ABM, Metrics, & Marketing Impact
The painful truth about your made up marketing results
The conversation around ABM (account-based marketing) has been taking place for a long time. Unfortunately, though most organizations have started to pursue an account-based revenue strategy, practical execution and implementation have been questionable at best.
In my own organization, we’ve doubled down on our pursuit of a truly account-based strategy. We decided to move in this direction a few months ago, and since then, I’ve been spending quite a bit of time reevaluating what I’ve done in the past for ABM/ABS campaigns and how I can leverage those learnings to drive better results moving forward.
The primary issue around ABM is measuring performance. As Peter Drucker said, “If you can’t measure it you can’t manage it.” Which is why most ABM strategies have questionable outcomes.
Usually, marketers try to justify performance by measuring ROI on the spend allotted to the campaign against the number of new leads generated, and how those leads progress through the funnel.
**I know most marketers are going to think that I’m insane for saying I couldn’t (and if you truly admit it, you can’t either) measure those metrics. The truth is that measuring marketing’s impact is for the most part completely arbitrary, these marketing metrics are generally manipulated to tell the story marketers want them to tell — I know, it’s a hard pill to swallow, sorry for ruining your day.
Instead of trying to measure the results of a ‘Campaign’ results focus on metrics that marketing activities can impact. Here are a few of them,
- Number of accounts identified — are we doing the right things in the right place?
- Account penetration — how many individuals can we help identify and engage to bring into an opp?
- Account engagement — are the individuals we are targeting engaging with our story?
- Average deal length — how are our activities impacting the deal cycle?
- Expansion opportunity — are we driving awareness and adoption internally?
All of these metrics can be measured and benchmarked against. Most importantly, they span the entire organization and throughout the life cycle of a customer.
About the Author: Jesse Williams is a young entrepreneur, husband, father, technologist, and SaaS marketing expert. You can follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn and learn more about him and his projects here.
