How to prove the value of ABM beyond short-term campaign metrics

In this session, Lori Albano, Consulting Director at Momentum ITSMA, explores the difficult topic of how to prove ABM’s value beyond short-term campaign metrics, touching on a wide range of areas including: a brief recap on Momentum ITSMA’s 3 Rs (revenue, relationship, reputation), the fundamental differences between measuring traditional B2B marketing versus measuring ABM, the challenges our members encounter with this and with ABM reporting, and how we can turn the insights we gather into actionable business intelligence.

· Tackle the data sources, ‘systems and tools overload’ and organisational alignment challenges to make ABM measurement easier.

· Measure what matters. Move away from traditional B2B metrics and measure Momentum ITSMA’s 3 Rs according to the ABM strategy you deploy.

· Customer journey complexity, the lack of a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach due to the different types of ABM programs, and vast data make reporting a rather complex (but not impossible) task.

· Improve your ABM reporting by mapping activities to business outcomes, simplifying it so it’s easier to build and run, making it representable/relevant to key stakeholders and using it to provide meaningful insights.

· Translate your ABM learnings into actionable business intelligence.

The biggest challenges around measuring ABM: data sources, systems and tools, and alignment

Lori opened this discussion by addressing the most common challenges around measuring ABM: data sources, systems and tools, and alignment.

She talked about how, as ABM program complexity grows, so does the number of touchpoints, buyer journeys, and stakeholders, making it increasingly more difficult to determine the sources we should access, collate, and track to create a consistent data story. Lori also touched on the challenges we face when there is a ‘system overload’ – an abundance of technology systems and tools that are not integrated and not meant to be measuring ABM. The final of the three challenges was organizational ‘alignment’. Lori talked about this being the hardest one to overcome due to it concerning the cultural mindset of an enterprise rather than a skillset that can be brought in. As part of this third point, she talked about the challenge of aligning sales and marketing and why it's key for these two functions to come together when measuring ABM success.

During the conversations with the ABM practitioners, a couple of fascinating topics came up around shared challenges and learnings. We discussed what happens when stakeholders are more concerned with the number of touchpoints versus their value, talked about skewed views of metrics and KPIs, issues around Martech stacks, lack of marketing attribution, impatience with ABM results and more… But the message that resonated the most was that the ‘relationship’ element of the 3 Rs is the most difficult to measure. We unpacked this and determined this is the case because the metrics that sit under this ‘R’ usually belong to sales/a department that isn’t marketing (therefore are metrics that ABM practitioners struggle to own).

We addressed these concerns and discussed some of our members’ successes with measuring engagement at current and previous roles and concluded that it’s possible to change an enterprise’s mindset on ABM’s importance and potential if the correct metrics are in place.

We need to be measuring the metrics that matter

Lori talked about the difference between traditional marketing and ABM, explaining that ABM metrics go beyond traditional marketing and that they tell a much ‘bigger’, more complete story. Some examples of this are: traditional marketing tends to measure the number of leads whereas ABM measures the quality of those leads; in traditional marketing we consider CPL whereas in ABM we look at cost per conversion to opportunity; traditional marketing measures pipeline growth whereas ABM also considers aspects such as velocity, deal size, and win rate. Lori also discussed time as being one of the main differences between the two disciplines: “Traditional B2B tends to be measured through shorter campaign metrics whereas for ABM, campaign metrics are just the starting point”.

During this second part of the CoE discussion, we explored which of the 3 Rs demonstrates the most business impact and the metrics we should use to measure 1:1, 1:few, and 1:many ABM success. Lori spoke about how 1:1, 1:few, and 1:many ABM strategies call for different revenue, relationships, and reputation metrics. To bring this to life, we explored the qualitative (who, when, what), sales-oriented and longer term metrics needed to measure 1:1 ABM success and compared these to the more quantitative (opt-ins, web traffic), marketing-oriented and shorter term metrics needed to measure 1:many ABM success.

To bring this topic to a close Lori showed Infosys’ scorecard as an example of how a business can track metrics that really matter – aspects like CXO engagement, number of new buying centers, client testimonials, client speaking engagements, and more: “Don’t just measure the tangibles. Find a way to measure the intangibles. Shifting ABM from accounts to people means reinforcing value as much as you reinforce perceptions.” (Infosys, 2022)

During our discussions with the ABM practitioners we talked about whether they are measuring across all of Momentum ITSMA’s 3 Rs, the difficulties around connecting awareness and engagement with pipeline and revenue, and debated where they see the biggest ABM impact. Our members also contributed with some positive experiences around soliciting input and feedback from sales, tackled broader sales and marketing integration, and discussed a move away from the belief that ABM is solely driven by marketing. Lori highlighted that companies like Microsoft have decided to stop referring to it as ‘Account-Based Marketing’ and are instead starting to adopt the term ‘Account-Based Engagement’.

The third topic was ABM reporting and the difficulties practitioners encounter: customer journey complexity, a lack of a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach, and bringing the vast amount of data together into a coherent story.

Lori started by outlining the difficulties we sometimes encounter with ABM reporting. The most significant ones we’ve observed being:

· Customer journey: Mapping of customer journeys is complex and is not always linear, there are many different journeys per customer and these can be quite abstract.

· Scale and diversity: Different types and scales of ABM and the need to be tracking different aspects depending on the strategy make it difficult to have a ‘one-size-fits-all’ framework.

· Aligning the data to business outcomes: The difficulties in bringing all the data that we swim in into a coherent story.

She tackled these by talking to us about things to consider for more effective ABM reporting. She advised on mapping ABM activities to the biggest business outcomes, talked about simplifying reporting so it’s easier to build, run, and develop, highlighted the importance of making an ABM report representable and relevant to key stakeholders so it’s not just for sales and marketing, and finally using it to provide meaningful and actionable insights. Here, Lori talked about two kinds of insights we can gather from ABM initiatives – tactical and strategic. She referred to tactical intelligence as insights like what is triggering the leads to download an asset or enter a business’ database, what is making them move down the customer journey, etc. and strategic insights as intelligence such as accounts that have engaged, solutions and products that they are interacting with the most, information on how their engagement is changing over time. She argued that strategic insights can provide a better understanding of where ABM makes a difference and have the potential to transform a business.

On this topic, our discussion with the ABM practitioners centered around how we could go about making reporting easier, their battle with siloed systems, and we asked for their thoughts on whether they are spending lots of time and resources trying to make sense of it all and on reporting automation.

They contributed with insight into their reporting timelines, ideal metrics they would like to include going forward, and the benchmarks they have in place that they use to measure their ABM activities against.

In the last section of this CoE discussion, we talked about the need to turn our ABM metrics and learnings into business intelligence.

Here, Lori shared some final considerations into how failing to link individual campaign results to longer term KPIs not only limits marketing attribution, but prevents from both applying learnings to future programs and informing wider business decision making. There’s plenty to be drawn from it: from gaining a more comprehensive picture of buying groups and how those change in an evolving environment, to better understanding where the best deal sizes are and which segments of the market show the highest rate of success.

Lori closed this very interesting CoE session with examples of scoring account engagement across contact, action, and opportunity, re-iterating the importance of tracking influence on existing relationships and opportunities as much as creating new ones.

ABM plays a key role in re-activating, strengthening, and widening existing engagement which would otherwise remain low, restricted to limited solution areas or indeed shift toward a dormant status. That’s why moving away from traditional ‘lead generation’ metrics is vital to showing the true value of ABM.