Marketing measurement is a passion of ours at B2B Fusion based on these prior posts.  We’re starting to see more advanced business impact capabilities for Account Based Measurement that are valuable for Marketing executive reporting at the board level – and a maturity curve is starting to emerge in measurement that spans both lead based systems as well as Account Based systems.

There are also a number of measurement systems in today’s market ranging from Excel to (expensive) Google 360 to companies that dedicate themselves to measurement like Bizible, Full Circle, Proof Analytics, CaliberMind, Hive9, Strala, and Engagio among other measurement solutions that use BI from a data lake (Looker, Domo, etc.).   It’s impossible to cover all alternative measurement vendors in this one blog post.

There is a maturity of measurement in organizations as it relates to ABM and assumes a mid market (sub $500mm USD total revenue or less) company.  I’ll use ‘education’ levels as an analogy to explain.

One important “pre-requisite” for any stage – proper business process must be installed to have tangible as well as credible results. We’re running on a big assumption explaining these levels that you’ve already got the right business process in place. Data hygiene is a secondary pre-requisite. Where data goes bad at 2-3%/month according to Salesforce, proper attribution is only as good as the underlying data.

Stage 0 “Associate Degree”

• the Sirius 1.0 or 2.0 model which is person or lead based, single then multi-touch attribution.  This seems to be the minimum several SaaS companies or mid-market clients already have installed where Marketers are progressively being measured on opportunities sourced from Marketing.  It’s become a familiar metric to boards with CAC (cost of acquisition), LTV (lifetime value) and related measurements.

• There are typically either single or multi touch models.   The model leverages marketing automation and Salesforce.com, with some shortcomings in measurement but is a bare minimum measurement system in either a first or last touch model.  Companies like Bizible (now Marketo) and Full Circle Insights overcame single touch shortcomings with a multi touch digital and campaign attribution in their respecitve service offers to follow closely with the 1.0 and 2.0 models.
  • One example of multi-touch is a vendor like Full Circle, where there can be a variety of different ways to measure touches (linear, U shaped, W shaped, etc.) to attribute the campaign effort.

• In this stage of measurement, there is no need yet to measure Account Based Marketing.   There may be a need to keep a lead based measurement alongside an Account Based structure which leads to the next stage.

In our follow on post, we’ll look at stages 1 and 2.

If you have feedback on what works well for you in stage 0, please let me know.