As you assess the performance of an Account Based Marketing campaign in progress, which reports are important to take action on immediately?

The way I think about ABM metrics are 3 folds:

1. What’s the revenue impact we are driving - early indicators include what’s our contribution to pipe generation.

2. How are we helping our seller build relationships? These can be measured in the form of marketing responses or event attendance or executive engagement from decision makers in our ABM accounts (ie. VP+).

3. How are we strengthen our account data with contact acquisition & contact enrichment/cleaning? Not only are we driving new contacts for the sellers to build new relationships with but is marketing doing to 1) ensure data is the most up-to-date (trash data in = trash data out!) and 2) identifying the “change agents” or decisions that are advocates of your brand who can then become a champion for you during a deal.

To answer your question directly there are many early indications that you can address as a marketer before you assess how you are impacting the bottomline (revenue). The first thing you need to do is ensure you are aligned with your sales team - are there specific plays they are running this quarter? Are there specific products that have the highest probability to cross when you cross-sell to a certain LOB? Is your company launching new SKUs? You have to understand the business and products and align your ABM initiatives to your sale’s priorities.   

In parallel, I would typically look at YoY and QoQ compares for marketing responses and event attendance; this will allow you to get a sense of how engaged your customers are. I will also look at the compares for contact acquisition to ensure we are always keeping the key players in each account up to date. When flat or negative compares show up, that's when you dig deeper and create an action plan.