This document summarizes a presentation on metrics, measurements, and KPIs for high performance account-based marketing (ABM). It discusses how to determine goals by aligning marketing and sales objectives. It also covers how to create a target account list through collaboration between marketing and sales, how to track the list, and how to measure success and performance against goals. The presentation provides examples for setting metrics to measure things like pipeline, closed deals, account distribution, and enabling the sales team.
SEO for Revenue, Grow Your Business, Not Just Your Rankings - Dale Bertrand
Metrics, Measurement and KPI's
1. METRICS, MEASUREMENTS AND KPIS
HIGH PERFORMANCE ABM
John Dering
Director, Marketing Programs | Demandbase
Stephanie Robotham
Head of Corporate Marketing | Optimizely
2. FRI Metrics, Measurements and KPIs
Keys to Sales & Marketing Alignment SuccessTUES
WED
THURS
Building Your Target Account List
ABM Across the Funnel
MON ABM Fundamentals
@Demandbase #ABMwebseries
HIGH PERFORMANCE ABM WEBINAR SERIES
EVERYDAY 10 AM PT
4. AGENDA
HOW DO YOU DETERMINE GOALS
HOW DO YOU CREATE A TARGET ACCOUNT LIST
HOW DO YOU TRACK IT
HOW DO YOU MEASURE SUCCESS
HOW DO YOU MEASURE PERFORMANCE
HOW DO YOU ENABLE YOUR SALES TEAM
Hello everyone and welcome to Metrics, Measurement, and KPIs, the fifth and last day of our week-long High Performance ABM webinar series. I am John Dering, Director of ABM Technology and Strategy at Demandbase, and I am joined today by Stephanie Robotham, Head of Corporate Marketing at Optimizely.
As you know, this entire week, we have been talking about all things ABM. We covered everything ranging from ABM basics and fundamentals to how to create a target account list.
And if you are looking back at the sessions, kicking yourself for not making one, don’t worry. Next week we are going to send you access to the slides and on-demand recordings from the entire week. And it doesn’t stop after today. We are constantly thinking of new ways to make ABM easier and more accessible.
So make sure you follow along with us on Twitter at @Demandbase and join the conversation using the hashtag #ABMwebseries.
You have joined today using your computer or your telephone.
All phone lines will be muted during this session, but if you have a question…
We will have a Q&A session at the end of the presentation, so be sure to submit your questions in the Q&A tab on the left-hand side of the webinar console.
We often don’t have time to address all questions, so we will follow up after the session if we don’t get to you.
With that, I’d like to introduce you to my co-presenter Stephanie Robotham.
Stephanie Robotham is the VP of Corporate Marketing at Optimizely. Prior to joining Optimizely, Stephanie spent 10 years at Salesforce in a variety of roles in EMEA and the USA. She is now privileged to be building and leading a world class global marketing team at Optimizely focused on optimization and personalization, account based marketing, online and interactive marketing, demand generation, and so many more exciting marketing disciplines.
Stephanie, thank you for joining us today. Now let’s get into the content.
Today’s session is going to dig into a number of questions that we’ve seen crop over over the past few years. As marketers get more savvy about Account-Based Marketing, they concentrate more and more on the ability to track and measure their strategy.
Today, we’ll cover how to determine your goals, how to create and track a target account list, how to measure the success of those accounts, as well as the performance of your programs and strategy. Finally we’ll also talk about the ways that you can help enable your sales team with timely and useful data.
First and foremost, you need to set goals for your ABM strategy.
In order to do that, you’ll need to get buy-in and input from the right set of stakeholders in your company. In most cases, this will involve at least Sales, Marketing, and Finance.
Finance really kicks off this process, as they have insight into the long-term plan for the company. If you need to hit a certain revenue number a quarter or two quarters or a year down the road, that requires a certain volume of opportunities generated this quarter, and the next and the next. By starting with a fixed desired outcome (revenue), you can build a model that ensures you predictably hit those numbers.
Once Finance has built the plan and worked backwards to arrive at the volume of pipeline required to hit future numbers, the Sales and Marketing teams need to agree on achievable ways to impact that goal.
One key component of successfully aligned goals is that both Sales and Marketing are focused on the same thing. While your Marketing team is certainly going to look at things like MQL’s, registrant numbers, even click-through rates, you want to encourage them to think of those metrics as leading indicators of more impactful things like pipeline. And ideally you take that encouragement a step further by making that their true singular focus. You can even take that a step further and set up your bonus structure so that your Marketing team is focused on pipeline, rather than leads.
Stephanie, maybe you can weigh in on the ways that your team thinks about setting goals for their programs?
As you are setting up your goals, you obviously also want to think about how to leverage the data that you have currently in order to understand where you are today compared to where you need to be tomorrow.
Work with operations in order to understand which programs and channels are working, and how they are contributing to opportunities today. From there, you can start to prioritize different areas of focus, and set up an integrated strategy designed to impact those goals.
In many cases, you are going to find that in order to see progress, your marketing and sales organizations are going to need to get laser-focused on high-value accounts that are likely to convert at high rates.
In order to dig into this, I’m going to turn to Stephanie, who can give her take on Optimizely’s experience with setting up their target account list.
[I believe that Stephanie had a specific talk track she wanted to share here about Optimizely’s experience with building their target account list…] John, I think you are familiar with this slide...
Once you’ve built and massaged your list, there are a few tips and tricks that we’ve picked up through our own experience that will help you manage that list.
This might seem a little bit obvious, but it is important to be able to identify your accounts within your CRM and Marketing Automation System. Why? Couple of reasons: first, you are able to report on the performance of those accounts compared to your non-targets. Second, you can use that target account designation as a way to prioritize follow-up for your sales team.
You also want to start tracking all of the Marketing and Sales touches that hit those target accounts. This will enable you to build out the full buyer experience.
As you continue to iterate on that initial list, there are a few different ways that you can measure the success of the list itself.
Ultimately you are trying to figure out whether this is the right target account list to help you meet your business goals. Set expectations around how much of your pipeline is going to come from this list, knowing that these accounts should be the ones that are converting at the highest rates. There isn’t necessarily a hard number on how much of your funnel should be filled with target accounts, but understand that if you have too too many from outside of it, you might consider an audit to understand why.
Beyond the list itself, of course you want to measure the performance of your programs and overall strategy.
Some of these metrics are more familiar than others, but what you are trying to do is build out a reliable funnel that will help you forecast the performance of your programs.
If we start at the top, you might think about how many total inquiries are generated, basically the raw number of hand raises that you pulled in. From there, you can clean out the dupes and land at the number of contacts and accounts involved in the campaign. You can tease that apart to look at how many of those are on your target account list, or potentially how many are already customers.
As you move lower into the funnel, you can tie your marketing efforts more explicitly to business outcomes. You can look at the number of MQL’s, SAL’s and pipeline attributed to your campaign, and follow those through to closed/won deals. By keeping these funnel metrics at the forefront, you can ensure that your team is focused on the quality of their inquiries, rather than just the quantity.
Don’t forget that your efforts should reach across your entire sales organization. While you may start off by piloting one or two reps, by the time you launch a holistic ABM program, you are going to want to check on the distribution of the accounts across the team. Again, as these are your highest quality accounts, you want to be sure that you are feeding reps and setting opportunity generation expectations based on that distribution.
In that vein, I’d like to spend a little bit of time talking about how to enable your sales team in order to really maximize the performance of your programs.
As we already touched on, a good first step is to look carefully at which individuals in your organization are benefiting from any given campaign. By linking individual sales reps or teams to the contacts and accounts that are a part of a campaign, you develop a sense of accountability. You aren’t giving them a generic list of leads; you are giving them a personalized list of their accounts that are being impacted by a program.
For each campaign you run, you can build out an enablement package with reports broken down by rep, follow-up assets, and email templates. The easier and more explicit your ask of sales, the more likely it will get done.
Finally you want to give sales the opportunity to get involved with your efforts. Take advantage of their knowledge of what it’s like out in the field, and incorporate their feedback and ideas into your future programs. As an added bonus, it reinforces the trust that you built up by building your target accounts list to begin with.
We’ve covered a lot of content today, so before we open it up for Q&A, I want to go over a couple of the key takeaways.
First, set realistic goals in partnership with Sales and Finance.
Keep that spirit of collaboration going as you build out and iterate on your target accounts list.
Take a look at how that list impacts your sales funnel in order to determine whether it needs additional tweaking.
Obviously keep your goals front of mind and measure your performance against them.
Finally, be sure that you bring and keep sales in the fold as you plan and execute your ABM strategy.
Now we’re going to open it up to Q&A. As a reminder, you can still enter your questions in the Q&A tab on the left side of your screen.
We have an attendee who would like to know…
Seed questions
1 John - What are some other ways we can enable our Sales teams? 2. Stephanie - Have you ever measured ABM based on different areas? Midwest vs. South, etc. 3. John - Is it possible to have more than 1 target account list?4. Stephanie - What are some of the biggest changes you have seen since you started using ABM?
Well it looks like we are just about out of time.
Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter at @Demandbase and join the conversation using the #ABMwebseries hashtag.
Thank you so much to Stephanie for speaking, and thank you to our audience for joining us. On behalf of Demandbase, have a great rest of your day.