What ABM Metrics Are Marketers Prioritizing This Year?

September 2, 2020

Demandbase Top ABM Priorities Sept2020Although a majority (61%) of businesses report that they are currently running an account-based marketing (ABM) program to some extent, very few appear to be at a mature stage when it comes to measuring ABM. Only 5% of the marketers surveyed for a recent report [download page] from Demandbase say their measurement of ABM is “awesome”, while almost two-thirds (63%) report that their measurement is still in the very early to early stages.

That said, those businesses that are further along in their ABM initiatives and seeing high ROI also rate the sophistication of their measurement higher. More than half of these marketers say that their company’s measurement of ABM is either “awesome” (23%) or solid (34%). By contrast, more than 6 in 10 companies seeing low ROI rate their measurement sophistication as early (26%) or very early (37%).

Which Metrics Are Marketers Tracking?

Recent research from Demand Gen Report found that two-thirds of B2B marketing executives would like to see deeper ABM metrics used in the next 12-18 months, with another 55% wanted to be able to measure ROI by channel.

There’s a strong need for such measurement in ABM: when the more than 600 Demandbase survey respondents were asked what their current ROI was with ABM, the majority responded that they either hadn’t started to measure ROI (57%) or that they didn’t know how to measure ROI (12%).

Nonetheless, only about one-quarter (26%) of respondents say that not being able to measure ROI is one of their biggest challenges for executing ABM.

Interestingly, although a large portion of marketers say they haven’t started to measure or don’t know how to measure ROI from ABM, two-thirds track revenue generated as an ABM metric. In fact, more respondents say they measure revenue generated than track marketing qualified leads (64%), pipeline created (59%) and account engagement (50%).

This finding is confirmed by another recent report [download page] from Ascend2 that identified target account revenue generated as one of the key metrics respondents used to measure the success of their ABM programs.

Measuring ROI a Bigger Priority for Those With Full ABM Programs

Overall, marketers seem to be content with looking at revenue generation, as measuring the ROI of ABM programs isn’t a top priority. Instead, ABM execution is a bigger priority, suggesting that the sophistication of their programs is a factor.

Indeed, for those companies with full ABM programs in place for at least 6 months, measuring ROI is a slightly bigger priority than ABM execution. Previous research shows that being able to attribute marketing efforts to revenue has been a priority for ABM marketers for some time – and perhaps those with more comfort in their ABM maturity can turn their efforts to measurement.

The full report can be found here.

About the Data: The DemandBase findings are based on a survey of 604 respondents (75% of whom were marketers) across 12 industries and a variety of sizes.

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