In today’s dynamic B2B world, ABM can help your brand garner high-value leads. But how do you determine whether the campaign has served its purpose?
An individual no longer influences the success of business strategies. The future of decision-making is collective. It’s what a B2B buying committee is all about.
However, marketers remain stuck to unidirectional marketing strategies that oversimplify the decision-making process even after this realization. It considers each decision-maker a lead, which bears its own set of limitations- from inconsistent messaging to overlooking collective influence.
The traditional spray-and-tell approach fails to capture the impact of your marketing efforts on the entire committee.
So, ABM flips the traditional playbook.
It considers the entire right-fitting “account” as a target of one. ABM has come far from being a niche practice. It’s become mainstream and imperative to B2B sales. Why?
Top Three Benefits of Account-Based Marketing
93% of SaaS marketers have found this inbound strategy to be successful in meeting business objectives.
Let’s look at the three key reasons explaining why ABM matters:
Sales-marketing alignment
One of the chief points of account-based marketing is that it orients sales and marketing teams.
When these two teams align, they become unified in identifying target customers and developing campaign strategies. This collaboration improves communication and work efficiency, leading to better business outcomes.
You also create open lines of communication between these two teams, delivering better communication with the target accounts.
Enhanced customer experience
The importance of customer experience may be overlooked while promoting business offerings. Consider this: If a company is happy with your deliverables and communication style, they are likely to opt for your offerings again. With an ABM approach, you can focus on exchanging tailored messages specific to the audience, which conveys that your brand can solve their challenges.
And when clients’ needs are met, they will not hesitate to come back for your services/products
Shortens the sales cycle
Your sales and marketing teams spent hours reaching out to customers, let alone identifying the target accounts. So, when you choose ABM, your central focus shifts to identifying high-value prospects. It eliminates unqualified ones early on. And you end up with more high-quality b2b lead generation services, which elevates the overall ROI cycle.
Hyper-targeted account selection
Not all accounts are looking for your solutions. What if you’re targeting ill-fitting segments from the get-go? It’s where ABM comes into the picture.
It resolves this gap. And ensures that your marketing efforts reach only the right-fit accounts. Especially ones that illustrate some level of interest. With the right ABM metrics, outlining such accounts becomes straightforward.
And you can forecast which target accounts are most likely to convert and drive revenue for your brand. These are the high-priority accounts. And it’s ABM metrics that help you decode this.
So, your brand can boost its conversion rate and long-term growth.
Here is ABM’s whole picture- the why.
ABM is multi-directional and builds cohesion across the entire B2B buying committee. And acknowledges the collective influence of all members on a decision.
With ABM, each decision-maker receives marketing messages relevant to their position. Meanwhile, the content ties back to the company’s unified business value proposition.
There are no isolated individual interactions. But account-level coordination.
But this is all fluff without a medium to measure its impact. This is where ABM metrics come in.
Why is Calculating ABM Metrics Crucial?
ABM is a much-needed shift from traditional marketing shehnanigans. From casting a wide net on large client pools, B2B marketers have shifted to precision marketing.
That’s what ABM is all about.
It allows marketing teams to focus on every high-value account. Whether you want to acquire more clients or expand your market presence, this customer-centric strategy paves the way for business growth.
Measuring the impact of your ABM program is fundamentally different from a lead-based strategy. Your sales and marketing teams can redirect their focus on acquiring clients that add real value to your bottom line.
But this marketing program can only prosper in the long term if you can demonstrate its impact. Without the justification for what’s being spent, your ABM campaign loses its substance. And that’s the truth.
How precisely do you illustrate this?
Choose the correct ABM metrics to assess your ABM strategy’s performance.
ABM Metrics that Actually Matter in 2025
ABM has been around for quite a while. But the recent flux of digital transformation has brought it to the center, making it one of the most sought-after marketing functions. And the cycles of tech innovation have escalated its adoption, from growing businesses to large enterprises.
The entire market has come to terms with what this can afford them- you can reach more right-fit accounts and garner more data at your fingertips.
But what does this data say? How do you segregate the data that matters from vanity metrics? And then, how do you apply that data to gauge actionable insights from it?
We present ABM metrics that will help you here.
Close Rate
Here’s the harsh truth: the success or failure of any marketing strategy is predominantly defined by whether a deal was closed won, or lost. ABM moves the focus from lead volume to the target accounts acquired with active buyers.
When your prime attention is on reporting the close rate, you are no longer obsessed with the number of leads in the pipeline. The emphasis is on concrete, measurable ROI that corresponds to your efforts.
Bottom line? An effective ABM program gives you a few high-quality clients rather than many low-intent prospects.
Sales Velocity
Once you draw your attention to more closed won deals, the next ABM metric to measure is how long it took to acquire them.
In the rapidly expanding B2B market, where time is money, we strive not to waste resources on uninterested and unengaged leads. You can accomplish this by using a well-thought-out ABM approach. One that leverages more personalized, direct, and relevant content based on intent.
The marketing and sales teams also function holistically to boost audience engagement. Utilize the sales velocity ABM metric to gain insights into business outcomes that can be measured, such as more clients, better engagement, or higher ROI.
Deal Size
ABM’s hyper-targeted approach is a seamless tool to close deals without a hitch. And even row in larger deals that are complex to navigate.
The inherent value of this inbound strategy lies in customer-centricity that drives informed decision-making. It uses a different dialogue that prioritizes adding value to the customers rather than merely selling your offerings.
You can measure the overall impact of deal size through increased revenue and better brand exposure.
Pipeline Coverage
This fancy term denotes a ratio representing the number of target accounts expected to close in a quarter and your sales quota for the same period.
To measure the pipeline coverage, take your total pipeline for a given period and divide it by your sales quota for the same quarter.
Account Engagement Score
This score is your ideal metric if you want to quantify the overall customer engagement with your business. It offers the bigger picture of the response received across different channels, such as websites, email response/open rates, content downloads, event sign-ups, and social media.
Account Penetration Rate
In the account penetration process, the sales team first owns the account, then builds a meaningful relationship, and finally directs the account through the sales funnel.
It requires a substantial amount of time and commitment from the sales team to be 100% aligned with all windows of communication open for successful account penetration. How can you estimate whether your sales team is systematically navigating the territory or simply ‘milking’ target accounts?
You can get an answer by calculating the account penetration rate- a percentage of accounts from which orders are secured.
Marketing Qualified Accounts (MQAs)
You may encounter accounts that show interest in your offerings but may be unwilling to convert into paying accounts. If you track with MQAs, you can identify your potential customers in the early stages of the account-based marketing strategy:
- Determine the accounts that can be categorized as MQAs
- Keep tabs on these accounts and evaluate them using lead scoring based on their engagement with your content and interactions with your brand
- Track how many MQAs have progressed through your sales funnel
Total Addressable Market (TAM)
Although 74% of ABM campaigns are known to result in improved business revenue, how can you ensure a high revenue potential for your business? TAM ABM metric offers clarity about your brand to the stakeholders. It helps you identify every potential customer for your solution in a particular segment and measure their existing market share. To calculate the TAM value, all you have to do is multiply the average sale price by the number of potential customers.
But the question here is: How do you know which metric will offer you the answer you’re looking for? Throwing darts in the dark with your ABM metrics could lead to further complexities and confusion.
How do you make sense of the numbers? To effectively apply insights on the hollow data, you need to understand what’s really going on in your target accounts: how are they moving? What truly matters to them?
To answer all these queries, first develop a framework- one that analyzes and tracks the performance of your target accounts. You compare engagement across different accounts, and then orchestrate an ABM program.
So, began there.
Steps to Calculate ABM Account Engagement Scores
A. Choose the engagement activities.
Determine the chief engagement behaviors that you believe (from your research) impact the overall account score. Some common ones include website visits, content downloads, sign-ups, and event attendance.
B. Outline the crucial account-level attributes.
While behavioral data has gained immense precedence, account-level attributes still entail vitality. Specifically, to help define and categorize a target account, which influences the final account score. This means targeting attributes such as firmographic and demographic data, like company size, revenue, industry, and geographical location.
C. Assign points to all the values.
Each value/attribute must be assigned specific points according to levels of interest and importance. While higher points signify actively engaged actions, lower points could indicate mere browsing or doubt.
You can use a scale from 1 to 100 to simplify the process.
D. Weigh the values against each other.
Find out the relative importance of each point in comparison to the other and the final account score. This isn’t rooted in any rules and entirely depends on your objective. Only then will you be able to assign them the accurate value.
So, apply weightings to different attributes and behaviors depending on their accuracy in illustrating interest and conversion potential. And it’s alright if engagement behavior has more cruciality than account-level attributes. Because behavior directly depicts intent.
While account-level attributes are perfect for precise segment targeting.
E. Develop a scoring framework.
Gather all the attributes, and then curate a scoring formula. It doesn’t have to make sense to the broader market. But just to you. If it proves efficient in showcasing account engagement, that’s what truly matters.
Instill specificity. But also simple. A basic one would look something like this:
⇒ Account engagement score = (Engagement behavior 1Weight) + (Engagement behavior 2Weight) + (Account-level Attribute 1*Weight)
F. Segregate the accounts. And prioritize.
Now that you’ve developed a scoring formula, get down to the actual work. Add up the points for each account according to the framework, and then, segregate them. Categorize them as per the final scores- a high score indicates high-value accounts.
So, you can distribute the target accounts across high, medium, and low-value accounts. But before this, acknowledge the lower and upper limits for each category. For instance, high-value accounts would entail an account score between 75 and 100.
This is for simple analysis and comparison. And so you know which accounts to prioritize amidst the entire bunch.
G. Now, adapt your scoring framework to a B2B buying committee.
The total account score should be above 60% for it to be a high-value account. With it indicating healthy engagement metrics.
Differentiate the weightings and scores for different types of decision-makers: influencers and stakeholders.
For example, engagement behaviors can be scored as such:
⇒ For a stakeholder attending a webinar = 30 points.
⇒ For an influencer attending a webinar ⇒ 20 points.
And then, weightings can be attributed as follows:
⇒ Stakeholder = 5 (highest value)
⇒ Influencer = 3 (average value)
⇒ User = 1 (low value)
So then, for each decision-maker, you add up all the engagement behavior scores (for each action type) and multiply them by the weightings.
And for the buying committee? Add up all individual decision-maker scores.
Analyzing the right ABM metrics elevates your ABM strategy’s success rate.
The right ABM metrics are supposed to empower your marketing teams. Especially with data-driven actionable insights. So that your marketing team isn’t left out in the cold. And sales isn’t dealing with low-quality leads that seem like a dead end.
ABM is where personalization takes root. Especially to build positive brand-customer relationships. And that’s what the right ABM metrics build upon.
The right ones move beyond the basics- budget, authority, and urgency. And travel to the very heart of B2B buying. The need. With customers also at the very center.
That’s why it’s significant to determine which ABM metric works best for your brand. Whether driven by your business goals or target audience, it doesn’t matter. There must be a reason you’re measuring the specific metric and not others.
That’s what builds a strong ABM measurement framework. One that’s periodically reviewed and analyzed. And is flexible enough to leave ample room for improvement.
Account-Based Marketing FAQs
1. What is account-based marketing?
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a B2B marketing methodology that targets individual accounts as standalone markets. And rather than focusing on broad-based campaigns, it focuses more on winning and growing specific high-value accounts.
It fundamentally works on personalized content, messaging, and campaigns.
2. What are the three types of account-based marketing?
Think of it as three concentric circles:
- The bullseye is one-to-one ABM, where you’re essentially creating a custom suit for each account.
- Moving outward, one-to-few ABM is like designing a limited edition collection for a select group.
- The outer circle, one-to-many ABM, is akin to intuitive mass customization- personal enough to matter but scalable enough to reach more accounts.
3. How is account-based marketing different from customer marketing?
If customer marketing is fishing with a net in the ocean, ABM is spearfishing in specific, chosen spots.
In other words, traditional customer marketing broadcasts messages with the hope of catching interested buyers. Whereas ABM is more like a careful courtship- you’ve already identified your ideal matches and are crafting personalized approaches to win them over.
It’s the difference between hosting an open house and arranging private viewings for pre-qualified buyers.
