In account-based marketing (ABM), pipeline and revenue don’t just happen.
There’s a series of key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that allow you to not only understand how these numbers are achieved, but also enable you to predict whether you’re going to hit them. Many serve as early warning signs, alerting you of potential shortfalls in reaching your targets—whether it’s driving meetings with your sales team, converting prospects into customers, or even securing larger deals. If you’re not seeing the results you expect from your ABM strategy, it’s likely because you’re missing a critical element: visibility. Without a clear view into campaign progress and performance, it’s impossible to know which actions are moving the needle and which ones are falling short.
Better visibility not only helps you track the metrics that matter to your department and the company’s overall goals, but also enables you to proactively determine if you’ll hit your goals and quickly adjust campaigns in real time to optimize performance. With deeper insights into the campaign levers that lead to higher success, you can stop guessing and start confidently engaging and converting accounts faster.
Why You Need Better Visibility
In a multi-channel ABM strategy, there are a lot of moving parts to keep track of: account and buying group targeting, unifying channels and content, and aligning teams. Without clear visibility, identifying campaign shortcomings often turns into a reactive guessing game of where to attribute results rather than a strategic evaluation of your efforts.
Since ABM requires significant time and resources, marketers can’t afford to operate in the dark. Better visibility solves these challenges by providing a full, real-time view of your campaign’s performance. This not only helps you see what’s working but also gives you actionable insights into what needs to be fixed, allowing you to optimize your marketing strategy and drive better outcomes with confidence.
The key to achieving this level of visibility is accumulating quality data through an integrated tech stack. This tech stack typically includes a customer relationship management (CRM) system, a marketing automation platform (MAP), and an ABM platform that integrates with these systems, allowing you to monitor datasets as they’re updated in their respective systems so you can see up-to-the-minute information. With the ability to monitor your target accounts and campaigns in one place, you gain immediate access to key performance metrics, allowing you to make quick, informed decisions that directly impact your goals. By leveraging data in real time, you can:
- Boost personalization efforts by tailoring your approach in real time to engage accounts more effectively.
- Seize emerging opportunities by allocating more resources to high-performing channels within your campaign.
- Optimize underperforming elements, like adjusting ad creative, tweaking social media posts, or refining email campaigns.
Ultimately, better visibility gives you full control over your ABM processes. Without it, you risk wasting resources or making costly mistakes, like prematurely pausing a campaign that could succeed with a few tweaks.
Common ABM Challenges Solved with Better Visibility
B2B buying cycles have become longer, more complex, and involve larger buying groups than ever before. This requires a nuanced and holistic approach to ABM to deliver personalized experiences that reach, engage, and ultimately convince buyers that you’re the ideal solution to help them solve their problem.
Poor visibility into campaign progress and performance only amplifies these challenges. Waiting until a campaign has ended only to then access whether you reached your goal provides zero insight into the tactics that work best and limits your ability to make necessary changes that optimize your approach. By enhancing visibility through advanced analytics, you gain deeper insights into account behavior, streamline collaboration, and improve overall targeting and messaging, ultimately leading to more successful ABM initiatives.
Measuring the effectiveness of your ABM strategy is crucial for ensuring that your marketing efforts align with your business goals and deliver desired results. Better visibility starts with prioritizing the ABM KPIs that help you proactively solve your ABM challenges. KPIs are measurable objectives that serve as sources of truth into how you’re meeting them based on what your chosen metrics say. By tracking measurable objectives, you can quickly identify where your campaign is falling short because of challenges and make data-driven adjustments to improve performance and efficiency. Here’s a look at some of the common ABM challenges and the KPIs and optimization opportunities that help you identify and solve them.
Challenge 1: Engaging Target Accounts and Buying Groups
Without clear visibility into account and buying group interactions and preferences, it’s difficult to adjust strategies, anticipate the needs of the buying committee, and effectively provide a unified and personalized experience that leads accounts and decision-makers to your solution.
Better visibility provides a comprehensive view of account behavior, interactions, and feedback that helps you tailor your approach at each stage of the buying journey. With these insights, you can prioritize high-intent accounts, engage key decision-makers with personalized content that relates to their buyer persona, and anticipate the next steps in their buying journey—all of which increase the chances of conversion and ensure a more meaningful relationship that can bring in more revenue through your customer expansion initiatives.
To solve account targeting and buying group engagement challenges, focus on the following KPIs:
Market Reach
Measures the total potential market size and the percentage you can effectively reach. This KPI is crucial for assessing the scope and potential of your ABM programs. Understanding your market reach helps you evaluate how well your marketing and sales teams penetrate the market.
- When to Optimize: A high market reach indicates effective targeting and engagement. If your analysis uncovers untapped segments, consider adjusting your strategy to include them, potentially expanding your reach and growing your addressable audience.
Engaged Accounts
Also called marketing-qualified accounts (MQAs), refer to the number of accounts with consistent engagement across multiple decision-makers within a buying group. Use this KPI to identify accounts with a high chance of conversion—those are the accounts you should focus your efforts on.
- When to Optimize: Multiple engaged decision-makers suggest deeper penetration and higher conversion likelihood. If only one decision-maker interacts with your content, expand your outreach to other influencers within the account to boost conversion potential. You can also use intent data to uncover untapped stakeholders.
Account Engagement
Tracks interactions across your website and marketing initiatives, such as website visits, email opens, and content downloads. Depending on the level of engagement and interest from target accounts, you can easily assess how effective your content strategies and outreach efforts are across the funnel.
- When to Optimize: High engagement levels are indicative of how your ABM Content resonates with your audience. Conversely, low engagement from high-priority accounts may indicate that you need to revise your content strategy or personalize outreach to better capture their interest.
Challenge 2: Maximizing Your ABM Campaign Budget
Without visibility into what’s working and what’s not, marketing teams struggle to allocate resources effectively, leading to wasted spending on underperforming channels, missed opportunities to double down on high-performing efforts, and an overall lack of ROI clarity. You need to understand how to maximize your ABM budget efficiently or you won’t see the desired impact to pipeline and revenue.
Better visibility empowers you to optimize your budget as it emphasizes looking at campaign performance across channels in real time and one holistic view. With clear insights into which tactics and channels are driving engagement and conversions, you can make better-informed decisions about where to invest your resources. Whether it’s reallocating funds to a high-performing campaign or cutting spend on underperforming initiatives, this level of insight allows you to maximize ROI and use your budget more strategically.
To solve budget optimization challenges, focus on KPIs like:
Performance by Channel
Measures the ROI for each channel in your ABM, helping you identify high performers and those needing adjustments.
- When to Optimize: High ROI shows your channel effectively reaches target accounts and drives revenue. Low ROI indicates it’s time to rethink your strategy, which may include adjusting targeting parameters, refining messaging, or reducing spend.
Influenced Pipeline Creation
Highlights the direct impact of your ABM efforts on pipeline and revenue, as it assesses the value of generated opportunities in your pipeline.
- When to Optimize: High influence on pipeline creation from your campaigns indicates their effectiveness at driving growth. If you notice low pipeline creation from campaign efforts, adjust your messaging or targeting for better audience engagement.
Average Deal Size
Focuses on closed-won deals across your accounts, taking the total revenue of your deals and dividing them by the number of accounts to find the average over a period of time. You can use this metric to accurately understand the value of the MQAs that convert into customers, as well as forecast the potential revenue of your ABM efforts if you were to close deals with your entire target account wish list.
- When to Optimize: A larger average deal size shows that you’re effectively targeting high-value accounts, which maximizes revenue and justifies your campaign budget. A smaller average deal size may signal that you need to examine your targeting strategy on high-value accounts. You can also align with sales to discover upsell opportunities for higher-value solutions, which will lead to better budget alignment across both departments.
Challenge 3: Aligning Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success
ABM cannot succeed in isolation—it requires tight alignment and strong sales and customer success collaboration to be truly effective. These teams play crucial roles in the customer lifecycle, and every touchpoint—from initial outreach to ongoing support—must be unified. Without alignment, silos emerge, leading to disjointed experiences and ineffective strategies that hinder pipeline and revenue growth.
Better visibility fosters this alignment by ensuring consistent messaging and a shared understanding of customer needs. When these teams work together, you achieve greater success in customer retention, more expansion opportunities across the account, and a better customer experience by identifying and recommending what customers need when they need it.
To solve alignment challenges, focus on KPIs like:
Pipeline Velocity
Measures how quickly opportunities progress through the sales pipeline, from creation to closing. This KPI assesses sales cycle efficiency and helps identify bottlenecks that may be solved with better alignment.
- When to Optimize: Pipeline velocity benchmarks vary by industry and company growth stage. A fast pipeline indicates efficiency, while a slowdown suggests the need for additional sales training or strategy adjustments to address common objections from accounts.
Customer Upsell Rate
Tracks how often existing accounts purchase additional products or services, reflecting the success of upselling efforts and potential revenue growth.
- When to Optimize: A high upsell rate shows that customers value additional offerings. If rates are low, consider targeted campaigns and more post-sale focus on highlighting the benefits of complementary products to existing clients.
Net Revenue Retention (NRR)
Measures the percentage of recurring revenue from existing customers, including upsells and cross-sells, to highlight the effectiveness of retention and expansion efforts across the organization.
- When to Optimize: A high NRR, which you can benchmark year over year or by industry, indicates the strength of your upselling and relationship-building efforts toward customer loyalty. If NRR is lower than expected, analyze your churn percentage, feedback, and upsell performance to improve customer retention and expansion efforts.
Achieve Better Visibility into Your Campaigns
Creating better visibility into your ABM strategy is crucial for ensuring that your marketing efforts align with your business goals and deliver desired pipeline and revenue. You need to create a standard, repeatable framework to unlock a granular understanding of ABM campaign efficiency and find areas to optimize your efforts and maximize your resources.
Madison Logic ensures your ABM campaigns stay effective while remaining agile enough to adapt to shifting market and industry trends. The ML Platform integrates both ML Insights and ML Measurement, bringing your target audience and account engagement intelligence and your campaign measurement together. This combination gives you a comprehensive view of your campaigns and deeper visibility into areas that work well and those that need refinement. With ML Insights, you can tap into intent data from over 20 million companies globally, helping you identify key decision-makers on buying committees and tailor content and messaging to resonate with them. Additionally, our proprietary engagement data reveals behavioral insights across your target accounts, spanning four key media channels: CTV, content syndication, LinkedIn, and display advertising. This detailed visibility allows you to track performance in real-time and make proactive adjustments, enabling you to continuously optimize your ABM strategy.
If you need more guidance in building an ABM measurement framework, download The Metrics that Matter: Measuring ABM and Integrated Campaign Results. This guide gives you a more complete view of the metrics that matter so you know what to measure when and how to do it so you can work more effectively when goals grow or the market—and competitors—make it harder to grow. And when you’re ready to bring deeper visibility into your initiatives, request a demo.
