“Only 54% of marketers are confident that they can measure full-funnel ROI within marketing.
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Read our guide below to learn more, or email measurement@agent3.com to book a deep-dive session exploring your measurement challenges and how Agent3 can help you make sense of your ABM/ABX measurement.
As trusted by some of the world's most successful ABM teams:
Meaning. Action. Impact.
A blueprint for success in the ABX era.
Turning your measurement into a path to value that delivers on accelerated, account-centric business outcomes.
The challenge of ABM measurement
ABM has never been more important. The linear buying journey is a thing of the past – if it ever existed. And as we adapt to an increasingly hybrid world, businesses need to deliver on the promise of personalized buying journeys at scale. The only way to achieve this is by aligning marketing, sales and customer success using an ABM marketing strategy.
And yet confusion remains over the right marketing KPIs to measure the full funnel delivery of an ABM program. Only 54% of marketers are confident that they can measure full-funnel ROI within marketing. Every day, we get questions about how to select the right KPIs for optimizing ABM campaigns and reporting on business outcomes. The art lies in achieving a truly holistic view of the results of your strategy, accounting for your organization’s ABM maturity, the timeline of your ABM initiatives, and the increasing levels of integration between marketing, sales, customer success and beyond.
Introducing the PAR model
At Agent3, we have developed a new model to help our clients analyze their ABM marketing strategy. Our approach spans program planning, campaign activity and business results - incorporating the three key pillars of successful ABM measurement – program readiness, campaign performance and business outcomes.
Consider your results in terms of your historical performance
For example – if your campaign is generating higher engagement than previous ones, and you have historical data in terms of the business results from your previous campaigns, you can infer that you would expect a greater business result than last time based on your early indicators. You may need to do some more advanced analysis to be able to quantify exactly how much better your results are expected to be, and, as the investment disclaimer goes, “Past performance does not guarantee future results”. Nonetheless, the comparison to historical performance provides a short-term solution to building a narrative around how your program is performing.
Take your colleagues on your journey with you
Communicate, communicate, communicate. Having clear and transparent lines of communication with your primary stakeholders, whether those be sales, executive leadership or someone else entirely, is critical for establishing trust. While you may not want to share every minutia of your campaign decisions with your entire stakeholder committee, highlighting key wins, early indicators of success or opportunities – and being able to explain the data-driven decision making between why you’ve done X and not Y, fosters confidence that everything is moving in the right direction.
Start a conversation about optimization instead
You’ve probably heard of the “growth mindset”. The same applies in ABM – while ultimately you always need to show business results from your program, that doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty to learn along the way. A willingness to adapt the program based on your data isn’t a failure of your original plan – instead, it demonstrates how ABM is constantly working to improve the way the business interests, engages and converts leads into revenue.
While every marketer wants results, we believe you also need planning and activity metrics to tell the complete story of your program’s success. Imagine you were running a lead generation program. Your “result” might be 100 leads, but whether that’s a success or a failure depends on factors like:
How much you spent on your ad creative and promotion
Whether those leads matched your ideal customer profile
Whether you delivered those leads on time with creative assets produced on budget.
Considering your planning metrics also help you to break down your target result into a more manageable plan. $1,000,000 of marketing-influenced revenue in isolation may sound daunting. Knowing you will get there by producing X pieces of content, distributed over Y channels, with Z budget becomes far more manageable. It also provides you with the granularity to understand how you came to meet that target so you can optimize the process next time.
A holistic approach to program measurement also helps us fill in the timescale by demonstrating which metrics an ABMer can measure at which point in time. It’s not uncommon for executive leadership or business functions outside of marketing to want to see business results, fast. Sadly, we know you can’t see the revenue result of an ABX program two days after the first awareness campaign has launched. However, there are ways to foster understanding of why this is unrealistic, set appropriate expectations, and give these stakeholders a clear path to understanding and witnessing progress towards a revenue result.
Here are three tips for how ABM leaders can navigate the question of whether your ABM campaign is working:
This would give us a foundation for understanding if we’re on course to meet our target for the year (and we could use our historical data on conversion rates, win rate and deal size to see if we’re progressing in the right direction), as well as offering the ability to optimize throughout the process. If we see fewer new companies engaging with ads, we could explore expanding our channel mix, refreshing our creative, or expanding our audience size. If companies are seeing our ads but then not converting, we could consider how we lower the barrier with more compelling content or easier-to-find CTAs. Then we can look at how we optimize the sales handoff and processing – can we A/B test different sales outreach emails? What content is impactful for improving the success rate of POCs? What separates the won deals with higher deal sizes from those we lost after a POC – and can we use that to update our targeting or refine our process going forward?
The short version is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to selecting KPIs. The right KPIs are the ones that help you benchmark and optimize your progress towards your identified business and measurement goals.
Selecting Account-Based Marketing KPIs
Selecting the right KPIs comes down to considering the building blocks that ladder up into your business goal. For example, if my business goal is to close an additional $2 million in net-new logo sales, and my measurement goal is to guide my team and sales towards how we achieve that, I might want to consider:
# of new companies that are engaging with ads
% of companies who viewed ads who subsequently engaged (Form-fills, CTAs or significant website view time)
Conversion rate from first sales outreach email to an initial meeting
The sales-reported score of a prospect’s awareness of our solution in that initial meeting
Conversion rate from initial meeting to proof of concept
Win rate
Average deal size
Total revenue gained from ABM-touched accounts
Download our measurement guide for ABM leaders
We help ABM leaders:
Align ABM metrics to business goals
Understand their ABM maturity to set KPIs for both right now and a roadmap for the future
Select marketing and sales metrics to measure towards a common purpose
Use the PAR (Planning - Activity - Results ) model to measure the lifecycle of ABM programs, from individual campaigns to global initiatives
Follow best practices for managing the people, processes and technology involved in ABM measurement
Build better ABM dashboards
