Optimizing Your ABM Pipeline: Importance of Measuring and Maintenance for Success

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is an agile strategy that requires consistent effort. Hence, measuring campaign effectiveness, optimizing activities, and maintaining sales enablement is just as important as the execution. This ensures that the budget allocated to an ABM mission is going to the right places and generating revenue / sales pipeline. At the end of the day, how can you judge the success of a strategy without measuring its impact on your main performance indicators, such as revenue, engagement, etc.?
In  previous articles, we discussed that the ABM approach can be regarded as the opposite of the lead-centric strategy. Indeed, this difference is evident in all aspects, including performance measurement & reporting. ABM requires sales and marketing teams to go beyond their reporting habits and focus on assessing overall account engagement instead of individual lead engagement.
While many organizations measure their ABM success with pipeline contribution and closed deals (which are indeed valuable performance indicators), it’s also important to assess the impact of your ABM mission on an account’s buying experience.

Pipeline and closed deals: Examine the deals you have won as a result of your ABM efforts and determine what worked. This will help you refine your program to direct you towards future success.

Influence on buying experience: Pay attention to how you engage buyer personas within your target accounts – how many contacts are in touch with your sales reps, how many are interacting with marketing assets on your websites, emails etc.

THE KPIs YOU CANNOT FORGET
To give you a more tangible idea of what and how you should measure, we have compiled the most frequently used KPIs that help B2B marketers judge the success of their ABM missions:

• Marketing Qualified Accounts (MQAs): This provides a more wholesome layout and information on your prospective customers. These accounts are the ones that satisfy your Ideal Customer profiles and predetermined level of engagement among multiple stakeholders in the decision-making process.
• Engagement Rate: In ABM the objective of engagement should be at the account level rather than per lead
• Account Reach/Penetration: Measuring the level of reach for net-new contacts within the target’s accounts. Such measurement allows you to measure your brand awareness and the size of the customers buying committee.
• Average Selling Price: What is the average deal size of closed-won opportunities coming from your ABM program? How does it compare to other campaigns?
• Conversion Rates throughout the Funnel: What is the level of contribution of your ABM campaign for the number of targeted accounts that positively progressed to the nest step of your sales cycle
• Pipeline Velocity: Has your ABM program improved the pace your target accounts moved through your sales pipeline? What is the average timeline from first touch to opportunity and opportunity to closed-won deal’
• Win Rate: What is the percentage of close-won deals that have come from your ABM program, in comparison to total closed-won deals?
• ROI: What is the ROI of your different ABM campaigns? What campaigns generate the most ROI?
• Marketing Influence: What deals have bene influenced by the Marketing team? Where did this influence occur in the Sales cycle?- What ABM programs influenced the most?
• Churn Rate: What is the percentage of customer churn for each ABM campaigns? How does this compare to your overall churn rate?

WHAT KPIs SHOULD YOU START MEASURING FIRST?
It is important to keep in mind that metrics related directly to revenue need some time to mature. It means that your ABM teams will need to establish and agree on several early indicators of success first. Then, as your ABM mission progresses, you will need to reserve KPIs for each stage of the program. Continuous review of the key metrics will help your teams make sure they work towards the same goals, making it easier to continue to invest in your ABM efforts.