1. Strategizing
2. Organizing
3. Personalizing
4. Distributing
5. Optimizing

Implementing account-based marketing (ABM) requires marketers to be bold and venture into unknown territory. However, the metrics for ABM are also often unknown territory. Measurement is difficult for many ABM launches because the approach is different from traditional B2B marketing. Don’t let the challenge deter you! Reporting on the right metrics is important. Solid measurement of ABM allows you to:

1. Make better decisions around the programs you run, and invest in what’s working.  

2. Share your success. Socializing success is often overlooked, but gaining internal confidence in ABM is important to getting buy-in from the teams that matter most to making ABM work. This includes your fellow marketers, sales, and executives.

3. Prove the impact ABM has on revenue, and show ROI. ABM is often more tightly linked to revenue than other areas of marketing because of its close alignment with sales.  

What Metrics Actually Matter in ABM?

Based on my conversations with many marketing leaders, there are two metrics that stand out above all others and truly help align marketing and sales: opportunities generated and revenue closed. These metrics are the most foolproof indicators of whether your ABM programs are driving a positive return on investment from the accounts you target. (As a side bonus: your finance team will love you for reporting on them!)

While these metrics should be at the top of your list, many ABM programs have a more nuanced influence on sales that require additional metrics. To show how well an ABM program is working, you may also need to measure your target accounts on some of the following:

Engagement

When analyzing engagement, some key factors you may want to consider are:

• Target account website traffic
• Event attendance
• Ad conversion
• Webinar attendance

Sales Efficiency

In order to gauge your organization's sales efficiency, look at: 

• Rate of booking meetings (per account, by activity) on target list
• Opportunity creation rate
• Revenue closed from target accounts

Deal Velocity

When considering how ABM impacts deal velocity, see how many days your target accounts take to close compared to your average. A faster close rate would indicate that your ABM program is working effectively. 

Average Customer Value

How big are the deals you're closing that have been touched by account-based marketing? Analyzing the size of deal closed on target accounts compared to average is another key metric to look at when gauging ABM success. 

Multi-Touch Attribution to Pipeline and Revenue

Finally, you'll want to look at the contribution your ABM campaigns have made to pipeline and revenue—this can include multi-touch, equal touch, W-shaped, and U-shaped attribution.

Be wary of vanity metrics: they can cause your organization to lose confidence in ABM and alignment with sales. Know what is most important to your business, and be determined to find the metrics you need. There are often multiple ways to find these metrics, and working with finance, sales, and ops can help. There are also great technologies and services in the ABM analytics space.  

Technology can add more sophistication and insight into your analytics, and provide a deeper understanding of engagement throughout the buyer journey. Depending on what is important to your audience, it may be worth investing in tools that allow you to better measure engagement from your target accounts with your website, content, ads, events, and overall attribution.

While there are many considerations in measuring ABM, it’s extremely important to get it right. It will help you make better decisions, build internal confidence, and prove the value of your work.

Request a demo to learn how to use Uberflip to scale your ABM campaigns.