Account-based marketing (ABM) can drive 75% more valuable contracts and boost customer lifetime value by 150%. But for many organizations, the true return on these campaigns is unclear, making it hard to:
- Access budget for future ABM campaigns
- Identify waste or missed opportunities
- Optimize performance for maximum ROI
Our team has helped clients drive 111% YOY revenue growth using ABM—and this guide reveals the systems we used to measure that performance.
Account-Based Marketing 101
What is Account-Based Marketing?
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a B2B strategy that aims to engage and convert a specific high-value company. Rather than speaking to a broad set of “ideal customers”, it narrows your focus to a single target account—and invests in extensive lead nurture to convert that account.
Is Account-Based Marketing the Right Approach for You?
Our view is that ABM is often highly valuable, but involves a series of tradeoffs:
- High Risk, High Reward: Generating a positive ROI from ABM hinges on a handful of target accounts converting into customers. This is off-set by the potential return: most target accounts are big fish, and earning even a single purchase can be a significant windfall.
- More Precision, Less Repurposing: ABM involves creating content for a specific set of buyers. The content is more relevant and personalized, but also less easily repurposed for other contexts or audiences.
- Shorter Cycles, Narrower Funnel: The level of precision and focus involved in ABM often means the purchasing cycle gets shorter. Marketing is more impactful; sales teams are more receptive. But this also means you are likely connecting with fewer businesses.
When Does Account-Based Marketing Deliver the Biggest Gains
The approach typically makes the most sense for:
- Companies with inherently limited total addressable markets (TAMs). For example, government contractors generally have a handful of agencies they can sell to. They lose relatively little by focusing exclusively on one or two purchasing teams—and stand to potentially gain a lot.
- Companies looking to move “up market” or consolidate high-end status. An ABM campaign can enable mid-sized companies to win big buyers and quickly scale up their operations. It’s a big strategic swing, and when it works, it’s game-changing.
- Companies whose inbound marketing is locked in. If you have a strong inbound pipeline established—and are able to automate parts of it—shifting your attention to ABM can help increase your overall marketing ROI.
However, all of this depends on a few prerequisites:
- You must have a clear view of your target accounts. ABM will only work if you actually understand the specific companies you focus on.
- Your sales and marketing alignment must be on-point. From a shared view of the target buyers to strong lead hand-off processes, you need to operate as a single entity—and give the target buyers a feeling of total continuity.
- You must have the time and budget to see the campaign through. B2B marketers are often dynamic, quickly pivoting or using data to adjust campaigns. But ABM requires a sustained investment in a single approach that might take many months to generate any returns.
The takeaway? Account-based marketing can deliver significant results for your company—but it requires detailed measurement systems to ensure strong ROI.
How to Measure the ROI of Account-Based Marketing
The fundamental ROI calculation for ABM is simple: Revenue Generated by ABM minus Budget Spent on ABM times 100. If you invest $400k in ABM activities—content production, ads, etc.—and win an account worth $800k, your ROI is 200%.
However, this leaves out a few complicated factors:
Metric Choice
How Much is an ABM Win Really Worth?
The revenue generated from your target account is rarely fixed. While you might sign an initial deal through your ABM campaign, the total value of the customer depends on how long they stay with you.
Many companies solve this problem using a representative sample of existing customers to estimate the likely tenure of a new customer, and use this to measure the customer lifetime value (CLV) of a new customer.
This is useful, but inherently imprecise. It is also unclear how much future revenue from a new customer can be attributed to the ABM campaigns, especially given that customer experience plays a massive role in the average customer's loyalty.
Pipeline Influence
How Much Revenue Can ABM Take Credit For?
Measuring the ROI of ABM after a campaign usually leads to conflict and confusion. Nobody can agree exactly where marketing deserves credit for influencing the funnel or shifting things forward, let alone pinpointing the exact channels, content, or personnel each conversion can be attributed to.
Measurement Limitations
What Is Your Data Not Capturing?
The potential value of ABM might not be limited to measurable factors like conversions or revenue generated. ABM typically focuses on large companies whose employees might be influential; prolonged engagement with them might lead to word-of-mouth marketing and improved brand reputation—in ways you will never be able to demonstrate.
3 Steps to Measure ABM ROI More Accurately
Our team recommends several steps to measure the ROI of ABM:
1. Establish Goals, Metrics, and KPIs Upfront
Start any ABM campaign with a clear definition of what will constitute marketing’s influence on revenue and set targets to measure performance against. The most important definitions here are:
- Direct Costs: Expenses explicitly tied to executing ABM campaigns (ad spend, platform fees, content creation costs)
- Indirect Costs: Supporting expenses not tied to single activities (employee time, training, overhead)
- Revenue Generated: Total revenue attributed to ABM efforts, including closed deals from targeted accounts and projected lifetime value
- Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): Average cost to acquire a customer within targeted accounts. (Formula: Cost of ABM / Number of New Customers Acquired
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Total revenue expected from an account over the entire business relationship
- Pipeline Influence: Portion of sales pipeline attributed to ABM campaigns, especially for long sales cycles where deals are still in progress
- Account Engagement Score: Quantified measure of how target accounts interact with your content, campaigns, and touchpoints
- Engagement Metrics: Account interactions, including website visits, email responses, content downloads, and event attendance
- Pipeline Velocity: Speed at which accounts move through the sales funnel from initial engagement to closed deal
2. Implement Detailed Data Analytics
Use a CRM—our team always recommends Hubspot—to generate granular performance data and create centralized dashboards. This ensures sales and marketing have a shared view of the target account and can adjust strategy based on real buyer behavior.
The key steps here include:
- Establish Data Standards: Define clear guidelines for data collection, categorization, and reporting across all systems
- Build Your Target Account List: Identify and import all organizations targeted by your ABM strategy into the CRM. You can segment accounts into tiers based on revenue potential, industry, and business needs
- Enable Integration and Data Syncing: Connect CRM with marketing automation platforms, ABM tools, and analytics systems
3. Select the Right Reports
While our team generally argues custom-built dashboards are best for tracking marketing ROI, a few standard reports include:
Core Performance Reports
- Account List Report – Definitive list of all targeted accounts, updated quarterly to maintain alignment across sales and marketing teams
- Intent Data Report – Weekly insights tracking account buying readiness and engagement activity to prioritize outreach efforts
- ABM Dossier – Living document per account containing firmographics, buying team members, engagement history, and all touchpoints
- Sales Motions Report – Continuous tracking of outreach activities (emails, calls, meetings) and engagement levels per account
Strategic Analysis Reports
- Planned vs. Actual Report – Quarterly comparison of planned ABM activities against actual outcomes, measuring both leading (activities) and lagging (pipeline/revenue) indicators
- Pipeline Influence Report – Tracks how much of the sales pipeline is attributed to ABM campaigns, especially for long sales cycles
- Engagement Metrics Dashboard – Real-time account engagement scores, website visits, content downloads, and webinar attendance by target accounts
- Revenue Attribution Report – Connects marketing touchpoints to closed deals, calculating total revenue generated from targeted accounts
Optimization Reports
- Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) Report – Average cost to acquire customers within targeted accounts to measure efficiency
- Customer Lifetime Value vs. CPA Analysis – Compares long-term account value against acquisition costs to ensure profitability
- Account Engagement Depth Report – Tracks sustained engagement patterns over time and multi-stakeholder involvement within buying committees
