How to ensure the success of ABM Campaign with optimal account coverage?

As an ABM practitioner what makes you confidently say – ‘we did it!!’

Is that return on the investment made on a campaign or the pure high-level business connection you just made through your stunning account-based marketing campaign?

What strikes you?

Numbers?

Or Impact?

We love ABM. ABM is cool, indeed. It is among the few areas of marketing that has maximum revenue impact.

Last year, in 2019, we had a great talk on what challenges we get while implementing ABM and its solution to our most effective ABM practitioners. It was a smooth discussion – until we brought a topic, ‘how do you measure the success of ABM campaign?’

We got a common answer, ‘By ensuring optimal account coverage.’

 

Takeaway: The importance of right account coverage in ABM success.

 

What is account coverage?

Building TAL is a crucial step in ABM Campaign design. Right after creating TAL, you need to review how well you could penetrate the personalized content into the account? You have to take two independent views into account.

1. The number of the accounts you reach from TAL.
2. The number of leads within each account you reach and engage thoroughly.

We initialize the process of ensuring the right account coverage by reviewing the contact and behavior data before implementing the ABM Strategy.

It is important to have the right contact details to target accounts more precisely, engage more effectively, and convert to an opportunity.

Following is the type of data your actionable lead database should be prepared with right before implementing ABM campaign.

 

Pre-implementation measurement:

 

1. Firmographics information:

Firmographic data helps identify the right account we have to target. Although firmographic information is proven to be important while building TAL, we cannot overlook it while structuring the actionable database, that is to be used while implementation of the ABM campaign.

Following are some common attributions to be taken into account while structuring the firmographics data.

1. Industry
2. Domain
3. Sub-domain
4. Annual revenue
5. Company size
6. Location
7. Sales cycle stage
8. Status
9. Executive team

1. Demographics attributes:

HubSpot says, “Demographic segmentation separates your target market into specific, accessible groups of people based on personal attributes like geography, age, education, occupation, and income. By leveraging demographic segmentation, you can create personalized marketing campaigns for each slice of your target market.”

Demographic data is crucial to defining the quality of contact. It is a marketer’s responsibility to refine and segment demographic data structurally so that a marketer has the data sorted out at any given moment.

Smart demographic attributes enable the marketer to prioritize prospects according to ICP fit.

1. Geography
2. Age
3. Education
4. Occupation
5. Income

1. Intent data:

“Intent data is behavioural information collected about an individual’s online activities, combining both topic and context data.” - Marketo.

Intent data helps the marketer to know the intent and readiness of prospects. While it is important to have a predefined set of criteria for selecting accounts and prospects, it is equally important to integrate intent signals into the database to have a complete view of the prospect.

Intent data helps marketers to personalize the content and engage the prospect well to the bottom of the funnel.

 

Post-implementation measurement:

 

What is the right way to measure the account coverage?

After launching the campaign, the most important step remains—it is to measure the ‘impact’ of the campaign.

We would love to quote from one of our ABM interviews:

“
Interviewer: How can you tell whether the ABM campaign is done successfully?
Answer: Account coverage. The more we cover the account with valid engagement metrics, the better for sales enablement.

Interviewer: Account coverage based on…?
Answer: “Based on how many right leads we reached, engaged within a specific account. And. How many accounts we reach from TAL. Both ways.”

Counter question: ‘Do we measure the lead counts per account as a success parameter?’
Answer: “No. It is not a numbers game. It is all about quality.”
”

Reference: Interview with our in-house ABM Expert.

As we can read, account coverage is one of the ways to measure the success of a campaign. While the expert politely accepted the fact that – “the number of leads has nothing to do with the success of an ABM campaign.”

Tricky? Not really, let’s see how to map the account coverage?

Leverage the Account Structural Data:

We do marketing for sales enablement. It is necessary to target decision-makers within the account to have maximum impact.

The marketer has to have a complete picture of the internal hierarchy to understand who makes the purchase decision, who influences the buyer journey, and who helps settle the purchase.

Account structure data helps marketers recognize high-value connections. Integrating account structure data with the campaign database enables marketers to track content delivery to the right person, its impact on that decision-maker, and measure the action they take.

There are an average of six to ten decision-makers involved in a single purchase decision. Smartly segmenting those into decision-makers and influencers empowers marketers to deliver personalized content according to the type of persona.

Reflecting the same – marketers can map the penetration of resources on the right account and contact list.

Alignment of the marketing and sales team, with the integration of various databases, enables a marketer to measure account coverage and prioritize the leads ready to be enabled for sale.

How does the right account coverage help marketers create a maximum revenue impact?

In ABM, the marketing and sales teams work towards a common goal—that is to have maximum revenue impact through sales enablement.

ABM is an account-focused approach, and the success of a campaign is measured by the accounts that the marketing and sales team have won.

The right data on account coverage allows marketers to analyze the buying readiness of an account as a whole. Account coverage truly creates a maximum impact when it is measured beyond content penetration by registering engagement and intent metrics of an account as a whole. The following are ways account coverage helps marketers succeed with an ABM campaign.

1. It enables marketers to understand the internal decision-making hierarchy of the account and create a personalized nurturing campaign according to it. 
2. It enables marketers to recognise the right decision-makers and distinguish it from influencers. 
3. It enables marketers to prioritise the account with its readiness to talk to the sales team.

What insights do you have to share with us about account coverage? let us know!!!