Earlier this week, we wrote about how your Customer Success team can help jump-start your ABM strategy. Now, we’re taking a closer look at one unique way organizations can evaluate accounts.
ABM requires organizations to spend more time building relationships with select accounts, rather than casting a wide net and hoping an account comes to them. Unlike traditional lead scoring, engagement metrics are applied to qualify entire accounts (the MQA) instead of one singular lead (MQL.) This measures engagement levels for multiple leads to determine the sales-readiness of an account as a whole.
Time is money…
At Engagio, engagement is measured through time-based attribution. Simply put – how much time are accounts spending interacting with your brand and your campaigns?
“People will spend time with you before they spend money with you. So it’s about how to measure the time spent,” Brandon Redlinger, Director of Growth at Engagio, said.
These parameters are customized based on organizational goals, and how brands prioritize certain interactions across their sales and marketing campaigns. Like traditional lead scoring, certain interactions – like an ebook download or a sales call – may have more weight than more top-of-funnel interactions, like reading a blog post or visiting a product page.
But in a time-based attribution model, these different “weights” are measured in terms of engagement. For example: reading a blog post may count as five minutes of engagement time – whereas attending a webinar or taking a sales call may account for 30 minutes to an hour.
“An account could be considered ‘qualified’ if they have at least two key personas spend a certain amount of time engaging with the brand,” Redlinger said.
Different personas within accounts can also be weighted depending on how different organizations value certain leads, placing greater value on the amount of time these leads spend with a company.
“In those cases, you can say ‘multiply that “minute” by 1.5 times the traditional score,” Redlinger said.
…So don’t waste it
Before you start tracking engagement, make sure you’ve selected the right leads and channels to start building campaigns. Terminus CMO Sangram Vajre suggests creating an ABM scorecard for both sales and marketing teams to use to determine the right fit.
“If you don’t have the right fit, then the engagement doesn’t matter,” Vajre said.
Account coverage tracks how much data your organization has on select accounts, and how complete that data is. Make sure your company has identified all the major stakeholders involved in the decision-making process – and that you have the information to contact them in the most effective ways.
“Computers are better at integrating data at mass quantity, but they’re not good at building the relationship – only humans can do that,” Redlinger said. “Slow down and be more focused to deliver more value to the account.”
