The One About ABM Measurement

So we have all of these metrics for inbound, all of these metrics for outbound, all of these metrics for our ABX programs, all of these metrics for the deals that AEs create directly. And so lots of flavors, but, again, you don’t need twenty dashboards for this. How many dashboards do we have this in? One. One source of truth. One dashboard. This is Revenue Makers, the podcast by Sixense investigating successful revenue strategies that pushed companies ahead. Alright, Saima. We’re doing another one. It’s just us, and we’re gonna not fight on that. We never fight. I forget which episode where I said, like, we were gonna have a knockdown fight, and we didn’t. And then I posted on LinkedIn, this was a knockdown, just kidding fight. So but this is a big one. I think everyone who’s gonna listen is gonna get excited. What do you wanna call it? Wanna call it the definitive ABX ABM measurement episode? Let’s call it that. So we’re gonna talk metrics by definition. And I feel like if you are gonna measure even eighty percent, maybe even sixty percent of what we’re gonna talk about, you’re doing a really great job. Right? So this is maybe the definitive episode and maybe not fully exhaustive, but pretty comprehensive. And take it with a grain of salt of maybe this is a little bit aspirational because not every metric might be readily available for you unless you’re a Sixense customer. But you should be on the track. Plugged. You should be on on the track to measure most of these. It’s a crawl, walk, run world, and so we’re gonna talk about all the things, but, you know, not all the things have to happen. As a prerequisite to listening to this episode or maybe to get the most out of this episode, what should the listeners go back and listen to? We have the series of definitive episodes, not unlike episodes from Star Wars or perhaps The Lord of the Rings, where you really wanna watch them all. So we had our ICP episode. We had our attribution episode. So is this the threequel to those two? This is. Now the threequel typically isn’t the best one in all of those examples you gave. Right? Maybe we’ll fight on this. I don’t think Back to the Future three was good. I would say Back to the Future three was weak, had some parts that were good, had some parts or we could be Toy Story three, which was great. There you go. So we’re gonna be the Toy Story three. Here we go. That’s our goal. Of podcast episodes. Alright. So let’s talk about ABX measurement for the real world. Now I think we break it up into two portions because there are certain metrics that are telling you if your programs are working. They’re after the fact. They’re what we would call lagging indicators. Did they generate pipeline? Did they generate meetings? Did they generate revenue? And so there’s lagging indicators, but a lot of marketers don’t have the luxury of waiting for those lagging indicators to show up and to manifest to prove that their programs are working. And so the leading indicators are almost more important to have a handle on as you embark on your ABX journey. Again, referencing back, you’ve got an ICP. So you kinda know where you’re playing, who the accounts that you wanna go after are. What’s the very first thing that could say, okay, whatever activities, whatever campaigns and programs you’re doing are starting to be effective or having impact. And where would you look to that? So I would, number one, start with quantifying your ICP. How many accounts are in your ICP? And accounts is, again, a loaded word. It means different things in different companies. But whatever your definition of an account is, whether it’s a global account, a domestic account, a site level account, know how many accounts you care about and you wanna go after in your program. We do ABM at scale. And so for us, it is tens of thousands of accounts, but some companies might have five hundred or even fifty or even ten. Either way, understand what that pool of accounts is, quantify it, and then you wanna start to understand how is that account performing in relation to your activities. And I would look at two things. Number one, are you as a company doing an effective job of reaching that account? Meaning, do you have programs that they’re enrolled in? Do you have those accounts in CRM? Are you doing outreach from a marketing perspective, from a sales perspective? So there’s something that six cents provides, which is a reach score, but you can proxy that based on, you know, how many of those accounts are in your ongoing programs, whether it’s display, whether it’s any of the above that I mentioned. So reach becomes really important because you need to reach these accounts in a multi omnichannel way. And then the second thing I would look at is how many of those accounts are actually engaging back with you. And engagement can be something like opening an email. It’s an early, early indicator. We’re talking leading indicators right now, by the way. So it could be opening an email. It could be being an anonymous visitor on your website. It can be picking up the phone, of course, and whatnot. And so reach and engagement within your ICP is probably the first thing I would look at, and there is more we can go in after that. Yeah. And if we talk about, you know, early indicators in terms of some engagement, you know, going back to your website, If you are getting those accounts to start to visit and measuring that through, we call it ICP web traffic, but ultimately and there’s, again, Sixense other tools that can, a, deanonymize that traffic and, b, allow you to report on it. So in the most simplest form, pushing that data into a Google Analytics. Say, okay. In a given month, quarter, whatever it may be, x percentage of these accounts have shown up somewhere on the site. Now you could go really deep on that and understand where they are pages and so forth. But again, early indicator accounts in your ICP are sitting your website. That’s a step in the right direction. That’s a great step in the right direction. Adam, if you tripled your web visitors, number of sessions on your websites, but it was not your ICP, Would you consider that a success? No. And I know a lot of people around here wouldn’t either, and they’d have a conversation with me about it. So no. I think if you’re gonna triple your website traffic and you manage to not increase your ICP, that’s actually kind of impressive in a negative way as well. But, yeah, again, like, I would take a ninety percent cut in my website traffic if I could five x the percentage of accounts that I know in my ICP were on it. I would take volume down for quality of those ICP accounts visiting for any day of the week. So quantify your ICP, proportion of accounts reached, proportion of accounts engaging with you, and then a trended view of ICP web traffic through Google Analytics. That’s a great, great start. One point now. Adam, if you have an ICP, would you treat every single one of those accounts in the same way? No. No. So understanding where those accounts sit in their buyer’s journey is another really important starting point. Are they in early stage of awareness, maybe starting to do some research on solving pain points that you might solve for, maybe initial research on thought leadership content versus how many accounts in that ICP are actively in a buying cycle, maybe actively evaluating you versus your competitors. We look at a lot of data, and we see on average ten percent of companies’ ICPs are typically in market. And so you need to know that pretty early on because that’s gonna determine how you’re gonna speak to different accounts, whether they’re in market or not, and also where you’re gonna put your budget in terms of, you know, the most meaningful marketing activities. You can look at where are they visiting on your website to give you a sense of are they engaging more on thought leadership content, if they’re hitting your pricing page or if they’re going to your careers page. I mean, there’s all sorts of different ways to look at that. If you are using a provider of third party intent, understanding the research there. So, again, you don’t have to have as much as we’d like everyone to have. You don’t necessarily have to have all of the tools and all the platform to do it, but understanding and I think it’s also a process of sitting down in your organization saying, what to us is indicative of in market or buying behavior? What do we know that looks like, okay. This account’s probably doing a research that could indicate some kind of buying behavior versus predictive analytics from from providers like us? Totally. And to make it real, I will say every quarter, we look at the proportion of our ICP that we’ve reached, the proportion that we’ve engaged, what specific tactics are driving the reach and engagement, And what do we do with that data? Well, we look to see how many accounts in our ICP we didn’t reach and we didn’t engage, and we might start a very specific program against them. Maybe in the notes of this episode, we’ll throw in a video from our website where I take people through the reporting that we do every quarter Yeah. Up to the board around reach and engagement just so you can see what it looks like and how we use it. That’s yeah. That’s good. When you talk about the penetration of your ICP as well, I don’t know how many times have you had a conversation with it could be sales, could be marketing about, like, oh, we’re we’re running out of accounts to go after. Unless you look at your accounts and you have a hundred percent penetration of your ICP, there’s probably some we haven’t touched. So it’s an an important metric to look at because, again, the universe for you is only so large, but it’s pretty unlikely that you’re in all you’ve gotten to all of them in any given time in a meaningful way. Exactly. Okay. So we’re running programs against the ICP. One of the most important or early stage tactics that people use is display ads. And so we’re jumping into your wheelhouse, Adam. What do you look at when you look to measure the effectiveness of your advertising programs? So you can look at you know, you’ve got your sort of standard click through rate and your you know, you can look at your CPMs and all just to look at, okay, like, am I efficiently running this campaign? Am I efficiently spending? Am I getting in front of these accounts? One of the metrics that can be really important because, again, if you look at, let’s say, display let’s say it’s a billboard, a digital billboard. Right? You’re not you’re you’re not gonna get someone to click on your display ad and fill out a form and, oh, I want you know, and become a lead. But you can also measure the view through. So, again, you think about view through as an account that was exposed to that ad and then within a given period of time, seven days, thirty days, whatever it may be, has returned to your site. So you take a look at, okay, I ran this particular campaign to two hundred and fifty accounts. Of that, you know, the click through rate’s probably pretty low, but I’ve gotten seventy five of those accounts back to my website in the last two weeks. What does that tell you? That said and, again, these accounts don’t wake up in the morning thinking about you. So you can’t just, like, well, how do I know that the ad did that? Well, likely, they don’t think about you until they’ve, at some point, seen you and they’re and they’ve gone back. So to us, that’s a really important metric to understand. Like, again, coming back to the site, it’s ICP web traffic and how they’re engaging. That’s a huge one to really help and understand the effectiveness of it. Yep. Love it. Alright. So we have engaged with the ICP. We’re getting in front of the all the personas we care about. I do like to look at contact coverage on ICP accounts. By the way, that’s almost more of an operational metric as opposed to a performance metric. But do we have the right contacts and personas populated on the account record so that we can nurture them and we can get them in the hands of sales? So side note on an operational metric that I like to look at. But now that you’ve done all this work, hopefully, what you’re generating is what is called a marketing qualified account. And this is you know, again, we’re talking account based approach, and so it’s not about MQLs. We are looking to see accounts that are driving a meaningful amount of intent, meaning that they’re warm enough or hot enough really to be pushed to sales to follow-up on. So the volume of MQAs is really, really important. At Sixense, we call it a six QA just because we we do that. Whether you call it a six QA or an MQA, how many accounts are you bringing to the point of qualification and readiness to be passed to sales? You know, the interesting thing about that is all these activities that lead to that MQA threshold. And and it’s not that different from the MQL in the sense that certain activities lead to a decision point that says, okay. This lead is marketing qualified or this account is marketing qualified. That’s still a moment in time where you have a team that’s gonna go and engage with the account. But at the same time, if all is going well, some of those qualified accounts, either before they hit that stage or during, they might just hit your website and fill out a form and ask for a demo or whatever it is you’re offering, whatever your CTAs are, and raise their hand and say, hey. Yeah. I’m interested. Because you again, you’ve been running activities around these accounts. Some of them will be like, oh, I’m interested. I’m gonna go. Or they’re in market already. They’re not waiting around for someone to reach out to them, and they might be already in a buying cycle and ready to chat. So those things can happen same time, little before, little after all that. Alright. So we generated a high intent account or an MQL if you if you do get that hand raiser. When marketing does all this work to warm up an account, to educate them, to bring them along that journey and get them into the hands of sales, you better believe that the inspection that we put around, what sales does with those accounts is critical. So for us, we have response time as a really, really important KPI or leading indicator that we look at. Again, none of this is talking about pipeline or revenue yet. This is the response time for a BDR to log their first touch on that account record. Really clear cut SLAs, really clear cut inspection, and then not just response time of did I throw them into a mass cadence because that’s not what we want. Right? We’re doing an account based approach. It is the personalized nature of that response. It is how curated or quality activity is it. And so we look at response rate. We look at number of calls and number of emails. All of these are tracked, by the way, for us on the CRM on the account record as activities, so there’s no hiding. We have dashboards that we look at over here. And then outside of CRM, we do look at things like LinkedIn connects or conversations, calls that are logged through our dialer and so on and so forth. But I implore everyone who’s doing this to really not drop the ball when it comes to then actually activating and capturing that demand because you’ve put so much work and effort and budget into getting to this point. It’s a revenue moment, and you wanna strike while all these things were happening. And if you wait a day, a week, a month, then all those activities become less and less meaningful because they sort of decay, right, over a period of time. I think one thing that’s really important about the the quality activities and the personalization is as a result of all these activities that you’ve done and the data that you’ve gathered, you have so much information to create in this for your BDR, your sales team, whatever, maybe to create personalized outreach that calls back to content consumption, you know, some high level of the keywords that are showing up in intent. Even, you know, you could see that a particular ad that maybe they showed high you know, click through or engagement with to say it’s a warm outreach. Right? You know, we’ve got our our book. No form, no spam, no cold calls. It is a warm outreach because you have all this information, and it’s based on some engagement. So take advantage of that. And as a KPI measurement, say, look. You have to personalize. Don’t just use these templates because, again, you’re missing out on the opportunities that you have. Yep. Maybe a little note not in here for folks who are using AI to do this outreach, which we do as well. We use our own tool, conversational email. Even then, have that data populated into your CRM. That’s why I think the connectivity of these AI agents to your systems of record is so important. We don’t need these little point solutions out there that don’t talk to anything and and kind of live in a silo. If it’s doing outreach, tie that back into CRM as an activity, as a task so that when your AE or your BDR is coming on top of that, it is a very sort of curated, thoughtful journey as opposed to one hit here, and the AI is doing one thing, and the BDR is doing one thing, and the AE is doing one thing. Yeah. And the AI should have access to the same information that the BDR has. You know, what does what I just mentioned. Right? Like, content consumption, intent, all those things so that if you’re even going as far as having the AI write that first outreach, it’s got the data that the BDR has. And so it can create that personalized intelligent outreach just versus, like, a pure automated, hey. Thanks a lot. You’re an account we wanna reach out to. Yep. Alright. I think this is the last one of our leading indicators, which is, hopefully, at the end of all of this and at the end of this quality outreach that’s happening through the BERs, through your AI agents, you are generating a meeting. And typically, in most companies, that is the point of an moving from an account record to an opportunity record. And so you want to obviously understand how many opportunities are being created. So volume is important, but the conversion rate from a high quality or high intent account to an opportunity is important. So volume, conversion rate, and then another one that is almost equally as important is velocity. How many days is it taking on average for a six QA to become an opportunity? Because you could be generating the same number of ops maybe as you did last month, but if it’s taking twice as long to create them, you have a problem. And so in our dashboards in CRM, and CRM is source of truth for us at six cents, we look at every metric by volume, by conversion rate, and by velocity, and we color code and contextualize each of those metrics to Yeah. And, again, when you talk about that conversion from qualified account to meeting or as we call it, stage zero, again, you wanna be looking at two again, this is now getting out of account based marketing and just sort of, like, smart sales stages, but you’re booked a hundred more meetings this month than you did last month. But do those meetings actually move from booked to completed and then ultimately into to qualified pipe? So that’s that gets off of ABM a little bit more just but, again, that’s that’s an important area as well because you could start to see, could there be segments that you’re hitting that are you considered ICP, but there’s a group that’s no showing or there are a lot that are not qualified. They’re not making it past that first meeting, which you could then go back and sort of and you could talk about our ICP episode. We said revisit that ICP. That’s data to help revisit. We’re seeing an entire vertical that’s just, like, completely way off. Let’s revisit. Yep. Alright. So let’s jump into the lagging indicators. And these aren’t very different for ABM motions versus traditional sales motions. And so it’s a lot of the things that folks are used to. Right? Pipeline being created, volume, I think, as well as dollars is important. Stage based metrics, so we talked about meetings, but how many of those meetings are progressing to happened and then to qualified pipe? Again, always go with volume, conversion, and velocity for each of those progression stages. I think average selling price becomes really important because, again, you could be creating the same number of deals and progressing the same number of deals, but if they’re half the size as before, you have a problem. And so ASP as part of that becomes really important as well. What else do you look at, Adam? One of the things that we like to talk about too is that what gets created and closed in the same quarter. Right? So, again, that’s less about account based, but more about, again, are there certain segments of accounts where you have that fast velocity and the deal could even close in the same quarter. So really understanding, you know, as you’re doing pipeline planning, what are the set of accounts that you could potentially see? Like, okay. Right now, we’re starting the quarter. There’s x percentage of our pipeline and our revenue that we don’t even know about yet because we’re able to create and close in the same quarter. So that’s, again, becomes more about the sales stages, but I think an important one to make as well. Yep. And I think a really good point to be made from what you just said is all of this helps you as you’re planning for your next quarter or the next year. Right? On average, how much is created and closed in quarter? What is the average velocity? What is the average conversion? The last thing I would say on lagging metrics is win rates. It’s obviously you know, everyone has their own way they calculate win rates from what stage to close one. We do it at stage two to close one. But we look at a couple of flavors of win rates. We look at overall win rates, and you can look at it by the volume of deals as well as dollars, and sometimes it’ll be very different. And then we actually look at something called competitive win rate. And so if there’s an active competitor in the deal, how often are you winning there? And we have a pretty great one. I’m just saying. That’s that one, that’s like a warm blanket too. Right? Because you look at that and you’re like, okay. Like, it brings a certain level of predictability because, again, you can look at okay. What accounts right now? What opportunities are in play against this competitor? Okay. Well, we know this competitor’s got a fifteen percent higher competitor in rate than others. So alright. That’s Forecast accuracy. Let let’s call it that. Alright. So all these lagging indicators, I would say look at them overall. Look at them by go to market segment. So for your commercial business versus enterprise versus strat, look at them by geo. All of these metrics might look very different in North America versus APAC versus EMEA. We also look at them by sales team, and we also look at them by channel. So we have all of these metrics for inbound, all of these metrics for outbound, all of these metrics for our ABX programs, all of these metrics for the deals that AEs create directly. And so lots of flavors of all of these metrics, but, again, you don’t need twenty dashboards for this. How many dashboards do we have this in? One. One. One source of truth. One dashboard. I do think as another takeaway for this episode, we do have a webinar somewhere where we take people through our one dashboard, the single source of truth, and so we’ll throw that link in the notes as well. Okay. So you were grilling me. I’m gonna grill you. Someone’s on listening right now going like and we talked about crawl, walk, run. We talked about, like, this is a lot a lot of aspirational measurement. If you’re very early on in this journey, if you had to pick one or two of each leading and lagging, what would be your favorites to say? Like, you know what? Figure out the best way for you based on the data you have and the systems you have to measure. What do you think are the best ones to start with? Everyone’s got a CRM at least, hopefully, right, or some source of truth where this is happening. Flag the accounts in your ICP or in your ABM program in CRM. So have a checkbox on that account record, if nothing else. And then you can use that checkbox in all the traditional reporting that your team is using for pipeline and revenue and conversions and velocity and just filter it by your ABM accounts. Hopefully, what you would see is the conversion rate, velocity, ASPs for the accounts that you are doing this running this program on. It’s higher. It’s faster. They’re closing quicker. They’re you’re winning more of them. And so if nothing else, just flag those accounts in CRM so that you can look at the performance of your ABM accounts versus everything else. So that’s the simplest thing I would say. You know? Ignore all of those leading metrics if you don’t have access to them if you are in the crawl mode. I do think, though, that they give you a whole lot of insight to optimize your programs early and often, and so it would be a bit of a gap if you weren’t measuring a couple of them. That’s a really good place to start. I just thought of a question to ask you in our theme. I I don’t know if I’ve asked you this before when I ask you. What is the most ridiculous thing you’ve been asked to measure in your career? Okay. So you know I’m an analytics person. A lot of the squishy metrics, like sentiment, without a platform that is maybe doing some, you know, natural language processing, it’s really hard to get to. And so I would say a more subjective metric around sentiment without really having the tools to do so. The emotional status of your accounts. Yes. Of your account, of your deal. It’s also really hard to do that when reps aren’t updating CRM. And so, you know, if you gotta go in with, like, what do you think? And and you can’t really answer that question. Yeah. How about you? I’ve been asked to measure accounts that have come in that have not only used certain technologies, but have maybe talked about certain topics in presentations at conferences. And, like, that would be great. I can’t do that. Or go scrape the web for that and then just combine it and I’m like, no. No. So, yeah, I think there’s people can get really granular with what they wanna see. There you go. I mean, I think we covered the right amount of metrics. It wasn’t that intense of an episode. I feel like some of this is very low hanging fruit for folks who are just getting started, and, otherwise, six cents can help you measure all of it. So I lied when I said twenty seven minutes earlier. We’ve actually been talking for four hours. It just went by I’m kidding. I’m kidding. You know, I think it was Toy Story three ish. It did feel although if any of you out there think that Toy Story three was weak, then my metaphor or my my analogy or whatever I wanna is not working. But if we can agree on that, then I think we we got there. We can agree that it was at least better than Back to the Future three. I mean, you I don’t think I’ve ever seen you react so emotionally about a movie like that. So that’s It back to the future is a big part of my life. I’m just gonna say that. I I my Yes. Definitely. Big part of my childhood. I tried to get my kids really excited about it, and then they kinda fell apart at Back to the Future three. You know, I don’t know. My kids like three. They do. So Yeah. I don’t know if I should worry about their their taste or not. I don’t hate it. But, anyway It’s just not as good. No. Okay. Well, perhaps we could do a definitive movie episode. That would also be a good one for us. But I think from now, we will we will say great conversation. And, again, check out the show notes. We put a bunch of goodies in there to help, with the conversation. Thanks. Thanks. Take care. You’ve been listening to Revenue Makers. Do you have a revenue project you were asked to execute that had wild success? Share your story with us at six cents dot com slash revenue, and we might just ask you to come on the show. And if you don’t wanna miss the next episode, be sure to follow along on your favorite podcast app.