“Don’t count the people that you reach; reach the people that count.” David Ogilvy
Marketing has made significant progress in using metrics to earn accountability and respect since Mr. Ogilvy first said this quote, but its significance finds new meaning in today’s world, as the rise of Account Based Everything (ABE) demands new ways of thinking about marketing metrics and measurement.
Traditional demand-gen metrics simply aren’t enough to optimize an account-based strategy.
While leads and opportunities are important and even necessary metrics, they are not sufficient to measure ABE. You need metrics that are suited to this specialized discipline – or you’ll be pursuing and rewarding the wrong things. Because ABE is a fundamentally different approach, it requires fundamentally different metrics, those that provide an account-centric lens to your measurement. Here, marketing won’t be generating many “hot leads” – so even metrics that incorporate quality (MQL) become less useful.