Editor’s Note: This series, “The Three Alignments,” examines three common misalignments that erode the productivity of B2B revenue teams — and how to fix them.
Below is Part 3, which looks at KPIs and how the wrong metrics can hold back and even undermine ABM efforts. Part 1 focuses on ways to better align your marketing and sales teams so they operate as one cohesive unit. Part 2 examines a common disconnect that keeps revenue teams from recognizing the most valuable sales opportunities.
Marketing teams can deliver better sales results and better buyer experiences by re-tuning their sensory tools to distinguish between true selling opportunities and the behavior of individuals who may be researching without serious purchase intent.
The experience is better for all parties because it allows marketing to:
- Align with sales by showing the accounts ready to buy rather than a disconnected pile of individual leads who may or may not be part of a buying team.
- Align with buyers by directing outreach to receptive accounts — and leaving less engaged accounts alone until their activities reach critical mass.
But there’s one more aspect of marketing’s role that must be re-aligned: marketing’s own internal measurement systems and processes.
And, of course, an analogy helps us understand how and why measurement is so critical.
A Wrong-Headed Approach
During the latter half of the 18th century, a new theory of human mental capacities began to take hold.
Phrenology leaned on two core ideas.
- First: that human brains are modular, with different parts of the brain responsible for different functions, a belief born from observing the behavior of individuals with injuries to various parts of the brain.
- Second: that by taking precise measurements of the outside of a person’s skull, phrenologists could measure specific personality characteristics, from intelligence to ‘criminality.’
It turns out that the first core element of phrenology, that human brains are modular with specialized functional parts, is supported by modern science. However, the idea that skull measurements reveal personality characteristics is pure nonsense.
It was harmful nonsense. It led to decades of erroneous, typically discriminatory classification of individuals, impacting countless educational and vocational opportunities. But phrenology had perhaps its worst effects in courts of law, where criminal judgments and sentencing were influenced based on a tape measure.
Poor Metrics Are Endemic and Costly
The core idea of account-based marketing — that marketing and sales should align on a set of target accounts in order to optimize pipeline and revenue production — is demonstrably a best practice.
And yet, 6sense Research recently found that most ABM practitioners still assess their performance through lead and MQL conversions. And just as damaging, less than half of ABM practitioners measure vital metrics such as anonymous web traffic, opportunities, pipeline, and revenue from target accounts.
Apart from the missed opportunities we have already discussed, organizations that do not adapt their measurement practices to match the key results they are producing are at risk of failing to recognize what is working and what is not, hindering the organization’s ability to learn and improve.
Traditional MarTech Stacks Can Paint a Distorted Picture
First, consider the nature of B2B buyers. As discussed in Part 2 of this three-part series, B2B accounts nearly always buy as part of a committee. These teams range from 5 to 20 individuals, all of whom can be expected to do some of their own online research.
In fact, the evidence suggests that for every person from a target account who fills out a form, there may be 8 to 9 others browsing anonymously. And it is a near certainty that multiple individuals from each potential buying account will fill out forms.
Next, consider what’s likely to happen when organizations focus more of their attention on a smaller set of highly targeted accounts. If the marketing efforts work, organizations will experience increased anonymous traffic as well as more form fills from those accounts. Organizations that are ignoring their anonymous traffic will miss the vast majority of clues about where their marketing efforts are succeeding.
Similarly, if organizations still rely on marketing qualified leads converting to sales opportunities, those lead conversion rates will drop, as more “duplicate leads” come in from accounts that have already been presented with MQLs. Watch this podcast for a complete discussion.
This is a problem because many ABM practitioners have no systematic way to detect when targeted accounts express a greater than normal level of interest. Their traditional martech stack (marketing automation + CRM) simply isn’t equipped to spot and highlight the signal.
The Problem(s) With How We Measure Marketing ROI
Another huge problem is the way organizations attempt to measure ROI by using marketing sourced attribution for MQLs. Marketing-source attribution is a dubious metric for any B2B organization, as Forrester discusses at length. For those that have ABM practices, such metrics can be highly damaging.
Marketing-sourced metrics nearly always:
- Fail to recognize the role of anonymous traffic, which is how buyers express interest in solutions at least 90% of the time.
- Fail to measure opportunities first identified through third-party intent. And yet, intent data is likely to be the way potential opportunities are initially identified. Gartner estimates that this makes up 83% of B2B solution research.
The Marketing/Sales Tug-of-War For Credit
Even more problematic, however, is the notion of sourcing itself, particularly in an account-based paradigm.
The design of ABM programs is that marketing and sales are typically both communicating with accounts simultaneously. When either party claims they’re responsible for the identification of a particular selling opportunity, it often leads to as much dispute as understanding.
Consider this common scenario:
Marketing records a form-fill from a target account. That individual consumes marketing content, is scored up as an MQL and delivered to the BDR team, which then emails, calls, and ultimately qualifies the opportunity for sales. Marketing claims credit for sourcing it.
Makes sense, right?
Not so fast.
The account executive has notes in the CRM that clearly indicate she had been trying to reach that same individual via email and phone calls for weeks before the person came to the website and filled out the form. Was the website visit a response to marketing’s overtures? The AE’s outreach? The correct answer is yes to both. Undoubtedly, both influenced the individual or individuals in question.
Debates over who gets credit in such situations are rampant throughout B2B and of no value whatsoever. In most B2B scenarios, but particularly in most ABM scenarios, the production of pipeline is a joint effort.
Don’t Credit a Moment; Credit Winning Playbooks
Instead of measuring which touch or action gets credit, organizations need instead to measure the full set of interactions that contribute to deals.
These interactions often number in the hundreds or thousands prior to the creation of an opportunity. It’s unlikely that a single ‘source’ can be identified among the dozens of interactions. However, patterns of interactions driven by both marketing and sales tactics can be identified, so that they can be repeated to optimize productivity.
Learn More
While encouraging ABM practitioners to ditch sourcing metrics, my former Forrester colleagues and I discussed two of the many ways in which marketing measurement isn’t aligned to its own practices. It’s critical that organizations include new measurement practices in their implementations of modern go-to-market strategies such as ABM.
For a complete discussion of current measurement practices and their implications, see “Doing One Thing, Measuring Another.”
