single point of entry,” Hanson says. That frame of reference plays an important role in gauging campaign performance.
We’ve broken down these ABM-oriented metrics by leading indicators, funnel impact, and ROI. Let’s dive into each category.
Leading Indicator Metrics
Within the first few weeks of your ABM program, you can start to report on leading indicator metrics. The benefits of reporting this early are two-fold: if you’re trending in the right direction, your sales reps are much more likely to trust you when you promise more bottom-funnel metrics. And if your trajectory is too low, you still have time to course-correct. “It’s a credibility thing,” Hanson explains.
| ABM Success Metric | Insight |
| Number of target accounts visiting your website | How many of your target accounts are (at least somewhat) engaged. Example: 10 target accounts visited your website within the last 60 days. |
| Target account coverage | The bigger a target account, the bigger their buying unit. This metric tells you how much of the buying unit you’ve penetrated. Example: A tier 1 account might have a 12-person buying unit, while a tier 3 account might only have a three-person buying unit. If you’ve engaged nine out of 12 people from a large buying unit, you have 75% target account coverage. |
| Content engagement | Within each account segment, the pieces of content (by extension, the messages and value propositions) that are resonating and moving targets along a journey. Example: A blog about time-saving marketing automation is driving 80% of results, indicating that productivity is a topic of interest to your target audience. |
Funnel Impact Metrics
Funnel impact metrics reflect the middle of your sales cycle performance. Reporting on these ABM benchmarks will inform stakeholders of all of the progress you’ve made thus far. They don’t speak directly to ROI, but can illustrate your revenue potential.
| ABM Success Metric | Insight |
| Number of target accounts progressed | Similar to how demand generation focuses on lead statuses, ABM focuses on account statuses. ABM account status progression tells you where an account is in the buyer’s journey. It looks like this: Cold account → engaged → MQA → demo → opportunity → customer → renew/upsell Example: 60% of target accounts have progressed at least one stage in the last 30 days. |
| Number of meetings/demos created | This tells you the number of MQAs you’ve put in front of a salesperson. Example: 30 meetings created |
| Number of opportunities created | The number of qualified accounts that are deemed likely to become a customer. Example: 20 opportunities created |
| Value of opportunities created | The amount of revenue to be gained if the opportunities close. Example: $2.5 million in opportunities created |
| Marketing-influenced pipeline | In a multi-touch attribution model, this represents the amount of potential revenue marketing takes credit for contributing to the sales pipeline. Example: $1.5 million in marketing-influenced pipeline |
| Opportunity creation cycle | The length of time it took to generate an opportunity. Example: 6 months |
ROI Metrics
Eventually, you have to report on the actual dollars gained from your ABM program. Did you achieve true sales and marketing alignment? Did those promises you made all of those months ago hold true? When it comes time to present to stakeholders, be prepared to speak to these ROI metrics.
| ABM Success Metric | Insight |
| Average selling price (ASP) | The average price of the deals closed. Example: $100,000 ASP |
| Win rate | The percentage of qualified deals in your pipeline that you’ve won. Example: 60% win rate |
| Average sales cycle length | The amount of time it took to win the deals. Example: 10-month average sales cycle |
| Net revenue retention | A customer-specific metric, the percentage of recurring revenue that’s retained over a period of time and accounts for upsells and cross-sells. Example: $1 million in net revenue retention |
Quick Tips for Measuring ABM Success
- Consider which metrics matter most to each stakeholder audience. Some numbers might relate back to marketing versus sales, content, or finance. Report accordingly.
- Segment your accounts by tier. Metrics for tier 1, 2, and 3 accounts hold different weights. For example, penetrating 50% of your tier 1 accounts is more impressive than penetrating 50% of your tier 3 accounts.
- Segment by existing business (cross-sells and upsells) and new business accounts.
- Consider unit economics, such as customer lifetime value (CLV) to customer acquisition cost (CAC). These types of metrics speak to the efficiency of your strategy and demonstrate how much value a single unit drives for your business.
- Remember to report early on upper funnel metrics, to gain credibility with your internal stakeholders.
Easily Monitor Your ABM Success Metrics
To keep track of these ABM success metrics and more, you need the right tech at your fingertips. That’s where the ZoomInfo MarketingOS platform comes in.
MarketingOS is equipped to meet all your ABM reporting needs. Our dashboard tracks a number of important ABM benchmark metrics including:
- Top campaigns
- Top industries
- Target account progression
- Hot spots (if an ideal customer profile is catching fire)
- Target account website visitors
- Intent within priority accounts
Want to see for yourself? Request a demo today.