Account-based marketing has become the most sought-after marketing strategy for B2B organizations striving to win new businesses and retain current customers. Typically, ABM aligns and targets a revenue team’s efforts towards specific high-value accounts.
Since it focuses on customers that matter, ABM enables B2B organizations to close deals faster and increase revenue significantly. But to help reap its benefits, you need to track the progress of your digital advertising strategy and determine what works or what needs improvement.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are powerful metrics that enable B2B sellers to track the progress of their advertising campaigns more efficiently. However, using traditional KPIs on ABM campaigns is never enough.
After all, ABM focuses on aligning sales and marketing while targeting a specific group of customers. Choosing select ABM KPIs can guide your campaigns more appropriately.
Focusing on Metrics That Matter
Unlike traditional marketing campaigns, account-based marketing engages a small number of qualified accounts, using multiple touchpoints and channels to provide unique value for B2B buyers. If you use ABM campaigns, you likely have lengthy sales cycles and countless decision-makers.
Research shows that about 75% of B2B vendors experience an average sales cycle of four months, while over 46% have a sales cycle of at least seven months. Because tracking progress in a prolonged sales cycle can be challenging, focusing on channel-specific metrics becomes more important than ever.
The most relevant ABM KPIs vary, depending on individual industries. But the following are six great metrics that can indicate success in B2B ABM advertising campaigns.
1: Influenced Pipeline
Unlike most KPIs, influenced pipeline is a straightforward metric to measure. All you need to do is determine if any of your ABM channel strategies influenced your target account.
If the account is influenced, that means the campaign is working. But if the account isn’t impacted, it means some channels in your ABM strategy are ineffective. Review your strategy to determine which channels do not affect your ABM campaigns.
Measuring influenced pipeline stops revenue teams from building complex models to measure if channels significantly impact leads. Ultimately, if you can attribute closed deals with your target account to your marketing efforts, it means your ABM strategy is working.
2: Return on Investment
This KPI lets you know how much you might spend before closing any deals. However, if your current campaign costs more than the average or you can’t measure ROI to track it, you need to reconsider either your marketing and sales efforts or target accounts.
3: Target Account Coverage
Most ABM marketers struggle with targeting the right accounts and individuals within specific accounts. When creating your ABM strategy, you may not know if you are targeting the right business until you launch your campaigns. Target account coverage enables you to track your coverage metrics, ensuring you reach the right people.
Also, you can determine the engagement rate, including how detailed your account data is. To measure your target account coverage, consider the following areas:
- Number of contacts in each account
- Percentage of contacts that have engaged with you
- Number of connections you have their complete data
- Your contact list growth rate in each account
It’s essential to have high target account coverage to engage more prospects and increase your buy-in from decision-makers. Experiencing low target account coverage means your ABM campaigns are ineffective or not targeting the right people.
4: Sales Cycle Length
Typically, big accounts have longer sales cycles. But you need to track it, mainly because ABM digital advertising campaigns often correlate to reduced sales cycle length since they are more personalized, effective, and targeted. Tracking sales cycle length also helps augment your deal closing process.
To measure your average cycle length, divide the total period for the completion of each sale (in days) by the total number of deals.
The number you get won’t necessarily provide insights into your deal closing process, but it will help provide a baseline to improve your sales processes and reduce the cycle length. For an effective and shorter deal closing process, experiment with how you handle the later stages of your deals.
5: Pipeline Velocity
It’s also imperative to calculate how fast your target accounts advance from MQAs (or 6QAs in 6sense’s parlance) to your ABM funnel final stage. The intent is to understand your pipeline velocity, which is essential for informing data-driven planning. Precisely, you can measure pipeline velocity in the following ways:
- Total time spent from opportunity creation to close date
- Time spent on every opportunity stage
If you measure a significantly lower pipeline velocity value than you anticipated, you’ll need to work on tactics such as increasing the number of accounts at the top of your sales funnel — and reviewing and improving your digital ad strategy.
This enables you to improve your pipeline velocity, ultimately increasing the number of deals won and generating more revenue.
How We Can Help
If you need help launching an effective B2B ABM advertising campaign to boost your pipeline, 6sense can help.
Using the power of AI and Big Data, we help every revenue team member uncover demand, prioritize actions, and engage resistant buying teams at scale for better outcomes. Book a demo with us to get started today.
