Account-Based Marketing is the tactic of choice for B2B marketers seeking to build and expand their relationships with large and high-value prospects and customers. While it has been more than ten years since ITSMA started with the concept, ABM has rapidly gained traction in 2015.
Due to the increased attention more case studies and company testimonials become available, revealing that companies using Account Based Marketing as a strategy report higher average deal sizes and reduced sales cycles from prospects and accounts included in their ABM strategies.
Based on this, the following is a formula that can be used by marketers to calculate and communicate the added value of Account Based Marketing to their organizations:
(Where CM = Contribution Margin, D = Deal Size ABM, E = Deal Size Non-ABM, M = Marketing Investment, r = discount rate, d = sales cycle) Source: Inferens, 2015
The Account Based Marketing ROI formula is not the tough part of demonstrating ABM added value. Because sales cycles are long it may take months or even years before deals are won and revenues can be linked to marketing investments.
In the meantime marketers need to be able to monitor that they are on the right track. For this companies need an Account Based Marketing dashboard which contains metrics and targets about customer engagement as well as sales pipeline developments and data completeness.
