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.

The key word here is "immediately." I struggle with that. The first reason I struggle is that I don’t trust data at face value. When results look too good or too bad, I don’t react right away. I dig in to understand what’s causing it. That means I wouldn’t immediately kill a campaign just because, after 48 hours, there were no clicks or form fills. The second reason is that a lot of things take time. Modern marketing systems don’t just launch a campaign and expect instant results. They enter a learning phase. Machine learning models adjust targeting, personalization algorithms optimize based on early engagement, and audience data refines itself. So reacting too soon can do more harm than good.

But There Are Signals That Require Immediate Attention. One of the most underrated but highest-impact signals comes from sales and customer-facing teams. I once launched a campaign in partnership with PMM that I felt amazing about. The work was deep, visually stunning, and multichannel. We had events, digital, and dynamic ad creative - everything we always dream of in an integrated ABM motion. Then, I got invited to a meeting with enterprise AEs. They were not happy. The campaign had everything… except effectiveness. Instead of helping close deals, it was driving consideration of our competitors. We had worked so hard to be objective that we had actually over-positioned alternative tools. Instead of reinforcing our differentiation, we created analysis paralysis. I walked out of that meeting and killed my beautiful campaign. It hurt, but it was the right thing to do. We reworked the foundational content, and only then did we relaunch.

Honestly, there are tons of reasons to reconsider a campaign and take action. You might be bringing in the wrong audiences. It might be upside down on ROI. It might just not be landing. We are artist-scientists, we hypothesize and create beautiful art that we think addresses that hypothesis and then test and measure and adjust our hypothesis based on what we learn.

Audience Quality Red Flags - If unqualified audiences are engaging - wrong industries, job levels, or geographies - it means something in targeting is off.

Immediate ROI Discrepancies - If a campaign is spending heavily but not converting into meaningful engagement, there’s something off in the message, offer, or targeting.

"Not Landing" Reports from Sales - If sales says: "Prospects don’t care about this message." "The positioning isn’t resonating in real conversations." Then you take that seriously. Numbers alone can’t tell you if a campaign is effective - it has to move deals forward.

Hope that helps.