Skip to content
  • What we do

Demand Acceleration

Integrated marketing programs designed to surround your buyer with full funnel content and solve marketing challenges.

Demand Capture

Capture in-market leads against your ICP and target accounts with content syndication, personalized email marketing and 1-1 telemarketing.

Services

  • Account-Based Marketing
  • Content Creation
  • Content Syndication
  • Lead Generation
  • Market Research
  • Thought Leadership
  • Account-Based Marketing
  • Content Creation
  • Content Syndication
  • Lead Generation
  • Market Research
  • Thought Leadership

Featured Whitepaper

ABM Content Hub

ABM Hub

Master the latest ABM plays with our dedicated ABM Hub, home to all your essential resources including 1st party research, strategy breakdowns, templates, tutorials and more…

Sales Acceleration Hub

Packed with insights, examples and best practices, this hub consists of tried and tested strategies providing a framework to help you design and deploy an effective Sales Acceleration strategy for your business.

Content

  • All Resources
  • Blog
  • Case Studies
  • Infographics
  • Webinars
  • Whitepapers
  • All Resources
  • Blog
  • Case Studies
  • Infographics
  • Webinars
  • Whitepapers

Featured Whitepaper

ABM Content Hub

Need some help to find what you're looking for?

Search
  • Our Data
    • Audiences
    • DemandBI
    • Insights for Professionals
  • Our Data
    • Audiences
    • DemandBI
    • Insights for Professionals
  • Resources

Demand Acceleration

Integrated marketing programs designed to surround your buyer with full funnel content and solve marketing challenges.

Demand Capture

Capture in-market leads against your ICP and target accounts with content syndication, personalized email marketing and 1-1 telemarketing.

Services

  • Account-Based Marketing
  • Content Creation
  • Content Syndication
  • Lead Generation
  • Market Research
  • Thought Leadership
  • Account-Based Marketing
  • Content Creation
  • Content Syndication
  • Lead Generation
  • Market Research
  • Thought Leadership

Featured Whitepaper

ABM Content Hub

ABM Hub

Master the latest ABM plays with our dedicated ABM Hub, home to all your essential resources including 1st party research, strategy breakdowns, templates, tutorials and more…

Sales Acceleration Hub

Packed with insights, examples and best practices, this hub consists of tried and tested strategies providing a framework to help you design and deploy an effective Sales Acceleration strategy for your business.

Content

  • All Resources
  • Blog
  • Case Studies
  • Infographics
  • Webinars
  • Whitepapers
  • All Resources
  • Blog
  • Case Studies
  • Infographics
  • Webinars
  • Whitepapers

Featured Whitepaper

ABM Content Hub

Need some help to find what you're looking for?

Search
  • About Us
    • Our Team
    • Contact Us
  • About Us
    • Our Team
    • Contact Us

Demand Acceleration

Integrated marketing programs designed to surround your buyer with full funnel content and solve marketing challenges.

Demand Capture

Capture in-market leads against your ICP and target accounts with content syndication, personalized email marketing and 1-1 telemarketing.

Services

  • Account-Based Marketing
  • Content Creation
  • Content Syndication
  • Lead Generation
  • Market Research
  • Thought Leadership
  • Account-Based Marketing
  • Content Creation
  • Content Syndication
  • Lead Generation
  • Market Research
  • Thought Leadership

Featured Whitepaper

ABM Content Hub

ABM Hub

Master the latest ABM plays with our dedicated ABM Hub, home to all your essential resources including 1st party research, strategy breakdowns, templates, tutorials and more…

Sales Acceleration Hub

Packed with insights, examples and best practices, this hub consists of tried and tested strategies providing a framework to help you design and deploy an effective Sales Acceleration strategy for your business.

Content

  • All Resources
  • Blog
  • Case Studies
  • Infographics
  • Webinars
  • Whitepapers
  • All Resources
  • Blog
  • Case Studies
  • Infographics
  • Webinars
  • Whitepapers

Featured Whitepaper

ABM Content Hub

Need some help to find what you're looking for?

Search
Get in touch
  • What we do
    • Demand Acceleration
    • Demand Capture
    • Services
      • Account-Based Marketing
      • Content Creation
      • Content Syndication
      • Lead Generation
      • Market Research
      • Thought Leadership
  • Our Data
    • Audiences
    • DemandBI
    • Insights for Professionals
  • Content Hubs
    • ABM Hub
    • Sales Acceleration Hub
  • All Resources
    • Blog
    • Case Studies
    • Infographics
    • Insights
    • Webinars
    • Whitepapers
  • About Us
    • Our Team
    • Contact us
Phone
Email
Contact us

How to Measure Account-Based Marketing Results

  • January 20, 2020
  • Account-Based Marketing
  • Natasha Orme
How to Measure-Account Based Marketing Results

Home » Account-Based Marketing » How to Measure Account-Based Marketing Results

By nature, account-based marketing is bespoke, tailored and one-of-a-kind. So how do you measure success and ROI across your ABM operation?

With account-based marketing, each account is different, however, there are still a variety of ways to measure activity, and the more advanced the approach, the more interesting the challenge. The critical part is identifying the most valuable metrics where you can limit the number of variables to provide a clear framework for you and your team.

Reading time: 6 minutes

View image full size.

While it is important to treat each account as unique, they will all have fundamental similarities than can be used to align your approach and improve account segmentation:

  • Industry
  • Purchasing cycle
  • Decision making units

However, that doesn’t mean you have to forgo measuring success or identifying the approaches and principles likely to yield the best results. It also shouldn’t prevent you tracking the basic metrics that will help you keep track of the time and resources spent and the overall health of your ABM program.

Using metrics to qualify accounts

Since ABM involves devoting substantial resources to a single account, it’s important to have a robust and accurate process for identifying the best ones to pursue. Insights from our Account-Based Marketing Research Report shows 83% of marketers are using lookalike strategies based on already qualified accounts, but how do you determine what an ideal account looks like?

ClickZ recommends adopting specific parameters for an MQA (marketing qualified account) which can indicate a state of possible sales readiness, for example:

  • Having more than one engaged contact
  • Meeting a threshold number of hours of contact time

They also suggest creating an ideal customer profile (ICP) – a persona that represents the customer you are looking for, which can be used as a benchmark for assessing potential leads. The ICP will capture a number of criteria, such as annual budget, annual turnover and sectors or industries served.

How to establish macro objectives

Everything can be tracked, analyzed and optimized in the interest of better performance, so it is important to measure the metrics that are relevant for your specific objectives. Big data is great, but it can often be overwhelming, with ABM you can start simple, with metrics around reach and response, and then move onto penetration of accounts, engagement rate of the DMU, uplift by account and account revenue potential.

ABM is a journey and you can have many different tactics to deliver ROI from your accounts, but to do so, you need to separate your high-value opportunities from those considered to be low-value and then build that into your planning.

According to our ABM Research Report, 40% of marketers use close rate as a measurement for their ABM efforts. This number seems a lot lower than many would anticipate and this could be as a result of the lengthening sales cycle in the last decade. Data from MarketingSherpa’s 2009 B2B Benchmark Study showed that 57% of sales cycles take less than 3 months, whereas in 2019, data from CSO Insights showed the volume of sales cycles that take place within 3 months has decreased to 43%. This change in the sales cycle points to an increasing need for marketers to create more targeted messaging; by measuring the time it takes for these accounts to close, marketers will be able to determine whether accounts receiving customized content convert faster.

Consider, introducing metrics as a way to keep track of progress against top-level objectives. Start by measuring reach to your target accounts, or specific contacts at those accounts, to give you a percentage or a conversion rate by account, which can give you something to build on.

ABM Report

Account by account: what to measure

But how much time should it take to deliver results, and how do you know when it’s time to take a step back, reassess and adopt a new strategy?
There are three key metrics your ABM strategy needs to track:

1. Account coverage

Developing in-depth intelligence on your target accounts is critical when setting up your ABM strategy. Without this insider knowledge, how can you be expected to customize messaging and personalize content to appeal to that particular account?

Account coverage is the level of penetration you’ve achieved with a customer company, or an industry sector. Consider:

  • How many contacts have been identified
  • How complete your knowledge of them is
  • What level of seniority and decision-making power the contacts have
  • How frequently you interact with them

Answering these questions enables you to pinpoint where you have information gaps with a certain company, sector or business function. You can then focus resources and attention on filling in those gaps to ensure you have a solid foundation to work from.

2. Brand awareness

This reflects how well your contacts understand your offering and how it might apply to their business. If your target accounts don’t know who you are, they are unlikely to purchase from you. Ask yourself; do they know the full range of your products and services? Have they seen them in action? To gauge awareness, look at:

  • Number of product demos or presentations
  • Email click-through and time spent reading content
  • Attendance of trade shows and events

Having a handle on brand awareness helps you to create the right type of content for different contacts, pitch conversations at the correct level and make sure that basic onboarding and introductory information isn’t being overlooked.

3. Account engagement

Engagement refers to how interested and enthusiastic a prospect is and their appetite for doing business with you. However, measuring it can be complex and the metrics used will vary depending on your business, industry and target accounts. Start by looking at:

  • Number of calls and meetings with contacts
  • Time spent on calls or in person
  • Proactive engagement with you on social media, web or offline
  • Introductions the customer makes to other leads, internal or external

Further insights in our research showed almost half (49%) of marketers measure engagement through the number of net-new accounts they’ve interacted with. Engagement is where the magic happens – it’s the interaction that deepens the connection and lays the groundwork not only for individual sales but for continuing loyalty, referrals and brand trust. High engagement means you have a green light to invest more time and attention on an account.

Being able measure engagement can give you crucial insight around what is happening between the top and bottom of the sales funnel. Brandon Redlinger, Director of Growth at Engagio, says you want to look for insights such as ‘Accounts in the top 25% of engagement have 18% faster sales cycles than those in the bottom 25%’.

Operational performance

Tracking the right metrics can help you view performance on an account-by-account basis, as well as the whole ABM operation itself to see how it performs over time. Are your teams becoming more efficient at finding and converting leads? Are your odds of achieving conversion up from where they used to be? Look at:

  • Speed – how long does it take to identify a lead and make first contact?
  • Conversion rates – how often does a new contact result in a sale?
  • Value per deal – how large are the sales, and are the volumes trending upwards?

However you employ metrics in your ABM program, it’s important to tailor them to your needs and make sure they are working for you and not the other way around. Metrics are only valuable if you can act on the insights they provide. If a certain measurement isn’t helping you to perform, don’t hesitate to take it off your radar.

State of ABM 2020

Want access to the latest B2B insights?

Our InboxInsider provides a monthly round-up of the latest whitepapers and reports, trending intent tags, best-performing subject lines, and more.

Latest blogs

5 ABM Facts
Account-Based Marketing

5 Account-Based Marketing Facts Every B2B Marketer Should Memorize

Compared to the more traditional mass-marketing email campaigns, the emerging trend of Account-Based Marketing (ABM) has proven to be a lot more beneficial for B2B marketers. So,

14th July 2023
15 FAQs on ABM, Answered
Account-Based Marketing

15 FAQs on ABM: ANSWERED

Interest in Account-Based Marketing (ABM) continues to grow, as marketers seek results in B2B sales and businesses look for more reliable strategies. But as we know, not

6th July 2023
5 Impactful ABM Plays to get Your Pipeline Pumping
Account-Based Marketing

5 Impactful ABM Plays to get Your Pipeline Pumping

Make your revenue goals a reality with these Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategic plays – here’s 5 approaches that can be used to create an overarching

30th June 2023
Tiers without fears: How to Identify Priority Accounts for a Successful ABM Campaign
Account-Based Marketing

Tiers without fears: How to Identify Priority Accounts for a Successful ABM Campaign

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) relies on the successful identification, engagement and nurture of high-value accounts which form the list of key accounts to prioritize your ABM

16th June 2023
Unveiling the Inconvenient Truths of In-House Programmatic ABM
Account-Based Marketing

Unveiling the Inconvenient Truths of In-House Programmatic ABM

In the ever-evolving landscape of modern marketing, ABM has emerged as a powerful approach that blends cutting-edge technology with strategic precision for targeting high-value accounts.

25th May 2023
State of Account-Based Marketing Uncut US vs UK
Account-Based Marketing

State of Account-Based Marketing Uncut: US vs UK

How does the state of account-based marketing (ABM) differ between the US and UK? What notable similarities and significant nuances exist across the Atlantic? B2B

18th May 2023

Latest blog posts

5 Account-Based Marketing Facts Every B2B Marketer Should Memorize
Learn More
15 FAQs on ABM: ANSWERED
Learn More
5 Impactful ABM Plays to get Your Pipeline Pumping
Learn More
Tiers without fears: How to Identify Priority Accounts for a Successful ABM Campaign
Learn More
Unveiling the Inconvenient Truths of In-House Programmatic ABM
Learn More
State of Account-Based Marketing Uncut: US vs UK
Learn More
Targeted Demand Generation: The Winning Formula for ABM Success
Learn More
Why B2B Thought Leadership Marketing Matters
Learn More
Build an Effective ABM List for Your Target Accounts
Learn More
How to Pick the Right Distribution Channels for Your Content
Learn More

Winchester, UK
1 Exchange Square
Jewry Street
Winchester
Hampshire
SO23 8FJ
+44 (0)1962 835950

Boston, USA
1661 Worcester Road
Suite 207
Framingham
MA
01701
+1-508-424-5330

Further Information

  • Contact us
  • Booking T&Cs (UK)
  • Booking T&Cs (US)
  • Cookie Policy
  • Privacy Policy
  • Anti-Slavery and Human Trafficking Policy

Read Inbox Insight reviews on G2

Cyber Essentials Plus

Cyber Essentials Plus

Inbox Insight

Inbox Insight Ltd. 1 Exchange Square, Jewry Street, Winchester, Hampshire, SO23 8FJ. Registered in England number: 7179598.

Copyright © 2023 Inbox Insight Ltd. All rights reserved.

This website uses cookies to optimise functionality. Please accept the use of these cookies, or select 'Cookie Policy' for more information (including how to opt-out). Okay Cookie Policy
Cookie Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Non-necessary
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
SAVE & ACCEPT