The Role of Reporting in ABM
Reporting is a feature of the marketing and sales strategy that can make or break your campaign. Without reliable data on a platform that fits your team’s needs, making informed decisions in a marketing campaign and thus pushing accounts down the funnel become nearly impossible.
Excel sheets, CSV files, charts, diagrams, one-page recaps… reporting comes in all different shapes and sizes. And weekly reports emailed to you by your platform host aren’t always helpful; you might have the data, but what’s next?
The ABM Agency method of reporting, however, is different. Our unique reporting methods help B2B companies see through messy analytics data and identify an account’s progress through the sales funnel—all while providing clear visual and quantitative dashboards for the involved parties (sales, marketing, the C-suite). We then take those reports and data points and use them to help push target accounts into becoming sales qualified leads and eventual customers.
Dashboard
The best type of ABM reporting dashboard is one that’s flexible and works for both sales and marketing teams.
It should include an overview of the entire ABM campaign, which allows the sales team to check in on specific accounts and their funnel locations with ease. Your marketing and creative teams will benefit from a dashboard that provides clear visual outputs; that way, they can see, for example, how well an ad set is performing and adjust their copy or graphics accordingly. And if the CMO wants to take a second to see the progress of a campaign, the data is at his or her fingertips. A user-friendly dashboard helps keep everyone aligned throughout the entire campaign.
With The ABM Agency, there are two ways to go about developing your perfect, functional ABM dashboard:
- Our developers will create a completely customized dashboard for your team, or
- They’ll build a dashboard to be integrated in your native platform (Google Data Studio, Domo, Tableau)
Once your dashboard is set up, you can start tracking data in real time. Which brings us to…
Metrics
Many well-known ABM service providers target accounts and generate reports using data and metrics exclusively from one platform, i.e. Bombora. You’ll see the classic metrics like engagement, CPC, clicks, and impressions. While these metrics should always be included in ABM reporting, there’s more to the data story.
At The ABM Agency we dig a little deeper. Our team combines data from multiple channels in order to create a comprehensive account score. This account score is then used to advise sales and marketing teams about funnel placement, effectiveness of content, and where to spend more (or less) of the budget.
There are 5 key buckets individually scored in order to generate the total score (and don’t worry, we can add more buckets based on your particular targets or industry). Each score is predetermined and ranked; you can score by company, by product, etc.
1. First and third-party intent data
2. On-site page views
3. On-site interaction score
4. Campaign score
5. Content score
Turning Your Reporting Data Into Concrete Action
So you have your dashboard; you have your metrics and account scores. Now what?
You can use the individual metrics as well as total account score to determine the success of your ABM campaign based on the following questions:
- Are the targeted accounts interested in your product or service, and are they visiting your website?
- Are they consuming the content you’ve created in a meaningful way?
- Are the targets moving down the funnel, headed in the direction of handover from marketing to sales?
If your dashboard and reporting helped answer these questions, then you’ve successfully utilized your data to inform your ABM strategy. Now you can turn the clear and concise reporting into actionable items for the marketing and sales teams.
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