Here are 4 ways B2B Revenue Attribution can fire up your Account-Based Marketing
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is becoming increasingly popular with marketers and growth leaders across the B2B world. Many are now testing the waters with this targeted approach for acquiring, converting, and winning their deals.
But, as results come in on the effectiveness of ABM, we’re seeing that success rests not only on the quality of the targeted activities, but also on the quality of the tracking, collection, and analysis of the activities’ data.
ABM leaders want to be able to measure the performance of all their ABM activities across the pipeline. And in this way discover which campaigns have helped drive revenue, which ones haven’t, and why.
Without these data based insights B2B marketers and growth leaders are unable to maximize the benefits of ABM.
By collecting, sorting and measuring account-based data, a B2B revenue attribution platform provides these crucial insights and helps fire up your ABM. In this post we’re going to give you 4 ways it does this.
Here’s what we’re covering below:
Why ABM has become a popular strategy for B2B marketing and sales
Account-based marketing definition
When does ABM work best?
Why the hype with ABM?
ABM: the risks
4 ways a B2B revenue attribution platform can improve ABM:
Organises your customer data into accounts to fully reveal the customer journey
Measures ROI, performance, and attributes revenue to all your ABM activities
Completely aligns sales and marketing
Tracks your time to revenue
Why has ABM become a go-to strategy in B2B marketing and sales?
While account-based marketing is by no means a new concept, over the last couple of years it has become an increasingly attractive approach for many B2B marketing and sales teams.
So what’s so special about ABM and why is it all the rage for B2B marketers?
Account-based marketing
To make sure we’re all on the same page, let’s start with a short textbook definition of account-based marketing (ABM).
ABM is a marketing strategy where B2B marketing, sales, and customer success teams work towards targeting and nurturing only specified top accounts.
In practice, it is a move away from broad brush branding and lead generation marketing strategies, where individuals are targeted with generic messaging, towards an account-specific approach.
The inverted funnel is probably the most recognizable representation of ABM.
To achieve their ABM goals, B2B marketing teams necessarily borrow expertise from and work with sales and customer success teams, to identify, engage, nurture, and close these top account deals across the pipeline.
Almost by definition, therefore, ABM is a holistic approach to generating revenue. This means that the strategy necessarily involves not only marketing teams but sales and customer success teams too.
So in this way, the label ABM is a bit of a misnomer. The strategy does, or rather should, involve all these teams throughout the execution (more on this in The Ingredients for Successful ABM section below).
When does ABM work best?
ABM requires detailed knowledge of your customer base, as well as detailed research of your ideal customers. While at the same time, of course, it requires working on all the operational aspects of actually doing your marketing and sales.
In other words, it needs a bit of effort across teams to get off the ground.
But when should you be throwing all this weight behind your ABM? Or to put it another way, does ABM make sense for all target markets?
The short answer is no.
ABM makes the most sense when the product/service offered is relevant to a well-defined group of companies. That is, despite the growth in data and tools facilitating ABM, the strategy works better for some target accounts than for others. And in ABM’s case, size matters.
That is, ABM should only really become your go-to strategy if your target accounts are on the larger side. Or to use Christoph Janz’s analogy, ABM is a useful weapon if you’re in the business of hunting large rabbits, deer, or elephants.
This is for two main reasons:
A large or enterprise-level organization will have a much wider audience to target your ABM towards.
When approaching small businesses, there is a disproportionate cost involved (in time spent researching and personalizing) when factoring in their smaller audience size and the higher risk of being disqualified.
Once again, even with the emergence of ABM automation and orchestration tools, this balance hasn’t really improved. As these tools’ utility (and price tag) are optimized for organizations of larger sizes.
Account-based Marketing: why the hype?
ABM has emerged as one of B2B’s in vogue marketing approaches. The search for novel approaches itself is a direct result of the overcrowding of the digital marketing landscape.
It’s no great revelation to say that marketers are finding it increasingly difficult to get noticed, not to mention having to deal with heightened buyer expectations.
This means that combatting the overcrowding using traditional branding and lead generation approach requires greater investment - e.g. buying ads on an increasing number of keywords. This in turn puts pressure on ROI.
Not ideal, right? Especially if a CMO’s success is being measured by their management of ROI.
Marketers and growth leaders in their endless pursuit of achieving the highest possible ROI, have looked to ABM, amongst other novel approaches, to make sure ROI is pushed back up.
In theory, by focusing exclusively on the most relevant accounts, which are by definition already qualified leads, and thus easier to convert and close, ABM can help improve ROI.
Previously, getting access to the right data on accounts and being able to process it, not to mention actioning the high-personalization that is necessary in ABM, was a considerable obstacle to scaling ABM campaigns at cost.
However, the ceaseless growth in digital touches and the data that comes with them, as well as the tools available to marketers, has meant that ABM is now more attainable than ever.
The growth in data, channels, optimization, automation, and analytics has meant that connecting with these top accounts has become that much easier.
Indeed, Covid-19, and the fully online based interaction that it has brought about, has made the scope of fine-tuning digital marketing strategies all the wider.
With this said, there are notable risks involved in ABM that are worth addressing here.
The risks of going all-in with ABM
The main risk with ABM is placing all your eggs in one basket. Well ok, not exactly one basket, but in comparatively few baskets.
This raises considerations such as:
What happens if you address the wrong accounts?
Even if you’ve been meticulous in your research, there is a chance that you miscalculate your ideal account and as a result see 0 impact from your campaigns.
Or what if you're not able to pay your way into the advertising space of the targeted accounts?
Or, what if the accounts already have a solution hence will not be buying anything new right now.
To go back to Christoph Janz, if you’re in the deer and elephant hunting game within a competitive market, missing out on key accounts can be particularly worrisome.
Of course, you will be doing all you can to mitigate against these risks by running the best possible ABM campaigns.
Speaking of which, what does it take to run successful ABM?
The ingredients for successful ABM
Now that we’ve got a better understanding of what the aim of the game is with ABM, let’s take a look at what it takes to run a successful ABM strategy.
There are four main elements to a successful ABM strategy:
Re-culture and re-organise your teams to be optimised for ABM
ABM requires a shift in thinking across all the teams involved with revenue generating activities - and beyond. The siloed structure of marketing, sales and customer success as loosely connected pillars, and the mentality that comes with that, will not allow for a successful ABM strategy.
It’s worth recalling here that to achieve your ABM goals, you need to borrow expertise from and work with sales and customer success teams, as well as marketing to identify, engage, nurture and close these top account deals across the pipeline.
Which means that ideally, you want to re-organise your teams to ensure the smoothest possible interaction between them from the point of identifying the accounts to
Target (and manage) prioritised top accounts
Targeting top accounts is what defines ABM as a distinct marketing approach, and so deserves the most careful attention.
You need to first identify who your targets are, before managing and nurturing these through the pipeline.
The first step in the process (identifying) requires detailed research and knowledge of your ideal account, and indeed of each and every one of your targeted accounts. Once in your pipeline, you need to nurture these accounts with highly targeted and personalised messaging and content across all channels.
Work across channels
You really want to pay close attention to the channels you will be using to target and manage your top accounts.
As the risks outlined above showed us, through ABM you’re already putting your eggs into a limited number of baskets, so execution is critical.
Using a broad mix of channels in a highly targeted and personalised way will ensure you greatly improve the chances of connecting with and winning your top accounts.
Measure, analyse and optimise your activities
As with any marketing / revenue strategy, your ABM needs to be measurable in order to demonstrate success and, of course, optimise moving forward.
The main metrics you should be tracking are largely the same as brand and lead generation marketing but with an ABM filter.
In particular, you want to be tracking the following:
Traffic on site from the contacts within accounts
Impressions and conversions (engagement) rate on content and outreach for each account
The average number of known contacts within top accounts
ROI on account-based campaigns
The average time it takes for your accounts to be closed as one (time to revenue)
4 ways a B2B revenue attribution platform can fire up your ABM
So now that we have a clearer understanding of what it takes to put into action an ABM strategy, let’s have a look at why and how B2B revenue attribution can make your ABM a success.
B2B revenue attribution is the process of connecting all your activities - marketing, sales, customer success - with revenue generated from accounts.
By collecting, cleaning and sorting all relevant revenue data, and then having algorithms run reports and analytics on that data, revenue attribution gives marketers and growth professionals unprecedented (actionable) insight of the B2B customer journey.
This insight is pivotal to your ABM strategy. To show you how, we’ve put together four ways on how a B2B attribution platform like Dreamdata fires up your ABM.
1. Organises all your data into an account-based model to fully reveal the B2B customer journey
A B2B revenue attribution solution pulls and joins all your revenue data and organises it into data rich accounts. In this way it accurately and holistically captures the complexity of the multi-touch, multi-stakeholder buyer journey that characterises the B2B model.
After all, ABM is itself a product of there being multiple stakeholders with multiple touches as part of the buying process.
To do this, a revenue attribution platform like Dreamdata will:
Collect data from both your commercial techstack - CRM, automation, ads, CS tools, etc - and your site.
Clean this data and sort it into accounts - in the process converting anonymised users into identified users within accounts.
Store this data on a cloud based data warehouse
With all this data cleaned and available, you will be able to paint a very accurate picture of what your accounts are looking like as they progress through the pipeline.
This means every contact and every touchpoint from the very first to the last. All the information you need to understand your customer journey and enrich user profiles.
That is, you will be able to identify all the individuals within the accounts that were involved in the buying process and what all the (digitally measurable) actions that the company has taken on the road to becoming your customer.
From this insight into the journey you are better able to optimise subsequent ABM campaigns, improve planning, and understand what parts of the campaign are performing (in real time).
For more unconventional accound-based marketing tactics, you can read Vladimir Blagojevic’s 5 suggestions here.
Which brings us to the next point.
2. Measures ROI, performance, and attributes revenue to all your ABM activities
Measuring the performance of your ABM campaigns is central to their success.
A revenue attribution platform takes all the relevant data and pulls reports on every aspect of your customer journeys and pipeline.
This means, that amongst other things, you can:
Scale your best performing channels
With revenue attribution you are able to attribute revenue back to all your channels. This means you will have a data-backed assessment on what has been performing, enabling you to scrap the channels that don’t work and scale the ones that do.
Optimise ROI and find LTV on all your activities
A platform like Dreamdata will allow you to drill down to see the effectiveness of individual ad campaigns, content, and experiments in your ABM campaigns. This means you will be able to find what activities are delivering the best ROAS, ROI, and LTV.
What’s more, unlike ABM tools, a revenue attribution platform will allow you to measure performance of all your ABM and non-ABM campaigns (should you be running these as well).
3. Completely aligns your marketing, sales and customer success teams
We’ve learned above of the importance of aligning all revenue teams (marketing, sales and customer success) in order to best give effect to your ABM.
From researching and deciding on top accounts, to planning and executing the ABM campaigns, all revenue teams need to work together.
A revenue attribution platform like Dreamdata enables this unified approach by including data on marketing, sales and customer success activities in all the reporting and modelling. The revenue attribution platform will measure the impact of all the types of activities on the account.
4. Tracks your time to revenue
In B2B revenue isn’t normally generated instantly. It takes time, planning and execution.
But for this, you need to know your Time to Revenue. That is, how long it takes from the first time somebody from a potential account visits your website until the account is closed as won.
You simply can’t judge activities on a monthly basis, if results are to be seen yearly. Things take time in B2B.
That’s why measuring your Time to Revenue metric on all your accounts will prove especially powerful in planning and executing your ABM.
Growth activities and experimentation
Making decisions on which activities to scale or scrap in your ABM campaigns rests heavily on the amount of time they are given to run.
So not being able to place your finger on how long it takes you on average to win deals creates a pretty significant stumbling block, right?
Say your average customer journey is 100 days long, judging activities’ performance on a monthly basis is a fool's errand. But, without knowing the actual length of your customer journey, you’re unable to draw a line on when you should be judging performance.
What’s more, knowing the average account journey gives a benchmark for trying to accelerate the journey.
Should you send more emails? Change the content of your automation? Run more ads? Pick up the phone twice as many times?
Account managers might have rules about moving leads to closed as lost after +100 days. But what if the average Time to Revenue for a large deal is 131 days as the example we will show below. Then you better keep trying to close the deal!
Predicting revenue and budgets
When you know your average Time to Revenue, you will know whether the numbers you’ve set as targets are actually possible to hit.
For instance, if your average buyer journey is over 12 months, then at the end of year 1, it’s already too late to hit year 2’s budget, unless the leads are already in the pipeline, right?
Which shows once again how important this metric is.
Interested to learn more about the time-to-revenue metrics, check out this article.
Concluding remarks (TL;DR)
Through highly targeted and personalised campaigns, ABM is helping B2B marketers become visible in the increasingly crowded digital landscape.
However, the approach is not without its risks, and should not be applied willy nilly to any target market.
In this post we showed how ABM works best when targeting large to enterprise sized organisations. And highlighted the inherent risks of placing many eggs into comparatively few baskets.
To mitigate the risks, a well run ABM strategy should pay close attention to:
Re-culturing and re-organising revenue teams to be optimised for ABM,
Identifying, targeting, and managing prioritised top accounts,
Working across channels, and,
Measuring, analysing and optimising all activities.
Yet, a successful ABM strategy rests not only on the quality of the targeted activities, but also on the quality of the tracking, collection, and analysis of the activities’ data.
So to really bring these ingredients together and fire up your ABM, you need to be looking at B2B revenue attribution.
With a B2B revenue attribution platform you can connect all your activities - marketing, sales, customer success - with revenue generated from accounts.
By collecting, cleaning and sorting all relevant revenue data, and then having algorithms run reports and analytics on that data, revenue attribution gives marketers and growth professionals unprecedented (actionable) insight of the B2B customer journey.
Specifically, we found four ways B2B revenue attribution can fire up your ABM. A B2B revenue attribution platform:
Organises your customer data into accounts to fully reveal the customer journey
Measures ROI, performance, and attributes revenue to all your ABM activities
Completely aligns sales and marketing
Tracks your time to revenue
