13 Key Metrics to Measure ABM

Account-Based Marketing (ABM), tracking and analyzing the right metrics are essential for measuring success and optimizing strategies. By focusing on specific target accounts and tailoring marketing efforts accordingly, ABM aims to maximize engagement, conversions, and revenue generation.

In this part, we will explore the crucial metrics that businesses should prioritize when implementing ABM, helping them gauge the impact of their efforts and make data-driven decisions.

1. Engagement rates
2. Account coverage
3. Return on investment (ROI)
4. Deal size
5. Retention rate
6. Your share of the pie
7. Sales velocity
8. Conversion rate
9. Meetings, contacts, demos
10. Acquisition costs
11. Referral: Quantity and quality
12. Marketing influence
13. Stakeholder advocacy

Let us understand these KPIs in bit detail:

1. Engagement rates

Your engagement rates are a very quick, high-level measurement to get a general sense of how things are going with your content. 

The term is so broad it could be considered a group of ABM KPIs rather than one single metric. Engagement will cover the extent and quality of your target account’s interaction with your content, which includes your emails, ads, ebooks, website pages, webinars, podcasts, blogs, and other similar assets.

Here’s what you want to ultimately figure out:

• How (and if) your target accounts are interacting with your content
• What kind of content is pulling in more new accounts
• Which piece of content is working and which isn’t
• What kind of content do your existing customers like
• Define what exact action you’ll call engagement

Remember, the better the engagement rate of a particular account, the closer they are to making a decision about the purchase. That means your account-based marketing campaign is working. Conversely, poor engagement could indicate either a lack of adequate personalization or poor content-account match. 

Because there are multiple touchpoints in B2B sales, you will need to dive deeper to uncover all the places you need to make improvement.

Beware: Because engagement includes a host of KPIs, it’s easy to end up paying more attention to vanity metrics. 

Let’s say you see a slight bump in the Email Open Rates. It’s a good idea to see what happened next. Did you have people from your target account actually visiting the webpage you wanted them to? How many unique visitors did you have from the same account? Did they visit any other page after that or did they simply exit from there?

2. Account coverage

The success of account-based marketing campaigns doesn’t lie in what kind of account information you generate. It lies in how well you leverage that information. 

Account coverage is a metric that shows you the gap between the information you have on each target account and the impact you create with that information. If you have identified the key stakeholders and decision-makers, and have personalized content for each of them during their journey, there’s no reason for the content to not make an impact.

The next thing to look for is whether you are engaging all the stakeholders at the account. Most marketers also say that your contact list should keep growing, because that would indicate you are expanding your impact. While that’s true in general, do not spread yourself too thin and waste resources in trying to engage people who have no role in the buying decision.

The two key ratios to look for are:

• Number of perfect-fit accounts you have begun engaging, as a percentage of total perfect-fit accounts you have been able to identify, and
• Influencers and decision-makers you’re currently engaging, as a percentage of the total influencers and decision-makers at the target account

Beware: Your key goal is to minimize the ‘dark matter’ – the number of things that you do not know about your target accounts. That’s because you need to have a good deal of information in order to personalize your content and begin engaging.

3. Return on Investment (ROI)

Your earnings, expressed as a percentage of your investment, is your Return on Investment or ROI. This ABM formula seeks to gauge how well you’ve been deploying your funds, and that’s why it remains one of the most widely used and quoted metrics.

In many cases, it’s not as easy as it sounds. What costs do you attribute to purely marketing? What exactly is the return? How should you factor the period between the time you began investing and the time you began to see results?

Despite all these quantitative challenges, ROI gives you a pretty accurate picture of how your campaigns are doing. 

Along with the ROI, it’ll help if you ask three questions:

• Is ABM making it easier for your reps to connect with the target accounts?
• Are your channels nurturing your target accounts faster than before?
• Are you seeing a rise in inbound demand?

If your answer to each of the above is a clear ‘Yes’, you can be sure you are achieving a good ROI.

4. Deal size

If you want to find out what is ABM match rate, the average deal size is a great metric to study. That’s because your ABM deal size should be bigger than the average contract value or deals your regular marketing activities bring in. So if you have done the right homework for your ICP and all that, your ABM campaigns should result in bigger deals.

Beware: Don’t look at the average contract value in isolation. Your total revenue should have grown too. That’s the only way to ensure there’s real growth.

5. Retention rate

No collection of ABM metrics can be said to be complete without Customer Retention Rate. Yes, ABM conversion rates are the one metric you should always keep your eyes on. But don’t forget to retain existing customers. 

We don’t need to remind you that acquiring a new customer is 5x more expensive than retaining an existing customer, do we? And because B2B sales take more time than B2C, you have a larger window within which to reinforce your relationship and keep the customer stay with you.

You engage differently with existing customers than you do with new accounts. For example, to customers who are already using your solutions, you can ask for their feedback. How happy are they with your solution? What is the overall adoption of your solution in their organization? Are there features they aren’t fully using?

And because they’re already using your solution, you have a tremendous lead. So don’t forget: you should always watch out for cross-selling and upselling opportunities to existing customers. After all, retention doesn’t mean you should stagnate; as the customer grows, make sure your sales opportunities grow too.

Watch out: Let’s say you retained all your customers during the year but added zero new customers. 

Your customer retention rate is 100%, but it could also indicate that your growth is stagnating.

6. Your share of the pie

When you talk about customer retention, you should also check whether your influence with the customer is growing. A relatively lesser known account-based marketing metric can answer that.

The following table shows the amount of money a customer spent in buying solutions:

From the look of it, you have increased your revenue (from that customer) by $50,000, which is a 50% rise over last year. But if you look carefully, the customer spend on solutions has doubled from last year to this year. 

That means your share of their pie actually decreased from 10% to 7.5%. You are leaving a lot of money on the table – not a smart thing to do.

ABM is meant to ensure you become and remain the customer’s top solution-provider. If that’s not happening, things are slipping through your fingers and you need to do something about it.

You can say you are enjoying the benefits of account-based marketing only when:

• You are getting new customers,
• Your average contract value is growing, and
• Your share of an existing customer’s pie is growing

7. Sales velocity

Shortening the sales cycle and accelerating sales is a key goal for ABM. Between the first touchpoint and the last, you should be able to drive your target account at a faster pace. In simpler words, you want to know how soon a target account converts into a paying customer.

Under ABM, you align your sales and marketing teams to increase the sales velocity. Forrester says companies with a strong alignment grow 19% faster. Marketing teams can keep a tab on how engagement is growing across different channels. Sales teams can keep track of the speed of conversion. 

And in the entire process, you want to pay more attention to where there’s friction and what you’re doing to eliminate that friction.

Because ABM is different, conventional metrics will fall short if you use them to measure your performance.  ABM KPIs need to specifically measure the outcomes and processes unique to ABM. 

8. Conversion rate

What is ABM technique if not a strategy to increase your ticket size and improve your win rates? Keeping a close watch on how many customers actually sign on the dotted line is certainly a very effective way of measuring and even learning from a successful ABM strategy.

This is one metric that can tell you a number of things.Are your pieces of personalized content actually resonating with your audience? Are the clicks on your websites actually translating into sales? Are your sales and marketing teams truly aligned and translating MQLs (marketing qualified leads) into SQLs (sales qualified leads)? Are all the efforts actually paying off?

Your conversion rates also tell you about your overall efficacy. Are your win rates going up or stagnating? Which competitors do you routinely lose business to? What product categories or geographical segments have you never failed to win?

9. Meetings, contacts, demos

In ABM KPIs, engagement has many faces.

On the one hand, you measure how your target audience engages with your content. How much time did they spend on your webpages? Did they share your content with someone else? Were any of them visiting certain content multiple times?

On the other hand, you keep track of more active engagement. Are you getting the stakeholders into the webinar you planned? How did they respond to the events you are setting up for them?

But that’s not enough. 

You want the stakeholders, decision-makers, and influencers to show a stronger commitment. So the additional set of metrics measure more. Could you get around to having them request a demo? How many meetings did you book? Did they engage with your sales teams?

All the above tell you whether your ABM strategies are getting results. But if you look at the finer aspects, they will tell you if your personalized content is delivering results. The relationship metrics tell you whether you’ve built bridges strong enough for your sales teams to cross over and simply win.

10. Acquisition costs

Contrary to popular belief, acquisition costs don’t end when you find out the money spent on acquiring a customer. With ABM, conversion rates,  engagement rates or sales velocity – all need an additional context. And that is: Are you attracting the right customers?

So the acquisition costs metric should not only tell you the cost of acquiring a new customer but also whether you’re winning the right ones. Little point in being proud of your low acquisition costs if the customers you won are low-value or improper fit. 

11. Referral: Quantity and quality

Just in case you forgot, the customers you won through referrals from other customers have a lower acquisition cost. What’s more, your profit margin is 25% higher and you will enjoy a 18% better customer loyalty with them (Source).

It’s okay to track the more widely known ABM KPIs like conversion rates and average deal size, but don’t forget referrals. If your solutions are really effective, your existing customers will refer you to other organizations you can sell to. 

So how many referrals did you get last month? Last quarter? Last year? What was the quality of those referrals? Were they relevant and high-value? 

Answers to questions like this will tell you the kind of confidence your existing customers have in your solutions. Equally important, it will tell you whether your ABM campaigns are geared towards engaging existing customers to the level where they’d be happy to pass on referrals.

12. Marketing influence 

So what was the role your marketing team played in the most recent conversion? What portion of the successful conversion can be attributed to the sales team? Even more difficult, how can you quantify all that in order to get an objective view?

None of these questions may have any quick or easy answers but they’re important nevertheless. Because, if sales and marketing alignment is not the crux of ABM, we don’t know what is. ABM technique or strategy seeks to ensure you optimize each of the several touchpoints in the buyer’s journey. Because when your marketing team hands over an account to your sales teams, the transition is seamless and efficient.

Again, you use different strategies for acquiring new customers, upselling and cross-selling to existing customers, or re-engaging leads that may have gone cold. Even the way accounts in each category behave is unique. Some jump the flow to directly begin engaging with your sales teams, while others take more than the regular time to even agree to meeting invites.

You want to ensure you give each team the right credit. Giving credit is not only for salary hikes or performance bonuses; it’s about knowing what stuff worked at what stage. Because the better you understand which piece of content, which email or which ad was instrumental in creating a positive impact or shortening the regular cycle.

13. Stakeholder advocacy

Stakeholder advocacy, also known as customer advocacy, refers to the number of executives at your target account whom you have been able to convert to advocates of your solution.

These advocates are people who will display a clear preference towards your organization. They will champion your services and go the extra mile for you.

When your stakeholders strongly support your services and solutions, it hugely improves your brand value. In internal meetings, they will explain the merits of what you’re offering and recommend using your service. In some sense, these stakeholders are a small part of your extended team.