How Your ABM initiative Relates to Marketing Performance Management
It’s imperative for today’s modern marketers to improve the ROI and effectiveness of their marketing programs. That’s no easy feat. We’re responsible for the processes of planning, analyzing data and measuring performance at every stage of the customer journey. Most importantly, we’re expected to deliver practical and actionable insights to the revenue team.
With the rapidly evolving B2B marketing space, it’s hard to keep up and meet these demands.
While doing our research for the new guide, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Laura Patterson, President at VisionEdge Marketing, a firm that specializes in building Marketing Centers of Excellence to improve business performance. She’s a wealth of knowledge and an absolute pleasure to talk to.
In this interview, she explains that Account Based Marketing must fall within your overall Marketing Performance Management. We dive into how exactly to do that.
Without further adieu, please enjoy my conversation with Laura Patterson.
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Brandon: What differentiates Best-in-Class Marketing organizations?
Laura: Our research since 2001 reveals several key differentiators among the Marketing organizations that earn high marks from the C-Suite for moving the business forward. We call these the 6As: Acumen, Alignment, Accountability, Agility, Alliances, and Assessment.
The 6As of ABM Analytics:
- Acumen
- Alignment
- Accountability
- Agility
- Alliance
- Assessment
They establish metrics that are relevant to their business leaders and provide insight into how Marketing is moving the business needles. They are skilled at using data, analytics and processes to quickly adjust. They forge strong collaborative alliances with other customer facing functions.These Best-in-Class marketers serve business people first, enabling them to maximize Marketing investments.
Understand Marketing identity. Though 40% of marketers believe they exist to serve Sales, Marketing is not a tactical group. Conversely, the 23% who earn high C-Suite marks strategically move business forward – they partner with every internal function.
Brandon: What do business outcomes encompass?
Laura: Outcomes are the specific initiatives a company needs to achieve their financial targets. They provide direction, clarify success and define priorities. Once Marketing knows the outcomes it can establish quantifiable customer-centric marketing objectives that are outcome-based. These objectives are the starting point for Marketing’s metrics.
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Be really, really careful. Companies are customer-centric, not revenue-centric. We don’t market to buckets of revenue.
Understand business outcomes. B2B sales are consultative, complex, and considered. Define four buckets: Customers, competition, category, and innovation. What are target outcomes? Net-new revenue? Referrals and additional wallet share?
Brandon: What metrics should Marketing use?
Laura: The metrics that Marketing chooses must tie to the business outcomes. A well-crafted Marketing plan reveals the chain of measures and metrics between activities, programs, objectives and outcomes. This chain becomes the foundation for the Marketing dashboard.
Brandon: How can we incorporate ABM with Marketing Performance Management?
Laura: B2B deals are highly complex. Marketing must be more accountable for understanding the customer journey and the behaviors that indicated prospective buyers are progressing from one stage to the next in the journey. We call this the 6Cs: Contact, Connection, Conversation, Consideration, Consumption, and Community.
The key is to define and establish the behaviors and associated performance targets for each stage.
The 6 Cs of ABM Analytics
- Contact
- Connection
- Conversation
- Consideration
- Consumption
- Community
If you want to be good at marketing analytics, you must be able to find patterns. Look where analytics are going. Pattern recognition creates better modeling, which improves results.It’s essential that your ABM performance targets link to the overarching Marketing objective associated with your ABM program. This objective would be tied to a business outcome or outcomes and impact the same KPI. A well-designed and implemented ABM initiative incorporates all the best practices of marketing performance management. The same As apply.
Marketing’s lust for new shiny toys is its Achilles Heel. Industry-leading marketers will stay focused on improving business effectiveness with ABM.
