Account based Metrics

The All-in-One Guide to Account-Based Metrics That Matter The New Way to Measure ABM Success for Marketing and Sales Revenue teams are always looking for the next wave of innovation to close more deals, as well as plan and predict future success. One of the biggest waves in recent years is account-based marketing (ABM), which has been proven to be a valuable go-to-market strategy by analysts and practitioners alike. The stats are so well-known we can recite them in our sleep, but just in case… According to Gartner, ABM programs show a 70% increase in opportunities created. And 87% of account-based marketers say that ABM initiatives outperform other marketing investments, according to a benchmark survey conducted by ITSMA and the ABM Leadership Alliance. SiriusDecisions found that 91% of companies using ABM saw an increase in average deal size. In fact, ABM has proven so successful that it’s become the new norm; Forrester predicts that by 2025, the term “ABM” will disappear as account- centric becomes the way most B2B organizations identify, plan, manage, and measure buying and post-sale motions. What’s missing from these impressive statistics? Marketing qualified leads (MQLs). Yet somehow the MQL has worked its way into the very fabric of the marketing funnel. Even though we know that less than 1% of these leads convert, marketers still covet them, and with good reason — the c-suite and board members are used to MQLs; they expect to see them posted month over month.

Plus, MQLs are easy enough to measure with traditional marketing systems and processes already in place, leading many marketers to work the law of large numbers: the more leads you have, the more conversions will result. In pure statistical theory, this is bang on, but it doesn’t pan out in the real world. It’s like trying to buy a car with pennies — entirely possible, but not easy to manage or keep track of, and definitely an inconvenience for all involved. But for lead-centric marketing teams, the MQL ultimately proves problematic. For one thing, MQLs typically rely on outdated methods of gathering data, like lukewarm event leads or forgotten form fills. Additionally, subsequent leads from the same company tend to be ignored in favor of the more heavily weighted first lead. That alone shows that many marketing teams aren’t aligned with modern B2B buyers. If you’re playing a numbers game, five leads from the same company should light up your scoreboard. And yet, any lead(s) after the first are effectively ignored by marketing and certainly by sales. In this scenario, sales often doesn’t even know there were other leads knocking on the door. This is what Vice President, Principal Analyst at Forrest, Kerry Cunningham refers to as Second Lead Syndrome. Effectively, the rules of measuring MQLs — where one lead is gold and more leads from the same account drives down conversion metrics — means organizations actively dismiss additional leads that solidify an account’s interest in your offerings. Most marketers will admit that they don’t want to focus on generating random “leads” — they’d prefer to spend time optimizing resources and warming accounts for sales that are most likely to close. But with this traditional way of thinking, when and how can marketers transition to account-based metrics? Ideally, new metrics (and the process of reporting on them) should be defined before you begin to focus on an account-based strategy. But if you’re already there, stumbling in the dark of account-based experience (ABX), all is not lost. This guide is designed to help you understand why it’s necessary to redefine metrics to properly assess the performance of your ABM programs — and how. 6sense.com | (415) 212-9225

It starts with qualified accounts, not MQLs Marketing and sales haven’t historically had the easiest time deciding which accounts to target or how to measure engagement. MQLs aren’t necessarily a waste of time, but you’d have to spend a lot of resources (e.g., time, ad spend, sales calls) trying to find a truly high-quality, well-timed, relevant MQL when you could instead begin with a pool of truly qualified accounts. The first action to take is to reframe your thinking from individual leads to accounts, focus on the entire buying team within accounts, and move to a surround strategy. Much like you’d be enveloped by music from all sides if you had a surround sound system, the same is true of a surround strategy when it comes to ABX — you want to envelop buying teams from qualified accounts with orchestrated programs throughout every stage of the buying journey. This new focus on entire buying teams and a surround strategy often results in revenue marketers seeing fewer (but more qualified) accounts, which can raise alarm bells for those accustomed to chasing ever larger lead tallies. However, this approach has been proven to generate more (and bigger) deals that close more quickly. A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is an individual (i.e., single lead) that is deemed more likely to become a customer because they have attained a certain score as a result of actions taken on your website, like downloading a case study or registering for and attending a webinar. However, these scores are arbitrarily defined by marketing, so a high score doesn’t necessarily indicate that a buyer is ready to make a decision — and a low score doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re not. But regardless of the accuracy of scoring models, leads are passed to sales as soon as they reach the MQL qualification threshold. A qualified account is what we call a 6sense Qualified Account, or 6QA. A 6QA represents an account that meets your ideal customer profile and has just moved to the decision or purchase buying stages as predicted by 6sense’s patented AI models. Your historical sales and marketing data, combined with real-time intent and engagement data, is what powers 6sense’s four predictive models: account fit, contact fit, contact engagement, and current buying stage. These models find patterns in the behavior of both anonymous and known buyers and compare that activity of past successful opportunities to determine where sellers and marketers should focus their time and effort. Together, these four models provide a deeper level of insight that enables revenue teams to predictably grow pipeline and revenue. 6sense.com | (415) 212-9225

So, how do you measure an account-based program? Now that we are focused on accounts, it’s time to revise your key metrics to include the following: • Total addressable market. The entire universe of opportunities available to you — every potential customer for your solution. • Ideal customer profile (ICP). A subset of your TAM, narrowed down to the companies that are perfect for your solution. These are prospects who are most like other customers that have purchased from you as predicted by 6sense’s account fit predictive model. It’s quite possible that you have more than one ICP based on different product offerings or location. • Accounts in-market. The number of companies (accounts) showing intent to buy based on their current behavior. In-market is a designation that signifies an account has moved from the Target buying stage to Awareness, Decision, Consideration, or Purchase as predicted by 6sense’s buying stage model. Like your ICP, in-market accounts are a subset of your total addressable market at any given time. • In-market ideal customer profile (IICP). The ideal customers for your solution who are also in-market. • Sales velocity. How quickly your business is able to make money — calculated by multiplying the following: ◆ Number of 6QAs. Total number of 6QAs (strong or moderate ICP fit accounts that have reached the Decision or Purchase buying stages as predicted by 6sense’s AI-powered models and intent data). 6QAs are the most likely accounts to become opportunities. ◆ Opportunity stage conversion. The textbook definition is the percentage of opportunities that move from one stage to the next. In practical terms, these are the most critical moments your team has to find the red (identify parts of the process that aren’t working so well) and improve the customer experience. ◆ Average selling price (ASP). The average price your product is sold for. ◆ Win rate. The percent of opportunities proposed or quoted that you have won, or the number of sales opportunities converted divided by the number of opportunities available. ◆ Deal velocity. The average number of days between opening an opportunity Bonus: These and closing the deal. are the metrics • Quotas. Based on the conversion rates for the metrics above it’s possible to define quotas for the number of 6QAs, meetings, opportunities, and revenue that matter to planned for each stage of the sales funnel in a given period of time: week, month, your board. or year. Depending on your specific go-to-market, you may need additional quotas defined related to your funnel. 6sense.com | (415) 212-9225

Individually, this may seem like a lot of metrics to keep track of. Collectively, these equate to what your board most cares about: revenue. These metrics put revenue at the forefront of your intentions, helping you identify, track, and predict repeatable success. Best of all, these are metrics marketing and sales can align on, rooted in data and not the subjective sliding scale many MQLs today are based on. SiriusDesicions found companies that align sales and marketing teams achieved 24% faster growth rate over a 3-year period, and during that same 3-year period, saw 27% faster profit growth. Orchestrating account engagement Earlier we touched on the idea of orchestrated programs to help bolster your surround strategy. Simply put, orchestrating engagement involves selecting and targeting the right accounts, as well as the right contacts and personas within those accounts. It involves delivering not only personalized experiences, but relevant ones, based on what buyers care about (like intent keywords or topics) and where they are in the buying journey. And it involves delivering consistent messaging and experiences across channels. However, successfully orchestrating account engagement requires you to have predictive, intent, behavioral, and other account data to dynamically engage the right accounts at the right time. Without an account engagement platform that includes these capabilities, orchestration requires infinitely more manual time, and customer experiences are likely to be less relevant, consistent, and personalized. 6sense.com | (415) 212-9225

Working qualified accounts If you’re focused on ABX and a surround strategy and not simply employing ABM tactics, you’ll get more insights from your efforts and be able to act accordingly as you scale over time. Moving away from traditional methods of trial and error with MQLs and related metrics — often with more error than not — and toward predictive account-based strategies mean you’ll want to focus on the account- based funnel as well. The change management component of trading MQLs for qualified accounts With the adoption of the 6QA, BDRs don’t have to disqualify accounts as frequently — there are far fewer to disqualify from the start. Beginning with a pool of active, in-market accounts that are an ICP fit saves time and energy that would otherwise be spent sifting through MQLs for diamonds in the rough… and then learning to engage them at different, potentially unknown stages of their buying journey. But this transition doesn’t happen in one fell swoop. If you’re used to being compensated based on the leads you bring in, the shift to how many accounts have been 6QA’d and then converted can seem groundbreaking. In reality, this method simply enables BDRs and AEs to put their efforts into delivering great experiences with accounts that have already proven worthwhile. Not only does that mean never having to chase down a bad lead again, but it also means further solidifying the importance of conversion metrics in aligning sales and marketing and achieving buy-in from leadership. 6sense.com | (415) 212-9225

Trade the traditional marketing funnel for the account-based marketing funnel With the traditional marketing funnel, you want to cast as wide a net as possible to ultimately filter through and engage with qualified leads. Not so with the account-based funnel, in which you flip the traditional funnel and start by focusing on that smaller pool of qualified accounts and tailor your marketing efforts to those individual accounts (and moreover, their buying teams). At 6sense, we developed our own version of the account-based funnel that revolves around 6QAs. This funnel might look familiar — it’s a tip of the hat to SiriusDecisions’ Waterfall Demand Unit Funnel. Why the change? Because B2B buying has changed. Now that buyers spend the bulk of the purchase journey researching anonymously, sales and marketing can only successfully engage buyers by identifying that anonymous behavior, and then delivering targeted content and outreach to meet buyers where they are in the cycle. When you start with leads that are….well, junk, then your result will be similar. Starting out with a qualified account supercharges your sales velocity formula. To help put this in real terms, 6sense commissioned a study with Forrester to quantify the benefits of an account engagement approach. The study showed that passing a qualified account to sales resulted in leads that convert at a 75% higher rate, have a 50% higher win rate, and 40% faster cycle time. The study also produced a framework for you to see the benefit to your business. You can see a few example results from the 6sense Value Analysis (6VA) below, and you can create your own analysis here. 6sense.com | (415) 212-9225

On average, organizations that adopt the 6QA generate 40% more pipeline, 40% higher win rates, and 3.5x larger deal sizes. The 6QA aligns sales and marketing teams on which accounts are in-market to make a purchase decision — and far enough along on the journey for sales outreach. Think of the 6QA as the MQL/SQL mashup with predictive models defining your in-market and ICP fit accounts. A 6QA means an account is in-market, is a strong or moderate ICP fit, and has reached the decision or purchase stage — based on our predictive models and intent data. 6sense.com | (415) 212-9225

As revenue teams become more strategic about the methods they use to identify and pursue in-market accounts, there’s a rising need for insight into account engagement tactics and metrics to gauge account-based program success. In fact, account engagement is a significant, new performance benchmark that is changing the way marketers and sellers plan. But, you can’t plan or course correct unless you have insight into what’s happening with those accounts (or segments) to know if your tactics are successful. 6sense uses four predictive models based on past sales and marketing data to help the entire revenue team prioritize accounts and contacts: Account fit Contact fit Contact engagement Buying stage 6sense provides self-service backtest reports that enable users to validate these predictive models and build organizational trust in the data. Historical sales data is your baseline (e.g., how many days it typically takes to set a meeting, open an opportunity, and close deals), which informs the system on many aspects of your sales team’s operations. 6sense’s predictive models recognize the signals (i.e., patterns) related to buying behavior and inform sales and marketing about which accounts are showing these signals, which are the strongest ICP fit, where they are on the buying journey, which contacts are most important to engage, and how engaged they currently are compared to past opportunities. These models continuously learn as more 1st- and 3rd-party data is consumed, matched to accounts by 6signal (our patented account identification technology), and prioritized for BDRs to take the baton. 6sense.com | (415) 212-9225

Segment Performance Many marketing teams have (painstakingly) built out ways to gain an understanding of how accounts are progressing through the funnel. With 6sense, your marketing team can gain insight into what’s happening within a segment of accounts through self-service reports that identify the sales and marketing activities driving account engagement and movement through the funnel. Because these reports are at the segment level, they can be used to analyze any similar group of accounts. For example, segments can be built based on where accounts are on the buying journey; which ones are an ICP fit; the 1st- and 3rd-party intent behaviors they’ve demonstrated; a static list upload; or profile demographics like industry breakdown, revenue range, and geographic locations. Regardless of the criteria used to build a segment, performance analytics help you analyze the actions that have increased funnel movement and account engagement, and also determine which actions to take to deepen account engagement. A segment refers to a group of accounts to focus on (e.g., your ICP accounts, a target account list, or late-stage accounts actively researching competitors). 6sense enables sales reps and marketers to create an unlimited number of dynamic and static segments as a self-service feature. Users can create segments through any combination of technographic, firmographic, intent, behavioral, and predictive account data. Imagine that our current objective is to warm up Tier 1 accounts for the enterprise sales team. Once the marketing team begins warming these accounts with campaigns and sales begins reaching out, we’ll want to analyze changes over time to understand what’s working and not working, and progress through the funnel is only one dimension of success. We want to see which accounts have moved through the funnel and which have slipped backwards, but we also want to see the number of accounts that have increased or decreased intent and engagement. 6sense.com | (415) 212-9225

In addition to these meta-level trends, segment performance reports also highlight the specific campaigns and activities that reached and engaged accounts in a segment during a particular time period — and how these trends compare to a baseline timeframe. In the sections below, we’ll walk through a sample analysis of our Tier 1 accounts to better understand how Segment Performance reports provide insights into how well we’re meeting our objective. Buying stage analysis With our segment of Tier 1 accounts in hand, we can begin our analysis of buying stage progression. In this example, our first analytic shows buying stage progression for Q2 compared to Q1, our baseline. From the quick cards at the top, we can see our efforts successfully resulted in $2.6 million in total revenue won. We also see that accounts progressed through the funnel at every stage. When you see a negative number, like in the April-June timeframe for Target and Awareness, that indicates that accounts moved from those stages. 6sense.com | (415) 212-9225

When we look at the results in the Cohort Movement table within the same report, the diagonal that starts at the top left (Target) and ends at the bottom right (Purchase), indicates accounts that have stayed in place during the analysis time frame. Accounts in the darker gray areas (top right) indicate accounts that have moved further down the funnel, while the lighter gray areas show accounts that have slipped back in their buying stage. From a high level, we can see that we have successfully progressed more accounts through the funnel than those accounts that slipped backward. Finally, the Activities by Source section of the report shows us the exact activities our accounts engaged with during the analysis time frame compared to the baseline. These activities are broken out by intent, reach, and engagement, and each line item can be expanded to show campaign details like campaign name, pipeline and revenue influenced, and the specific accounts reached. With this level of detail, marketing teams can better formulate and refine their strategy for continued buying stage progression. 6sense.com | (415) 212-9225

Account engagement analysis Now we want to see how effective our tactics were in driving engagement with our segment of Tier 1 accounts during the same period of time. Since our goal was to warm Tier 1 accounts for sales, let’s imagine the marketing team created some new multichannel campaigns specifically for this objective. The Account Engagement report helps us understand the impact of those campaigns on driving engagement with Tier 1 accounts, and this analysis can be over a month or series of months. Not only does this help inform strategy and spend for the next month or quarter, but it also demonstrates the impact of marketing and helps identify areas that could use attention. The goal of this analysis isn’t for marketing to “take credit,” but instead to have confidence that tactics are increasing engagement based on the business objective. 6sense.com | (415) 212-9225

The results you see here should look familiar, as these are the same activities and summary values we saw on the Buying Stage report for this segment and time period. But rather than displaying the progression through buying stages, this report highlights the number of accounts that moved from no engagement to showing intent, visiting the website anonymously, directly engaging, and converting to pipeline and revenue. Note that a single account can show up in multiple columns in this report. For example, an account might have had no engagement in the baseline period, while in the analysis period it began showing intent, visited the website, and converted to an opportunity. As a result of this analysis, we can see that the marketing team was successful in driving increased account engagement during the analysis period, and like with the Buying Stage report, we can drill into the specific activities that influenced pipeline and revenue. This analysis provides another way for the marketing team to measure success, understand which tactics are most effective, and refine campaigns to drive further engagement. Need help deciding where to start with your Segment Performance analysis? Here are a few suggestions. Territory warmup: Gain insight into how effectively your marketing team is moving accounts from Target into later stages. Keyword campaign performance: Understand which keywords are performing the best. Deep-dive on content viewed by segment: Focus on which content is influencing pipeline. Event engagement: Learn if and how attendees are interacting with sales and marketing prior to attending. Competitor takeout: See if customers of your competitors are engaging more with your brand. 6sense.com | (415) 212-9225

Ad campaign metrics In the ad space, time is money and agility is essential, as digital marketers often don’t have a lot of lead time to get new campaigns out the door. Some platforms offer only a managed service option to build, run, and provide results of your ad campaigns. In contrast, 6sense’s display ad capabilities are 100% self-service, and campaigns go live within 24 hours. Regardless of how advertising campaigns are launched, it’s critical to have account-based metrics to help measure the success of campaigns. Traditional advertising metrics focus on things like total impressions, cost per click (CPC), and click through rate (CTR). And while those are still relevant measures for digital marketers to monitor, they don’t paint the complete picture of campaigns as part of an account-based strategy. Digital marketers running campaigns as part of a broader ABX program need to understand how those campaigns are moving the needle in terms of account engagement, and this requires additional metrics like account view-through rate, accounts newly engaged, accounts with increased engagement, and pipeline influence. Additionally, it’s important to understand when campaigns need to be adjusted in flight in order to ensure they deliver the intended results. Say you want to know if your campaign is performing well or what you should consider tweaking; automated recommendations can tell you whether you’re outpacing your budget, if your budget won’t be spent because your segment specs are too specific, etc. Continuing with our self-service-first approach, 6sense’s campaign optimization capabilities enable marketers to help themselves further with more insight and autonomy. Revisiting the goal: moving to account-based metrics and increasing conversions We’ve gone over the importance of trading MQLs for qualified accounts and how methods and measurements like the 6QA and enhanced reporting capabilities can help get you on the path to measurable success. There are two things to keep in mind as you set your sights on an effective ABX surround strategy: • You know you want to increase conversions, cycle time, and ASPs to benchmark yourself and improve. In order to do that, you can’t physically work all leads and deals — nor should you. • With that in mind, it’s important to remember that your board ultimately cares about revenue, not potential revenue. Much like a participation trophy vs. a gold medal… there’s only one they give out at the Olympics. And your board is full of judges (that’s part of the job). 6sense.com | (415) 212-9225

Going for the gold: putting it all into practice Think about all the metrics you currently use to pull together your monthly performance reports. They may include some quantum physics-level equation to derive attribution, number of leads, number of downloads, etc. Most companies can derive how much pipeline was generated. The answer your board is really looking for is whether there was enough pipeline generated. Do the numbers tell your board how your funnel is performing (or not) and how that impacts areas of investment? What about influenced revenue? Shifting the focus to account-based metrics that tell the story of conversion, pipeline, and revenue will provide more insight into the success of your efforts than the number of clicks on a display ad or number of opened emails. If this were a paint-by-number project, you’d have some of the numbers… but if you can’t connect them to one another, how will you present or make sense of the big picture? Applied science Theory is great, but what does it mean to work this way? At 6sense, we start by engaging the right accounts (i.e., 6QAs that are a strong or moderate ICP fit). So first thing in the morning, our BDR team jumps into Salesforce where they use their 6sense Hot Accounts Dashboard to review the latest 6QAs and see what’s happening with accounts they’re currently working. Our platform tells the BDRs exactly which accounts are researching 6sense and our competitors so they can prioritize those with the highest likelihood of converting. This way, they can get meetings on the calendar earlier than with traditional sales and marketing activities that simply create awareness. They can tell which accounts need attention based on the following KPIs: • Days since 6QA • Buying stage • Intent score • Account reach • Opportunity status • Profile fit From here, BDRs can drill down into a specific account and use the rich insights surfaced by our platform, such as keywords researched and which contacts in the buying team to reach out to next. 6sense also suggests new contacts to purchase and connect with — filling out the whitespace of the team — and highlights all activities that have occurred to date in order to develop a personalized outreach strategy. And this all happens with the span of a cup of coffee, just like that. 6sense.com | (415) 212-9225

Remember those four predictive models we discussed? To recap, the more information those models are fed through this process, the smarter and more helpful they become, enabling BDRs to go after IICP accounts and relevant contacts showing buying signals. Continue conversations, don’t hit reset with each new person Well-executed ABX programs make it possible for sales and marketing teams to use data to its greatest extent — to continue conversations rather than pushing the reset button on a conversation with every new person engaged in the sales cycle. As a deal moves from BDR to AE, the AE should have the most up-to-date information about every marketing activity, sales activity, and response from the account, creating an amazing, informative, and efficient sales process for both sides of the buying journey. What’s possible with ABX programs? As sellers and marketers, we love to talk about journeys and paths and cycles and funnels. All of these shorthands are a way for us to encapsulate the intricate, coordinated efforts a company goes through to create an exceptional customer experience and drive predictable revenue growth. At each stage of the journey, buyers have different needs or questions to be answered. Sales and marketing know which pieces of collateral and what tactics are best suited to a specific part of the journey to answer buyer questions. ABX programs allow teams to anticipate these questions to drive the conversation forward — moving the sales rep to the all-important advisor role buyers are looking for. 6sense.com | (415) 212-9225

Quality accounts, conversion metrics, and… action! One of the most persuasive reasons to adopt conversion metrics as the North Star of your ABX surround strategy is that they provide an instantly digestible summary of your business growth. No more scrambling for disparate or outdated data points that don’t amount to a whole greater than its parts. As a sales or marketing leader, you have an understanding of your total addressable market (TAM), ICP, and existing programs — and how to work each of these levers to arrive at your monthly targets. Marketing as a discipline is a very necessary part of the business, and aligning sales and marketing efforts with metrics helps everyone stay focused on growing the business with an eye on what matters most: building engagement, brand awareness, or becoming the recognized leader in your industry. While data provides insight into what’s happening, metrics bring that data to life. Metrics help you understand the nuances of your process - where you can find the red and make improvements. Together, data and metrics are the ace up your sleeve, your competitive edge that tells you how to pull away from the pack. With a deep understanding of how your business functions, you have all you need to make educated decisions about your business that move you ever closer to reaching, and breaking through to your goals. What’s your metrics story? We’d love to hear your personal story of redefining your metrics to align your ABX programs. Email us your story at [email protected]. Learn more about how 6sense can help you drive predictable revenue growth. About 6sense The 6sense Account Engagement Platform helps B2B organizations achieve predictable revenue growth by putting the power of AI, big data, and machine learning behind every member of the revenue team. 6sense uncovers anonymous buying behavior, prioritizes accounts for sales and marketing, and enables them to engage resistant buying teams with personalized, multi-channel, multi-touch campaigns. 6sense helps revenue teams know everything they need to know about their buyers so they can easily do anything needed to generate more opportunities, increase deal size, get into opportunities sooner, and compete and win more often. 6sense.com | (415) 212-9225