What are common metrics that drive different types of marketing strategies like ABM or PLG?
I think strategies like ABM are decided upon when you identify a strong, core ICP that you can trust both quantitatively and qualitatively. ABM requires a solid ICP to understand who to go after but strong qualitative feedback from sales leadership validates and supports that ICP. When you have that ICP and both sales & marketing believe in that profile, you decide that your tier 1 and 2 accounts are the only accounts that meet the ICP.
Some things that I'd look at to determine ICP (which would lead to ABM strategies) include average contract value, deal velocity, and LTV. I would take those metrics and start to extract firmographic parameters to determine what makes up the characteristics of accounts with high ACV, the fastest deal velocity, and that have strong LTV. I'd take those characteristics and start looking at ABM strategies to only go after accounts that meet these characteristics since these will give me the most bang for my buck.
As far as PLG goes, I believe that any/all software companies have an opportunity to build a little side PLG model that you can decide to blow up into a full-fledged program. Who you start with is what matters most. Some of the metrics I'd look at are your product's power users, sign-up to activation, and high-growth accounts. Once again -- take the characteristics of those accounts and determine who set of personas are prime for a self-serve model. From there, you start to analyze every step of their journey within the product. You look at metrics in-product such as # of sign-ins, pages with the highest session duration, the most amount of clicks, and exit pages. You then start to remove any/all friction points on these pages while simultaneously pouring more people into this self-serve/PLG funnel to get more data and identify more friction points to remove. Over time, you will have a well-oiled self-serve machine where users are going through the sales journey themselves and eventually helping each other out through the building of communities and forums.
From my perspective, ABM and PLG are two different approaches and while the associated metrics will have some overlap, they will largely differ. There is a complementary framework from a product-led sales and ABM perspective, but that’s a separate topic.
Example metrics within the context of this question:
ABM metrics:
- Marketing qualified leads (MQLs)
- Conversion rate
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
- Target accounts in pipeline
- Average deal size
PLG metrics:
- Product-driven revenue (PDR)
- Time to value
- Churn
- Product qualified leads (PQLs)
- Average revenue per user (ARPU)
This list is NOT exhaustive. Depending on your business model and go-to-market strategy, you can then define your marketing plan and framework, and the metrics that will drive the desired outcomes.
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