The Complete Guide to Starting with Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

ITSMA first coined the concept of ABM in 2004. Their goal was to help marketers achieve better results by stopping them from drafting a sales pitch for a very general target audience and instead pushing them to create personalised campaigns and messaging for multiple stakeholders in high-value target accounts. 

So, by ITSMA's definition: Account-Based Marketing is "treating individual accounts as markets in their own right."

Since then, Account-Based Marketing strategies have developed even further. 

Broader definitions have gained traction due to technology players moving into this space. We like how Engagio (who have been acquired by Demandbase) defines ABM: "a go-to-market strategy that coordinates personalised marketing and sales efforts to land and expand into target accounts and boost revenue". 

This means that the emphasis is on the quality of the accounts rather than the quantity of the prospects. 

With ABM, we identify high-value strategic accounts and target the critical decision-makers in these businesses.

ABM Pillar #1: It's a strategy

• ABM is not a campaign that you can run once. It is a strategic marketing approach that the entire organisation needs to embrace. 
• Remember, "ABM is a strategic approach".

ABM Pillar #2: It's personalised

• Marketing and sales teams work to deliver personalised content and campaigns that speak to decision-makers in a specific account rather than an entire market. These campaigns are tailored to address the client's business problems.

ABM Pillar #3: It's a coordinated effort between the sales and marketing teams

• Marketing and sales being on the same page is critical for the success of any ABM campaign. The sales reps need to collaborate with marketing executives to develop a focused approach to target best-fit accounts.
• In addition to marketing and sales collaboration, alignment with customer success teams and the finance team can also have a significant impact; as mentioned before, ABM is an organisational strategy.

ABM Pillar #4: It's a land-and-expand strategy

• It's not just about landing new deals and new clients. We also need to look at how to expand into the targeted accounts and boost revenue potential.
• Based on where our stakeholders are in the customer lifecycle, we need to care about our relationships with them. Here, we're talking about increasing mindshare, enhancing brand awareness, and nurturing our existing customer accounts.

ABM Pillar #5: It's highly targeted

• The key is being extremely specific about the companies we are targeting. In an ABM process, we define the exact target accounts that we want as customers. We also look at factors such as revenue potential and the customer journey to create an ABM strategy.
• We also want to solve the client's problem and not just promote the solution we sell. This requires a profound understanding of the clients and their organisations so that the propositions truly help them achieve their business objectives.

Now that we can define ABM. Let's continue with who can make the most of it. At first, ABM was considered mainly for the B2B enterprise-level companies. However, the technology and capabilities developed in the past few years changed the game and has made it more accessible.

If you want to know whether an account is a good fit to implement an ABM strategy, you should look for two deciding factors:

• A Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) of larger than $10k and up to millions of dollars
• Organisations with complex sales environments where multiple decision-makers and influencers need to be on board to get the contract signed.

Usually, ABM is beneficial when your company is facing the following challenges:

• Not enough highly qualified leads or too many leads from small companies that are not a good fit for the solution you are offering
• The marketing and the sales team have trouble collaborating.
• Your organisation usually has long sales cycles
• Difficulty to show a return of investment (ROI) from your marketing campaigns

An ABM strategy can help with all of the above.

1. Shortened sales cycle

By focusing on the key accounts and decision-makers that matter most, ABM helps shorten the sales cycle and drives organisational efficiency.

This means that the efforts focus on high-value accounts that are more likely to become a customer rather than companies that might be too small or may end up not engaging with your business.

2. Higher deal sizes

As a result of being more efficient, companies who invest in ABM see an average increase of 171% in average contract size.

They land more prominent clients overall since they can focus resources on their ideal prospects and avoid opportunities that are not the right fit.

3. Drives sales & marketing alignment

According to Forrester Research, organisations with aligned sales and marketing teams see an average of 32% annual revenue growth.

Instead of complaining about unqualified leads or lack of follow-through on potential clients, ABM allows sales and marketing to collaborate and work as one team.

Everyone is targeting and working on the same accounts instead of losing focus on different individual leads. A common goal helps everyone speak the same language.

4. Better win rate

When marketing and sales work as one and focus their efforts, they increase engagement in their targeted accounts.

As a result, there is an increase in the number of closed opportunities. There have been reports of up to 50 per cent or higher improvement in conversion rates of qualified opportunities to closed/won deals.

5. Clear ROI of marketing efforts

Attribution is always hard to measure, especially in B2B. This makes marketing's job even more challenging to show how they're contributing to the company's pipeline and revenue.

Account-Based Marketing focuses on account-specific data.

Instead of measuring traditional lead generation metrics, results can be directly linked to the pipeline and revenue generated from a target account. Since we know the accounts that we're going after, we can directly see if any of our target accounts have entered the sales pipeline and then calculate the ROI of the campaign.

Let's illustrate this point with a simple example:

Let's suppose we decide that we are going to target 100 companies. We run a campaign for four months and spend $50,000 (spending $500 per account). When it's time to analyse the results, we see how many of these 100 companies we have closed.

In this example, let's say we closed 4 of them. Each with an average contract value of $100,000 (total revenue of $400,000). Fantastic!

Now, you can go back and do the maths. For every $1 that you spent, your ABM campaign generated $8 of revenue. You can also extrapolate this metric further up the sales funnel-like the total number of meetings generated at your target accounts or the amount of pipeline created.

As we can see, Account-Based Marketing has amazing benefits for organisations, and it also adds tremendous value for clients.

This approach plays an integral role in customer retention since targeting specific accounts ties the campaign to the prospect's particular needs. Every touchpoint along the buyer's journey is a personalised experience.

1. Define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

It's about engaging with organisations, not just individuals.

You will need to do proper quantitative and qualitative research about the type of companies you want to go after. Defining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) will set the basis to move forward. 

Some of the factual data to consider could be the size of the companies you're targeting, the vertical or industry they operate in and their geographic footprint. This kind of data is referred to as firmographic data.

You also want to investigate what type of technology they are using. This will help you understand how your solution can help them get more out of their existing tech stack or develop a strategy to replace some of their existing tools altogether. This is called technographic data.

2. Define buying centres & personas

Once you define your ideal customer profile, you'll need to identify who you will connect with within those organisations.

Depending on your business, you might need to deal with different departments. This means identifying buying centres within the companies you want to go after. For example, the marketing or the IT departments.

Next, you want to point out who are the key stakeholders. You need to get insights into their goals, motivations, and pain points to start defining personas.

3. Create a target account list

By now, you have a lot of information about the companies you want to pursue. You can create an account list of those and dig deeper.

Get insights on the businesses they are networking with, their corporate culture and their investments. 

Other things to focus on include the way decisions are made in the company, pain points and the interests of the decision-makers.

4. Tier the accounts you have selected

With your account list ready, you will be able to tier the accounts you have identified.

We will talk about tiering in-depth in the next section, but for now, let's just say that you can categorise potential customers depending on the size of the opportunity and the likelihood of success in three tiers:

1.     Strategic ABM tier: one-to-one
2.     Scale ABM tier: one-to-few
3.     Programmatic ABM tier: one-to-many

5. Identify the messaging and theme development

By now, you have a good understanding of the accounts you are going after and the people important to you in those accounts. You have also placed those accounts in tiers. You are in decent shape to start developing the messaging for your target accounts.

We've talked about how Account-Based Marketing provides a personalised experience for customers. At this stage, you can personalise content and messaging and develop specific actions that are relevant to the needs of your potential target accounts.

6. Pick the right marketing channels

So, how are you going to reach out to these people specifically? You need to decide how you will deliver your message at the right time to these organisations.

Some common marketing channels used in ABM are

1. Marketing emails (EDMs)
2. Paid ads
3. Direct mail
4. Social media
5. Sales outreach
6. Targeted IP and social ads
7. Content syndication
8. Tradeshows, in-person events and virtual events

7. Design an ABM play

An Account-Based Marketing play is a sequence of activities that are coordinated and implemented to reach and engage target accounts. 

You need to execute time-bound tasks and actions during the sales lifecycle.

You need to design a plan that specifies the sequence of work that's going to be done to reach a decision-maker or to close a target account. It is paramount to design a play that is both multi-touch and multi-channel.

8. Execute and measure

You've done your homework; now it's time to have some fun and execute your plan!

While you step into action, you must keep an eye on how you will measure your results.

These questions can help you identify indicators to track your progress:

• Are you expanding the number of stakeholders you interact with?
• Are there gaps in your execution that you can address for your subsequent campaigns?
• Are your KPIs aligned with company revenue?
• What could you do better going forward?

9. Optimise and scale for bigger campaigns

You will learn a lot as you measure your work. This information will help you adjust your process and see where you need to improve.

With all those learnings, you will be able to take your ABM strategy to the next level and scale for bigger campaigns.

When it comes to measuring Account-Based Marketing (ABM) success, one of the most significant difficulties for marketers is determining the right metrics. 

At xGrowth, we lean on the 3R framework provided by ITSMA to understand how an Account-Based Marketing campaign is performing. The 3 Rs refer to relationship, reputation and revenue. 

Let’s look at each of the above components in detail.

1. Relationship Metrics:

These metrics aim to gauge the quality of your relationships with customers in both current and potential accounts. 

They provide information on how the engagement level of your primary contacts has changed after your ABM efforts.

The below is not an exhaustive list of metrics, but they are an excellent starting point:

• Number of executives newly contacted
• Number of stakeholders reached by ABM campaigns
• Frequency of meetings with current customers
• Number of calls booked with key decision-makers from target accounts

Next, we will go into reputation metrics. 

2. Reputation Metrics:

Reputation metrics help evaluate the impact of your ABM program on how your target accounts perceive your organisation. There could be multiple forms of KPIs that you can use to track how your account-based marketing programs are adding to your reputation, but the below two encompass a considerable majority of them.

• Level of customer advocacy
  • Customer advocacy can include KPIs like how many referrals you get from existing accounts and how often your content is being shared by clients on their social channels.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)

After reputation, let’s move to revenue.

3. Revenue Metrics

When it comes to tying your marketing efforts to business growth and sales numbers, revenue metrics are of utmost importance and do not require any explanation.

Tracking certain revenue metrics can prove to be highly valuable for any marketer in the ABM space. Below are some that we feel are the most significant ones.

• Deal size (revenue growth)
• Share of wallet
• Sales velocity

While the three Rs framework is a good approach to looking at ABM metrics, an important thing to note is that the final list of metrics you choose also depends on the end objective you are trying to achieve with your ABM strategy. 

For more details on this topic, read the detailed piece we wrote about Account Based Marketing metrics.

ABM is usually divided into three different tiers depending on the level of personalisation. As you move up from Programmatic ABM to Strategic ABM, you should see a change in three areas:

• Increase in return on investment per account
• Increase in the level of involvement from the marketing and the sales team to engage those accounts
• Increase in the level of personalisation for each account

Let's analyse each tier in detail:

1) Strategic ABM Tier: one-to-one

It is used for the most important accounts and is executed on a one-to-one basis. This means that it is a very personalised campaign.

The idea is that the team focuses on building and nurturing relationships with the most valued stakeholders in your target accounts. To do this, you need to demonstrate a great understanding of the customer's goals and craft your messaging around those.

This tier is mainly used for target account expansion. Because a huge investment goes into this type of strategy, it is implemented in situations where the chances of winning a deal are high. Both the likelihood of success and the size of the success need to be significant for the account to be positioned in the strategic tier of Account-Based Marketing.

2) Scale ABM tier: one-to-few

Sometimes referred to as ABM Lite, this tier is about creating marketing programs for clusters of accounts with similar business attributes, challenges and opportunities.

The level of customisation is lighter compared to the one-to-one tier (Strategic ABM) since it is used for small groups of accounts instead of individual ones.

The programs are designed in ways to be lightly customised for each account within the cluster. The primary customisation efforts focus on the business issues that apply to all accounts within a cluster.

3) Programmatic ABM tier: one-to-many

In this tier, the focus is shifted to positioning accounts into much larger clusters and tailoring campaigns for those specific accounts at scale.

The accounts are selected from across one market and need to be aligned with the company's sales coverage model. The key to Programmatic ABM is to find the right balance between customisation and scale. 

Compared to the other tiers, this one-to-many approach is more reliant on technology. This is because a one-to-many campaign can require targeting and delivering a personalised message to a large number of accounts, sometimes in the thousands. We here at xGrowth also got together with some industry leaders in APAC to discuss some best practices for programmatic ABM. Check it out to level up on your ABM game

So, how can you choose the right approach for our organisation? Well, you don't have to choose one. A blended approach is best: the top-performing ABM teams employ two or even all three tiers.

1. Thinking of it as something only for the marketing department

We have mentioned this before, but we can't stress it enough: ABM is a coordinated effort between sales and marketing. It will only work if both departments work as one team.

Sales and marketing need to be aligned. Both teams should have common goals and messaging while reaching out to the target accounts.   

2. Seeing it as a campaign

This one is a classic. It is easy to say, 'let's run an ABM campaign,' but this is not the case. Account-Based Marketing is, by definition, a strategy.

If you try to run a three-month ABM campaign, it's not going to work. Your team needs to embrace ABM as a strategy and focus on it from a long-term perspective.

3. Believing that using an ABM tool is enough

There are a lot of great tools and platforms out there to help your team with your ABM strategy. However, if you think that just one tool will do all the work and solve all your problems, you will be disappointed. It does not work like that.

It's important to remember that tools are there to assist your team's efforts, not replace them. You need to do your homework, analyse which accounts you should go after, and understand the goals of your prospects and customers. Before investing in tools, you need to lay the foundations and design your strategy. Success will come with the right balance of human work and the right tools.

4. Not running a pilot

Many companies try to make a switch from their existing marketing strategy and go full ABM overnight. It's a guaranteed road to failure.

To truly become ABM-centred, it is crucial to run a pilot project as a starting point. Account-Based Marketing is a complex strategy. You should first run a pilot, build the practice, optimise, and gradually scale your efforts. Taking baby steps will allow you to iterate and learn what is working and what is not.

Let's talk about how to begin implementing ABM at your organisation.

If you are new to the ABM space, running a pilot will be a good starting point. 

A pilot will serve as proof of concept for your executive leadership. 

While you are trying to convince your leadership to run your first ABM campaign, have some successful Account-Based Marketing examples handy. These can be used to get their buy-in before making it an organisation-wide practice. 

With that said, let’s go into a step-by-step process for launching and executing your ABM pilot.

1. Start with building relationships

We have been talking non-stop about how marketing and sales teams should work together. So, as a marketer, you need to reach out to sales and partner with someone.

2. Define your objectives and set expectations on results and timelines

You and your internal champion from the sales team will both need to decide how far you can go with this campaign. 

The key is to run your pilot in a way that it is small enough to be safe but large enough to show results. You need to maximise learning while minimising risk.

Take some time to plan and estimate. You must have clear objectives and manage expectations for your campaign. Analyse what you are going to measure and why.

Ask yourself questions like

• What would it mean to run a successful campaign?
• What's a suitable number of accounts?
• What should the revenue look like?
• Do your current resources allow you to go after the number of accounts you have estimated?
• Do you have the bandwidth to do concise research on all the accounts you have selected, and will the revenue be worth the effort? 
• It's also vital to analyse how well-suited you are for the market you are going after.

As you design your ABM campaign, the team should be aligned in terms of

• Objectives
• Timeline
• What are you measuring, and why
• Who are you going to present your results to

3. Identifying high-value target accounts

Here, you would want to work with your sales champion to produce a target account list. This list should be a reasonable one. For instance, there’s no point in selecting accounts from an industry where your organisation has had no success. 

For the purposes of the pilot, go for accounts from the industry that your sales team is confident about!

4. Develop a messaging or campaign theme

Based upon the agreed-upon objectives, account list and research done, this step is all about developing a single GTM messaging that your marketing and sales team will use across the buyer journey.

5. Execute

This step is self-explanatory. If you haven’t heard it before, execution is key. If you are running a creative direct mail campaign, ensure you have the right mailing partners. Work with all the stakeholders involved closely, be it your graphic designers, content creators, or copywriters. A best practice is to share your campaign theme and context with all the players involved.

6. Measure, Report, and Revise

Lastly, remember to measure and report on the results of your campaigns as frequently as possible. A weekly report on the meetings booked or accounts reached should be broadcasted to the senior leadership. Driving the ROI of your ABM pilot will ensure that ABM persists in your organisation for the long term. 

Share your success and failures with your team and make improvements to your strategy accordingly. The results of your pilot should be identifying what works best for you in terms of audiences, channels, actions and tools. This will be the foundation to scale.

In this section, we will share some Account-Based Marketing best practices and tactics that you can use to multiply the results of your efforts. These would complement the ABM strategies we talked about in our previous section here. 

1. Personalise content to your account’s pain points 

This one is an easy decision; personalising content marketing efforts is the lowest-hanging fruit in ABM. 

By creating offers and content that are built specifically to address the pain point of each target account stakeholder, you're able to engage with your audience on their level and build a stronger relationship from it!

Here is an example scenario. 

Your organisation sells solutions in the cybersecurity space, and your research shows that cyber-attacks on financial services firms are a key industry pain point. It keeps CIOs, CISOs and CEOs up at night. 

You also find out that a big bank in your geography is looking for a new security vendor because they had some of their core systems hacked. 

The tactic of personalising content for your account could be done by launching LinkedIn Ads targeting the C-level of that specific bank. The ad could take them to a blog article on your website about “5 things to look for while evaluating a security vendor”. 

This is just one very simple example of what we mean by personalising content. 

Keep in mind; it’s not just about personalising content; personalisation could mean creating a completely custom website experience or creating very personalised SOW, proposals and offers.

2. Double down on social intelligence & market research tools

Strong market research capabilities are key to identifying your target accounts’ pain points. 

The easiest way to get a clear idea about what's going on at your target company is by subscribing to and monitoring public information services like Google Alerts. 

There are also other tactics that you can use, such as surveillance of social media activity for hidden insights into the happenings within the companies. LinkedIn and other similar third-party tools can help you in getting all the information you need.

3. Lean on professional list builders

The right contacts can be hard to come by. That's why there are vendors who specialise in creating lists based on role or responsibility. They'll also guarantee that the person you're looking for is still active! 

Leaning on professional list builders such as Reachforce (acquired by Leadspace) & Televerde for your Account-Based Marketing campaigns can be a game-changer sometimes.

4. Leverage retargeting

Retargeting is another brilliant tactic to engage your customers and make them feel like you're always there for the taking. While more common in B2C, retargeting has found applications in the B2B and ABM world as well.

Retargeting means showing ads to people who have already visited your website or seen your ad. This works by storing small pieces of data called cookies in people's web browsers. Then, when these people visit other websites, they will see ads for your product. This is an effective way to remind potential customers about what you're selling and increase brand awareness. 

In an ABM campaign, retargeting ensures you are always in front of your accounts!

5. Direct mail, your hidden weapon

You may think that marketing efforts today are all about social media and online content, but you would be surprised to know that there is an underutilised strategy out there.

Direct mail. Yes! Direct mail campaigns can return up to 20 times what is invested in them. Read about the awesome direct mail campaign that we ran for one of our clients here at xGrowth.

6. Tap into the network of non-sales employees

The connections other employees have within your target accounts could be a potential source of information and insight. Tools such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator allow you to see which team members are connected with people at these targets.

So far, we have been talking about Account-Based Marketing, why it is important, its benefits, ways to implement it, tactics and best practices. We will now dive into the tech stack that will enable you and your organisation to execute your ABM strategies with finesse at scale.

A disclaimer here is that you don’t necessarily need these platforms to launch your ABM program. These tools, however, will make your journey smoother, easier, faster and scalable.

Best Core Account-Based Marketing Platforms

1. Demandbase

The Demandbase ABX Cloud is a comprehensive platform for running advanced and personalised account-based marketing campaigns. 

The platform’s capabilities include audience management, intent data capture on how customers behave on different channels and campaign activation through native and non-native channels. There’s also account measurement, so you know what works best when the time comes to make decisions about your future marketing strategy.

As a part of its product roadmap, Demandbase plans to launch predictive intelligence capabilities for forecasting a potential “product purchase” action from the buyer and making recommendations on what marketers should do with that information. 

2. Terminus

Terminus’ Account-Based Marketing software has native channel support with advertising, website chat and personalisation features such as dynamic email signatures.

In the last couple of years, it has grown inorganically to advance its vision and add new functionalities, the most recent being an integrated customer data platform (CDP). 

The company’s ABM tool can also create psychographic account profiles that can be used by marketers to gain detailed insights about their target audience and understand what messages resonated best with them.

From a future roadmap perspective, Terminus is working on creating better analytics and utilisation dashboards for its end users.

3. 6Sense

The 6sense Account Engagement Platform is a powerful tool for managing ABM programs across sales, marketing and operations teams. 

With its strong partner ecosystem and native capabilities, the 6Sense platform helps deliver relevant content & messaging to target account stakeholders across multiple social channels. This is just one of their core offerings, and more details about them can be accessed here.

6Sense plans to expand its predictive models for pipeline reporting. Their platform will also start leveraging goals-based AI to increase web engagement and identify new account opportunities.

4. RollWorks

RollWorks is definitely a company to watch out for! They have a unique and advanced Account-Based Marketing platform that is highly intuitive and user-friendly. Marketers can use RollWorks for account identification, multi-channel audience engagement and ABM's impact measurement. 

The company is also investing heavily in enhancing its current account scoring models and audience engagement capabilities. With all these amazing features, the organisation is on the path to becoming a leading player in the ABM space.

5. Other notable ABM platforms

While we shared some information about the four major ABM platforms, there are others in the market that should also be on your radar. Some of them are Mutiny, Hubspot ABM, Salesforce (Pardot) ABM & Triblio. 

Account-Based Marketing Complementary Platforms

Apart from the core ABM platforms that we talked about in the previous section; you can also think of including the following tools in your ABM tech stack.

We will again re-emphasise our disclaimer here that you don’t necessarily need these platforms to launch your ABM program. These tools, however, will make your journey smoother, easier, faster and scalable.

For acquiring high-quality intent data on your accounts, you may consider the following two platforms:

• TechTarget’s Priority Engine 
• Bombora 

For contact enrichment, i.e. getting information on account stakeholder list and other account happenings, the following platforms can be leveraged.

• Clearbit
• ZoomInfo
• Seamless.ai

Chatbots for your ABM strategy! Yes, chatbots can play a part in your ABM campaigns as well. Below is a platform that can help you in your ABM journey!

• Drift

Finally, you can consider the below organisations for your ABM content delivery.

• Pathfactory
• Uberflip

Speak to an account-based marketing expert for advice on martech

Alright, we are almost at the end of this ultimate account-based marketing guide! And this last section will arm you with some pre-made templates!

These templates can be used along with all the tools, tips and tricks we have shared so far to structure your Account-Based Marketing program. 

The other benefit of these templates is that they will help you execute ABM or at least get started with it without dedicated platforms and tools. 

The last thing about these templates is that they are a subset of our “Ultimate Account-Based Marketing Template” piece that can be accessed in the resources section of our website. Look for our ABM strategy template to create a successful ABM strategy.

In this guide, we have highlighted four of the nine in total! So, make sure to check out the remaining ones!

With those pointers out of the way, let’s look at the templates!

Template 1: Account Intelligence Template

This template will be used to capture the key data points on each of your target accounts. 

So, if you have ten target accounts, you will ideally want 10 of these

The following items will be captured for each account. 

• Industry to which the account belongs
• Industry trends 
• Annual revenue
• Projected revenue for the next 6 quarters
• Number of employees
• Geographical presence of the account
• Org chart
• Key strategic initiatives where your offering could play a part 
  • Take these from annual reports or social media coverage on the account
• Competitive landscape (Incumbent vendors)

Template 2: ABM Buying Centres Identification

This template will help you structure your thoughts around different buying centres and departments you would target within your accounts.

The figure below shows sample departments that might be involved in the decision-making process. For us to develop custom campaigns for stakeholders in each of these departments, we would want to know their pain points and motivations. We would also like to know the metrics they care about and by whom they are influenced. 

For instance, a CRM company would want to ensure they are at par with the best-of-breed solution because that’s what the marketing team might be looking for; they also need to ensure that they are competitively priced to remove any objections from procurement. 

The CRM should also be easily deployed because that’s the motivation for the technology team. The “ABM Buying Centres Identification” template forces you to explore and dig into all this information!

Template 3: ABM metrics

This is a simple dashboard template to capture the performance of your ABM campaigns.

• It can be used to show ROI to leadership and regular progress.
• Based on the type of ABM strategy you are following, all or some metrics can be captured in this template. 
  • Targeted Ad Impressions
  • Clicks
  • Engagements
  • Number of meetings booked
  • Number of executive-level leaders connected
  • Opportunities
  • $ Value of new opportunities created
  • Weekly/Monthly NPS (For existing accounts only)
  • Number of Advocates (For existing accounts only)

While the below image is exhaustive in terms of the kind of metrics you should be tracking, it is essential to look at them with some context and dive deeper. 

For instance, if you are tracking “Targeted Ad Impressions, it's not just about hitting a certain number of impressions for the campaign overall; instead, it's more along the lines of how many of those impressions were from the specific accounts in your target list! 

Furthermore, if most of your impressions come from just one target account and you have 15 accounts in your list, then you need to look at the “impressions” number with that added consideration. 

The above would be true for “Clicks” and “Engagements” as well!

Remember, your metrics will only make sense if they are being captured for your target account list!

If you want to know more about ABM metrics, check out our detailed blog here!

Template 4: Campaign Project Plan

This template is a simple Gantt chart where you can lay out the timelines and key milestones of your ABM campaigns. The snapshot below shows some standard components, such as creating relevant content, running ads, direct mail deliveries, and SDR reach-out. Ideally, your campaign project plan should align with the buyer's journey.

As mentioned several times in this guide, Account-Based Marketing can be a daunting task. It involves a lot of planning and collaboration among the marketing team, sales, account management, customer success and finance teams. 

It is a long-term play with marketing campaigns running from several months to sometimes a couple of years, it involves both new and existing customers, it involves an immense amount of research and thought to create campaigns for specific companies with specific key decision-makers. There is a lot to account-based marketing, and we have tried our best to equip you with all the information you would need to go from a beginner to a pro.

It has been great to guide you on the first steps of your Account-Based Marketing journey.

If you have any bumps on the road ahead, please reach out. We will be happy to help. See you!