Account-based marketing (ABM) is becoming the hottest thing in B2B marketing since automation — and for good reason. New benchmark insights from BrightFunnel, an attribution and forecasting solution for B2B marketers, reveal that companies taking a more targeted approach in their marketing efforts perform better.
Here are five takeaways from BrightFunnel’s ABM Benchmark Insights report for Q3 2016 to help guide your organization’s ABM strategy:
1. ABM Strategies Lead To Higher Win Rates
Organizations that adopt an ABM strategy, segmenting prospects into target/non-target categories, have a 10% higher win rate than those who don’t. The study showed that the average win rate for non-ABM practitioners is 15.1%, compared to a 16.6% win rate for ABM practitioners.
“The data indicates that companies adopting target account strategies perform better,” BrightFunnel said in a release. “This should be reason enough to closely evaluate whether to invest in an ABM strategy. This finding could also indicate that the act of organizing an ABM effort, which requires investing time and resources to align sales and marketing, itself results in higher performance. Both are good reasons to adopt ABM.”
2. Target Account Opportunities Result Higher Win Rates
The benchmark insights revealed that target accounts have an average of 15% higher win rates compared to those for non-target accounts: ABM target accounts saw an 18.7% win rate versus 16.3% for non-target accounts.
These findings suggest that “taking an ABM approach does improve results for specific accounts targeted,” according to the report.
3. North American Accounts Require The Most Engagement
According to the study, North American accounts require double the touches of the rest of the world. More specifically, it takes an average of 16 marketing touches to close a deal for new businesses in North America, while those outside of North America require eight touches on average, according to the study.
“For global organizations, it is important not to take a ‘one size fits all approach’ to the marketing mix,” said the report. “There are many factors to evaluate, but the most basic one, which we’ve opted to start with, is that NA deals require more touches.”
4. Every Account Has Up To 13 Influential Buyers
The benchmark insights revealed that there are 8.1 orphan leads and 4.5 contacts-on-account, of which only one is attached to an opportunity. Essentially, for every single contact attached to an account, there are 1.8 potential orphan leads.
“There are a total of 13 people influencing an account and interacting with your marketing efforts, but only one shows up on the opportunity,” said the Brightfunnel report. “Many B2B organizations are still relying on single contact, single-touch attribution to evaluate their marketing performance. On average, this ignores 94% of marketing touches. This makes resulting marketing performance insights from CRM and Marketing Automation systems very unreliable.”
5. Event Engagement Is More Prevalent Than Pay-Per-Click (PPC) And Display Touches
Finally, the study revealed that event touches, including trade shows and field marketing, are four times more valuable than PPC and display touches.
The report noted that in-person interactions are still important. “Our hypothesis is that single-touch measurement approaches have led to over-valuing and over-budgeting of digital tactics, such as PPC. Meanwhile, for target accounts, higher bandwidth communication channels such as events are doing the hard work of engaging ABM prospects throughout the buyers’ journey.”
