Is ABM Having An Impact on Marketing-Generated Revenue?

October 20, 2021
MRPDemandMetric Impact ABM B2B Marketing Generated Revenue Oct2021

Account-based marketing (ABM) has gained traction over the past few years. For many marketers, it has become a go-to-market priority, offering higher ROI compared to traditional marketing initiatives and better relationships with other businesses. While ABM efforts have faced some challenges during the pandemic, one-third (32%) of marketers say it’s one of their most important revenue-producing programs, per a report [download page] from MRP and Demand Metric. 

Of the 420 B2B marketers surveyed, 1 in 5 say ABM is their most important program for producing revenue, while another 32% share say that the strategy is one of their most important relative to other programs when it comes to revenue production.

As for ABM’s impact on marketing-generated revenue, about one-quarter (23%) of respondents say that ABM has had a significant impact, with these marketers seeing a greater than 25% increase. An equal share (23%) report a modest impact on revenue from using ABM (between 10% and 24% increase). Additionally, 22% say that ABM has favorably impacted their revenue, however, they have not measured it.

What Sets Top Performers Apart

ABM’s impact on revenue does vary across businesses, but what qualities set the high-performers — those seeing significant revenue impact — apart from those organizations seeing no, negative or unmeasured revenue impact from ABM (“low performers”)?

One factor appears to be maturity. While the average length of time respondent organizations have been using ABM is 2.8 years, those seeing a significant impact on revenue are more likely to have been utilizing it for more than 4 years (34%), with those seeing the least impact on revenue instead most apt to have been using it for only 1 to 2 years (26%).

A Demand Gen Report survey shows that for half of the marketers surveyed ABM provided better sales and marketing alignment, and this appears to be especially true for high-performers. While the majority of low-performers (65%) say their sales and marketing teams work together to create strategy, 9 in 10 high-performers say the same, with 3 in 10 claiming they have multiple teams collaborating to execute ABM for all departments and lines of business in the company.

High-performers are also more likely than low-performers to use multiple sources of data to create account profiles (high-performers: 43% vs. low-performers: 18%). Additionally, high-performers are far less likely than low-performers to rely on institutional knowledge to build account profiles (4% vs. 44%).

Because of this, the majority of high-performers say they can see a complete view of each target account across all relevant platforms (62%), while the largest share (45%) of low-performers say they can only identify limited information about target accounts within one platform.

When it comes to content, high-performers take a more personalized approach, creating libraries of content to serve specific target-account objectives. Low-performers, on the other hand, tend to create content to support ABM and use the same set for all target accounts.

Finally, most high-performers are utilizing three or more programs to deliver their message (84%). They are also more likely than low-performers to use a platform that automatically changes content across all platforms, while low-performers are more likely to say they manually change content.

The full report can be found here

About the Data: Findings are based on a survey of 420 marketers, three-quarters of whom are part of organizations with more than $50 million in annual revenue.

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