So you have your measurement philosophy defined - and you’re confident the questions you are asking are appropriate for your organization’s level of ABM sophistication. Now it’s time to think about the “how”. We know that KPIs are the the key foundations of most measurement projects, so it’s important to get specific about what you want to measure.
1) SMART success
2) Program lifecycle coverage
3)Time horizons
We’ve all been there. We’re confident our campaign performed great. We spent hours manually collating insights to take to our next meeting. After we present it, someone in the room turns round and asks: “how do I know if this result is bad or good?” or, worse, they say: “so what?”
Nothing can feel more deflating than thinking you’ve achieved a goal, only to receive a lukewarm reception. That’s why, with your philosophy articulated, it’s time to break down your goals to understand what success looks like.
Most of us at some point or another have come across SMART – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound – goals as a framework to turn an ambition into an objective, and it can be useful to apply the same principle to your measurement goal-setting. In particular, it’s important to consider what the criteria for success are, and the realistic timeframe you want to achieve them in.
Getting specific about how you measure goals is critical to setting the right foundations for measurement. Results need context – and with a clear understanding of the aim and the desired outcomes it’s much easier to demonstrate success further down the line.
Let’s say our Demand Generation team needs to understand which channels are underperforming against expectations so that we can optimize our spend towards better performing channels.
To measure this effectively, we need to consider:
What are the benchmarks across each channel?
What are our expectations?
What are the timescales we should evaluate on?
What is the “golden point” where we’re not wasting money on underperforming channels but we have left things to run for long enough to have a representative dataset?
What budget are we putting against each channel and how might that affect the results?
What other factors could influence our results?
As part of establishing context, it’s important to consider the full lifecycle of the program. At Agent3, we do that by breaking our measurement down into a three step approach called the PAR model:
While ultimately every marketer is after results, we believe it’s critical to track your planning and activity metrics to tell the complete story of your program’s success. Imagine you were running a lead generation program – your “result” might be 100 leads, but whether that’s a success or a failure depends on how much you invested, whether those leads match your ideal customer profile and whether those leads were delivered on time with creative that was produced on-budget.
Considering your planning metrics also help you to break down your target result into a more manageable plan – $1,000,000 of marketing-influenced revenue in isolation may sound daunting; but knowing you are going to get there by producing X pieces of content, distributed over Y channels, with Z budget to support it becomes immensely more manageable. It also provides you with the granularity to understand how you came to meet that target so you can optimize the process next time.
Quick wins can help account managers in particular see some results that are in for them –like new LinkedIn contacts – to help keep the faith in ABM
A holistic approach to program measurement also helps us fill in the timescale by demonstrating which metrics an ABMer can measure at which point in time. It’s not uncommon for executive leadership or business functions outside of marketing to want to see business results, fast.
Sadly, we know you can’t see the revenue result of an ABX program two days after the first awareness campaign has launched; but with the right approach, we can foster common understanding of why this is unrealistic, set appropriate expectations, and give these stakeholders a clear path to understanding and witnessing progress towards a revenue result.
In the past, as an industry we’ve tried to solve this with unwieldy slide decks, full of so-called “vanity metrics” all intended to show “impact”. The result was often that dreaded “so what?”.
Or worse, at the other end we see wildly unrealistic calculations of ABM/ABX ROI that don’t stand up to questioning and erode trust in the value that the activity provides.
In the early days of a program, we need to show that the planned assets have launched, on time and on budget. Then, in the weeks after launch (if not days), we need to show “quick win” metrics such as opens, clicks and web visit data.
Over time we progress towards metrics that are oriented around engagement with key buyers and generating early-stage opportunities.
Finally, long-term metrics like pipeline, revenue and increases in areas like average deal size and velocity-to-close can be shown later in the program.
As ABM professionals, we need to be able to guide other teams into understanding what those initial, early and mid stage metrics mean – and how they can act as leading indicators for future results.
With SMART goals, full program lifecycle coverage, and a plan for managing time horizons, ABM and ABX practitioners can start breaking down what it is they think will help tell the “story” of achieving their specific goals on a more tactical level. Having a list of the KPIs you currently track and the ones you still need to answer your measurement objectives gets you one step closer to a viable measurement strategy. As the old adage goes, “what gets measured gets done”.