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With 70% of marketers reporting that they have an active account based marketing (ABM) program in place, ABM has become table stakes for B2B organizations. But with so many metrics associated with ABM, it can be tricky to track and report out on them all. Plus, deciphering between which are nice-to-haves and which should be your top-level success indicators can also lead to confusion.
To help you better align your ABM program to the benchmarks that matter most, we’ve compiled three essential metrics to measure your ABM program success. Whether you’re rebuilding your ABM strategy from the ground up, or just looking to fill in some of the blanks of your program, these three metrics will enable you to prove out the success of your ABM program to senior leaders, which can lead to more budget to expand the program over time.
Keep reading to dive into our three essential metrics to measure ABM program success.
Average Contract Value (ACV)
Average contract value (ACV) is one of the most important metrics associated with ABM, measuring the worth of an ongoing customer contract. It is calculated by averaging a contract's value over a year. Why is it so important? One of the overarching goals of an ABM strategy is to build meaningful relationships with high-value accounts. By doing this, you not only build trust in your brand but also the potential for multi-product and multi-year deals. When an account sees value in the solution you are selling, they will be willing to pay for it.
Fortunately, according to Gartner, ABM programs have a 20% lift in ACV compared to more to traditional demand generation programs. This means that when done effectively, your ABM program is likely to increase your ACV. One way to ensure this is to make sure the messaging across your emails, ads, SDR outreach, events, and website is consistent and showcases the value of your product offering directly to those accounts.
If you’re not seeing ACV increase it’s time to touch base with your larger go-to-market team. Spend time with them auditing everything from your ideal customer profile (ICP) and target accounts to your brand’s positioning to see how you can better align. Going back to the drawing board shouldn’t feel like a death sentence for your ABM program. In fact, consistently realigning your ABM program with other sales and marketing initiatives is key to ensuring the success of your program even if your ACV is booming.
Sales Cycle Length
Sales cycle length tracks the amount of time that passes from the time an account has entered the sales cycle to the closing of a deal with the account. This metric is a strong indicator of an ABM program’s health, as effective ABM strategies can reduce sales cycle length by 25%.
One way ABM can decrease sales cycle length is due to the highly personalized nature of these programs. And with 71% of consumers expecting personalized experiences from brands, it’s no surprise that effective personalization can accelerate deal cycles. Plus, ABM tactics tend to continue throughout the deal cycle, versus traditional demand generation where they stop once the opportunity is created. These continuous touchpoints with target accounts have been proven to speed up the deal cycle.
If you’re not seeing target accounts move through your opportunity stages at the pace you’d like, it’s time to take a look at your ABM strategies. A great place to start is how you are personalizing your website and landing pages. Are you personalizing target accounts’ experiences by featuring logos or customer stories from companies like them? On landing pages are you using dynamic data to include the visitor’s first name or company? Another place to look is your direct mail program and sales cadences. Are you sending gifts at the right time to keep prospects engaged? Are sales reps following up promptly and continuing to send helpful materials during the deal cycle?
While these tactics might not work for every company, identifying these types of opportunities will help put you and your team on the right path toward shortening your deal cycle. Intellimize’s AI-driven personalization platform makes it easy to scale personalized experiences at a 1:many, 1:few, or even 1:1 level across your website and landing pages.
Net Revenue Retention (NRR)
When measuring the success of your ABM program it’s key to look at net revenue retention (NRR), which measures a business’s ability to retain revenue from existing customers over a given period. NRR is a strong indicator of a brand’s ability to build strong and lasting relationships with customers.
If you’re struggling with NRR, think about moving beyond a traditional ABM program, to account based experience (ABX) instead. Unlike ABM which focuses primarily on alignment between sales and marketing, ABX aims to unify sales, marketing, and customer success. By adding customer success to the mix, you can create seamless customer experiences from an account’s first impression of your company through renewing their contract and beyond.
Although implementing ABX is a big undertaking, keeping customers is ultimately less expensive for your business than bringing on new ones, and can strengthen band loyalty from key accounts.
We hope these three essential ABM metrics give you a strong foundation as you fill in the blanks of your strategy.
