B2B marketers have historically relied on leads and site traffic as the key metrics to evaluate effectiveness of a marketing campaign. However, in the age of personalization, that approach to measurement has become outdated. Those metrics are both aggregated, looking at high-level performance across a broad swath of decisions makers. 

More individualized strategies, like account-based experiences (ABX), require new metrics and ways of thinking that are more individualized, too. This mandate may sound daunting, but there are ways to break down performance into short, medium, and long-term objectives to make it more achievable. This blog post covers each of those metrics to help you prove impact for ABX marketing and optimize your efforts effectively.

1. Short-Term Measures (0 to 3 months)

Our research shows that the average B2B decisioning process lasts 350 days. With such a long journey, shorter-term metrics are critical to get timely insights into how campaigns are performing. At this stage, the key objective is engagement – ensuring that you’re frequently engaging with a good number of accounts and that those interactions are both relevant for the buyer and valuable for your brand. This translates into two main buckets of KPIs:

• Account Intelligence indicates your database’s health on contact and account intelligence related to their needs, technographics, competition, and other important datapoints. Success metrics include:
  • Accounts reached
  • Accounts visited
  • # of contacts added 
  • Account challenges or needs

• Account score identifies what percentage of your contacts have become marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) through various engagements with your brand. Success metrics include:
  • Accounts with high-value actions
  • Accounts with a higher amount of time spent and engagement 

2. Medium-Term Measures (4 to 12 month)

Once a prospect begins engaging with you and has taken high-value actions to become a marketing-qualified lead (MQL), the next performance goal is conversion progression. You want to evaluate whether your marketing efforts are helping the account move forward in the buying journey and quickly identify stall-out points that need to be addressed. The two main buckets of KPIs at this stage are:

• Account Progression rate, which shows how successfully you’re translating account coverage and intelligence into meaningful content engagement and progression to conversion. If marketing is working, you’d expect to see conversion rates for interactions like meetings, webinar sign ups, and event participation increase, leading to more opportunities. You would see accounts progress from Awareness to Engagement to Marketing/Sales Qualified to Pipeline and, finally, to becoming a customer. It is important to map each of the accounts across these various journey stages.  Success metrics include:
  • Total number of accounts per journey stage 
  • Pipeline/opportunity conversion rate    
• Velocity rate, another metric that can indicate the usefulness of your content– the idea being that more helpful content makes the decision process easier (and shorter). Success metrics include:
  • Conversion rate to next stage
  • Time to conversion

3. Long-Term Measures (12+ months)

The final stage of measurement in ABX focuses on revenue generated. Now that you’ve started a relationship and provided content to help the prospect progress on their journey, the next natural stage is a purchase. This is the ultimate measure of ABX performance – but remember, it can’t be the only one because it doesn’t pinpoint where optimization is needed in the journey, and it takes too long to come to fruition. The two main buckets of KPIs at this point are:

• Revenue contribution – not strictly from a dollar perspective, but also from a trend standpoint. Are average deal sizes increasing? Are win rates improving? If both are stagnant, then your ABX efforts might not be contributing additional value beyond your other marketing campaigns. Success metrics include:
  • Revenue generated by accounts that’s attributable to ABX programs via attribution modeling.
  • Optimal budget allocation, or the ROI for ABX initiatives based on the revenue calculations from the above attribution modeling.

• Retention/upsell opportunities, similarly looking at trends versus absolute figures. Are your ABX campaigns driving more of these opportunities than other marketing efforts would have? Are you seeing better retention rates as a result of providing more account-based service and support after the sale? Matching your pre-ABX benchmarks is not the goal – you should aspire to exceed them to extract incremental value from your ABX approach. Success metrics here are similar to those for revenue contribution.

Conclusion

ABX is an important evolution for B2B brands to deliver great customer experiences – but without the right measurement in place, it’s impossible to know whether your efforts are working and how you can make them even better. By implementing the right KPIs throughout the purchasing journey, you can make sure your content is relevant and pivot quickly if it’s not hitting the mark.