In Part One: Building Your Team, we learned how to create the right ABM team. Now it’s time to take your newly aligned team and ease into the ABM depths. But before diving into creating a program and tracking down your accounts it’s important to take a step back. What is the point of your program? What problem are you trying to solve? More importantly, how are you going to prove that you’re solving these problems?
Defining your goals and KPIs for ABM provides a framework from which a strategy can be easily developed.
Clear goals and KPIs are paramount for a few reasons:
- A clear goal brings with it a determinable starting point and narrows the scope of your objective. This allows the goal to be broken down into reachable milestones.
- A defined goal provides an indicator as to what KPIs should be examined to prove value.
- ABM tools are expensive. Without clearly defined goals it can be difficult to decipher what you need. If you’re trying to focus on converting anonymous to known records it makes a lot more sense to begin by investing in a retargeting/web personalization tool rather than a tool for orchestrating sales.
Goals
For the purpose of this discussion our idea of goals revolves around the technical aspects of your process with the aim of influencing the bigger picture.
When evaluating what your goals should be, it can be easy to get carried away. Start small and focus on known pain points. I would guess it’s pretty likely you already know the sticking points in your customer journey. Maybe there is a struggle to bring records from anonymous to known or a glut of records who won’t move beyond MQL. The improvement of these by using ABM are great initial goals to set.
It’s common that the pain points of team members will come to light when working through the alignment process. Consider these as you develop your initial ABM goals. Not only will they improve process, but also deepen buy-in from team members who feel their needs are heard and valued.
Ultimately, the objective of your initial goals is to make your process more efficient. Seeing results here will then roll up to the bigger picture goals of increased revenue, velocity, etc.
KPIs
Goals and objectives are critical for maintaining a focused ABM effort, but at the end of the day we have to prove it works.
Identifying the correct KPIs for your goals can be tricky and it’s important to remember that ABM metrics are going to be account-based, not lead based. Like everything else, it makes sense to start with a foundational structure to your KPIs.
Engagio (and most other ABM tools) base their fundamental KPIs off of the following:
Coverage
Do you have enough data on the target accounts you are selecting? The better your coverage the better your chance of improving performance.
Awareness
Are the stakeholders within your accounts aware of you and your services/product? It’s pretty tough to make a sale if someone doesn’t know who you are or what you do. Look to increase awareness with web personalization, ads, social activity etc. Likewise, your KPIs will focus on metrics proving value to these efforts.
Engagement
Who is engaging with you? Is it the key stakeholders of an account you’re targeting? With ABM you should know who should be interacting with your marketing efforts. Additionally, that interaction should increase over time. Your KPIs will focus on tracking score, engagement minutes, etc. and the overall trending of these engagements.
Reach
Are your campaigns reaching your target accounts? With the focused effort of ABM we want to ensure that marketing spend is directed towards your identified accounts. Without proper reach, awareness and engagement both suffer.
Impact
Is it working? I know this is a bit of a blanket statement but this is where your specific KPIs begin to be evaluated with the bigger picture. How is this impacting your ROI? Attribution? This is where journey metrics also begin to make an appearance.
Reporting is a rabbit hole that we will venture down another day, but for now using the above gives some parameters to how your goals can be reported on and ultimately proven.
We now know what we want to go after and how we’re going to show value. The framework is beginning to be laid.
In Part 3 (stay tuned), we will cover solidifying the target account identification process.
