H1 Post-Mortem: 5 ABM Program Metrics to Guide You to A Better H2

After Q2, you’ve probably spent some time on KPIs. Inbound/Outbound Leads, Closed-Won opportunities, revenue… but what about the accounts you didn’t win, or even accounts you never got into a meeting with? If you had a disappointing H1, or just want to take your account-based marketing program as far as you can, here are 5 metrics you can use to gain insight into the health of your sales and marketing programs, and areas with room for improvement.

H1 Post-Mortem Metrics for B2B SaaS Go-To-Market Teams

• Sales & Marketing Targeting Evaluation
• Lost Deal Analysis 
• Lead Quality 
• Pipeline Progression 
• Lead Source 

Sales & Marketing Targeting Evaluation

If you’re running an ABM program, you should have a very clear idea of who your ICP is. Further, you should have a strategy to reach your target buyers… when they’re actually in a buying cycle.  

Here’s an exercise we did recently in the Triblio sales & marketing team to gut check our ABM strategy, that you can do too.

If you use G2 intent data, try this:

1. Pull a report of companies that viewed 1 or more of your competitors in the past quarter. 
2. Cross-reference that list against your pipeline – how many of the in-market accounts did you break into? 

When we first did this exercise for Triblio, we found that we were breaking into fewer accounts than we hoped to be. After identifying this as a gap, the BDR team adjusted their strategy by prioritizing outreach to accounts classified as ‘decision stage’ based on intent data criteria. By prioritizing these intent signals over just ICP-fit, BDRs are able to reach accounts with demand that they may otherwise overlook.

Often in ABM, we tend to focus on the absolute highest-fit account we can think of… but, if an account isn’t in-market, your sales and marketing teams are in for an uphill battle. If you have a lean team and want to get the most out of your work-hours, prioritize capturing existing demand before trying to create it.  

Lost Deal Analysis

Every quarter, there’s at least one deal that sales thought was a total slam-dunk that just… doesn’t quite make it. It stings! But rather than chalk it up to ‘you win some, you lose some’, a great salesperson (like the folks at Triblio) always investigates the loss. Not only should the data your sales team collects on why they lost deals inform their playbook, but it should also inform the go-to-market team as a whole: whether it points towards content gaps, messaging mishaps, or product roadmap opportunities.

What You Can Learn From Your Losses

If…

You keep losing to one competitor

Put together or revisit the sales plays and marketing messaging that you’re deploying in competitive deals. Identify where you win, and make sure that message comes across consistently in your marketing, prospecting, and sales touch points. 

Most of your pipeline ends up not purchasing any product in your category

First, look at your qualification criteria. If many of your opportunities don’t end up purchasing any product in your category, it’s possible that they weren’t qualified enough. Or there could be flaws with the way that your team communicates the problem your product solves. 

Learn 3 ways sales teams can close more deals with ABM tactics.

Lead Quality 

Lead quality is one of the most hotly debated topics between sales and marketing teams. To succeed as a team, the sales and marketing departments should ideally be referencing the same set of metrics as it relates to lead quality. For example, on Triblio’s team, BDRs decide based on predetermined ICP criteria whether each inbound lead is or is not qualified, and this data is shared between sales and marketing. From quarter to quarter, you should keep an eye on your lead quality. For Triblio, that looks like doing a lead audit at the end of each quarter and sharing the results with the sales team.

What to Do When Lead Quality Drops

When you see a dip in lead quality, you should drill down to see where the unqualified leads are coming from, and troubleshoot channels as needed. For example, if you see a spike in unqualified leads coming from paid search, you can take a closer look at your paid search campaigns, and see if there are keywords you should exclude, or targeting parameters you should narrow. Doing this exercise can help you fine-tune your campaigns, making your ad spend go further, and saving your sales team time that they can spend on more qualified accounts.

Pipeline Progression 

Measuring your pipeline progression can help to inform the general quality / fit of your accounts in pipeline, whether they’re routinely getting stuck in certain stages, and if your sales cycle is slower than it should be. 

What to Do About Slow Pipeline Progression 

If you’re seeing accounts move more slowly through the pipeline, which potentially is leading to a lower overall win-rate, take a step back and consider the touchpoints that your prospects encounter while they’re in pipeline. 

Is your sales team as supported as they could be? One of the most significant challenges of the B2B sales process is the breadth of buying groups (Surely you can’t expect your AE to personally reach and influence 20+ stakeholders in each account!). But many teams shy away from reaching their pipeline accounts with marketing messages for fear of ‘stepping on the sales team’s toes’.  To improve pipeline progression and win rates, develop a multi-threaded approach to your sales process, reinforcing sales messaging with marketing nurture and air cover. 

Learn more about strategic air cover for sales.

Lost Opportunities That Never Had A Chance

One way to use pipeline progression to uncover possible holes in your go-to-market strategy is to combine it with your lost deal analysis.

For example, if I see an increase in the percentage of deals lost after the initial discovery call, I would want to drill down to the reasons for those losses. Even though they were marked as qualified, there can be major issues identifiable by their loss reason. If a significant amount of deals lost before seeing the product  were lost because the customer was looking for a different type of solution than we offer, I’d want to revisit my message-market fit. Prospects should have a fundamental understanding of what your product is before they get on a call with an AE, so if you’re seeing instances where that’s not the case, ask yourself if your marketing is telling the right story. 

Learn more about pipeline metrics for account-based sales teams.

Lead Source 

How are you tracking your lead sources? You likely have automatically set fields, like HubSpot’s original source and latest source fields based on UTM parameters, but that often only tells a small piece of the story. If you have self-attribution fields on your demo forms, you have a trove of valuable data that you can use. 

How to Learn From Your Lead Sources

Compare your attribution metrics from software side by side with your self-reported attribution metrics, to see two very different stories. Attribution software will weigh organic search, direct, and paid search heavily, while self-reported attribution will clue you in to referrals, word of mouth, and social sources that you may otherwise miss. 

You can then use the additional context from your self-reported attribution to inform your future marketing strategy, by shifting focus towards channels that were most reported by your prospects as the reason they came to your business, as opposed to simply leaning on the channels with the most trackable attribution via software.

Check out this Demand Gen Live video for more about using self-reported attribution.

Conclusion

Whether you had a killer 2022 H1 or left the first half of the year wanting more, you can use these metrics to continue to learn from your team’s past performance to improve your future.

If your 2022 H2 strategy involves taking your ABM to the next level, check out how Triblio can help unite your sales and marketing team and simplify attribution in your ABM program.