Important KPIs in ABM: Leading and Lagging Metrics for B2B

Account based marketing (ABM) is popular for B2B enterprises, yet many struggle to measure its true impact. Instead of converting ABM strategies into revenue growth, many chase vanity metrics, like website impressions and email open rates, that have little to do with how many deals they’re closing.

Tracking the right account based marketing metrics is essential for building strategies that grow revenue. A successful ABM strategy will connect leading indicators (the early signals that a campaign is working) to lagging indicators (the proof of what worked or didn’t). Connecting the two gives your enterprise more ability to adapt in real time and to connect ABM strategy to measurable outcomes.

If you’re a senior marketing or RevOps leader, this guide will show you the ABM KPIs that matter, how to build a measurement framework that converts data into actionable insights, and how Directive’s Customer Generation methodology helps B2B businesses connect ABM measurement to bottom-line growth.

Why ABM Measurement Matters for B2B Growth

Account based marketing focuses on targeting high-value accounts and aligning your marketing and sales strategies around them. This marketing approach emphasizes precision as opposed to traditional B2B marketing where you attempt to generate leads at scale and hope some convert.

Because of ABM’s almost surgical precision, it can be complex to measure. The ABM journey includes multiple touchpoints across different channels. A decision maker might first encounter your ad on LinkedIn, read your blog through a Google search, sign up for your newsletter, and encounter you again via a virtual webinar before becoming a viable sales opportunity. With so many touchpoints, how do you measure which team deserves credit for the conversion?

The risk is that you can get bogged down in vanity metrics that sound like progress, but don’t necessarily have any impact on conversions or retention. For example, tracking website impression and email open rates sound impressive, but they’re no guarantee that sales are actually increasing.

Instead, you need to track data in a way that is outcome-driven. For ABM, this requires a shared KPI framework across marketing, sales, and success teams. Instead of marketing focusing on engagement and sales focusing on new pipelines created, a shared KPI framework aligns marketing and sales around the same goal.

These aligned goals prove ROI to leadership since they can more easily connect every dollar spent on marketing to an impact on pipeline and revenue. Plus, accurate ABM measurement makes optimization easier because it creates feedback loops that let you quickly see what is and isn’t working.

Directive’s approach to ABM performance tracking focuses on using high-quality data so that you don’t waste resources on leads that are unlikely to convert. With first-party data, we map your total addressable marketing (TAM) and manually build and verify account lists. This precision-based approach filters out bad leads and helps you build a campaign that is more efficient and likely to increase revenue.

Understanding Leading vs. Lagging ABM Metrics

The most effective ABM campaigns track two types of metrics: leading vs. lagging. Tracking both simultaneously is essential for understanding if your strategy is working and helps you pinpoint areas for improvement.

What Are Leading Metrics?

Leading metrics are early indicators of engagement and intent. They show momentum within target accounts while your campaign is running. Leading metrics give you early and real-time data into whether or not your campaign is resonating or reaching the right people.

For example, your target account engagement rate will measure the percentage of a target account list that has engaged with one of your marketing touchpoints, such as an email, website visit, social media post, or content download. Ad clickthroughs within target accounts provide a quick indication of whether or not your paid media is effective.

Similarly, if target accounts are downloading your content or signing up for webinars, that is an indication that they’re interested in your ideas, trust you as an industry leader, and are potentially open to buying.

Leading metrics can also indicate the intentions of account buying committees. For example, you can track intent data spikes from key accounts to reveal when buying committees are actively seeking new products or services.

Because leading metrics give you data about ongoing campaigns, they provide an exceptional opportunity to optimize your approach in real time. If you find that your engagement is low on certain channels, you can quickly adjust your messaging or reallocate resources to channels that are seeing better results.

Similarly, if some accounts are engaging, but others aren’t, you may need to adjust your campaign to target a different buyer persona. Instead of waiting for your campaign to succeed or fail, you can course-correct and maximize your chances of revenue growth early.

What Are Lagging Metrics?

Lagging metrics are outcomes that confirm whether or not a campaign was successful. They measure the end result of the campaign, so they’re typically slower to arrive. However, they’re arguably the most important metrics for your C-suite and will drive marketing spend decisions.

Some examples of lagging metrics include:

• Opportunities created: The total number of sales opportunities generated by your ABM program. 
• Pipeline value: The contract value attached to the total number of opportunities created.
• Opportunity-to-close rate: Your win-rate among ABM accounts, which lets you know whether targeted accounts are more likely to close than random prospects.
• Average contract value and deal velocity: The average value of each deal closed and how fast they progressed through the sales funnel.
• Expansion revenue: How much revenue new accounts generated beyond their initial purchase.
• Customer retention: The percentage of new customers who stayed with the company over a given period of time.

Lagging metrics validate the whole customer journey since they show how each stage ultimately helped contribute to increased revenue and more sales. With lagging metrics, you can track how awareness led to engagement, which led to conversions, which in turn led to revenue growth.

Because lagging metrics are proof that a campaign worked or didn’t, they’re essential for forecasting and budget spend. For example, as indicated in our B2B ROAS Benchmarks: High-Performing Campaigns in 2025, lagging metrics can be used to reallocate ROAS between Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn depending on how effective each channel is for top, mid, and bottom funnel audiences.

The Core Account Based Marketing Metrics Every B2B Team Should Track

When assessing the success of an ABM campaign, your B2B team will need to track awareness, engagement, pipeline, retention, and expansion. Each metric has its own KPIs that impact revenue.

Awareness & Engagement Metrics

Your account reach metric tracks the percentage of your target list that has engaged with your brand across any channel. Reaching the accounts in your target list requires a precision targeting strategy that ensures they are aware of and engage with your content. If your target accounts don’t know you exist, you won’t have any opportunities to turn them into customers.

Account reach gives you a big picture view of if your strategy is working on a foundational level. For example, if your ABM has an account reach of just 30%, that means 70% of your target list is missing out. When that happens, you’ll need to reconsider key elements of your campaign, such as targeting different channels that your target accounts are more likely to be utilizing.

Account reach may also consider different ways target accounts are aware of and engage with your content. For example, ad impressions indicate a level of awareness of your campaign, while click-through rates provide more valuable information about whether or not buying committees are exploring purchase options.

Websites and social media can also reveal awareness data, such as impressions, and engagement data, including visits, page depth, and social media engagement. These metrics help you assess which elements of your campaign are the most effective.

For instance, page depth indicates which elements of your website target accounts are engaging with most. Likewise, engagement with particular LinkedIn posts may point to which topics are most likely to lead to prospects engaging with your team directly, which in turn will open up more opportunities for sales.

Pipeline & Revenue Metrics

Pipeline metrics connect your marketing efforts to actual revenue-based outcomes. They show whether or not your ABM strategy is having a measurable impact on your bottom line.

An essential metric is marketing qualified accounts (MQAs), which measures how many accounts in your target list engage with your content and are ready to hand off to sales. MQAs show what percentage of target accounts are turning into opportunities for sales.

Even more important than the volume of MQAs is what rate they’re closing at and how quickly. If your close rate is lower or taking longer than average, that’s a sign of potential inefficiencies in your ABM strategy.

One way to improve efficiencies is by looking at your opportunity-to-close rates and sales velocity. These metrics will tell you what percentage of targeted accounts are actually ready to buy. For example, if your ABM accounts have a win rate of 40% compared to your company average of 30%, that’s a sign that precision-based marketing is working.

Finally, pay attention to cost per opportunity and customer acquisition cost (CAC). These two metrics reveal how much you’re spending to develop opportunities and sign up new sales. If the costs are higher than the revenue generated by the new customers, then you’ll need to either increase revenue or find ways to lower acquisition costs.

Retention & Expansion Metrics

A healthy ABM program should balance short-term engagement with long-term increased revenue. Your retention and expansion metrics provide confirmation that your strategy is delivering long-term results.

The customer lifetime value (CLTV) and net revenue retention (NRR) of your ABM targets reveal the long-term value of your accounts. These metrics include revenue from accounts not just based on their initial purchase, but from months or years of expansion revenue. For example, upsell and cross-sell conversion rates measure how many ABM customers are purchasing additional products and services over a given timeframe.

Measuring engagement among your existing customers can reveal what percentage of those existing customers may intend to expand their purchases. Similarly, predictive retention modeling uses AI and data analytics to reveal if you’re at risk of losing customers , which will drive down your CLTV. A low retention rate can be due to a number of issues, such as problems with the product or a lack of customer support.

Building an ABM Measurement Framework for Predictable Growth

While KPIs provide valuable data, you’ll need an ABM measurement framework to interpret them and translate them into actions. A measurement framework enables your company to achieve predictable growth that is backed by data.

Aligning Metrics Across Teams

Unfortunately, many B2B organizations suffer from fragmented measurement. While marketing tracks engagement, sales may focus exclusively on conversions and customer success on retention. The most successful organizations utilize shared dashboard and unified data sources so that teams are aligned around common KPIs.

A shared dashboard that lives in your CRM will show KPIs like pipeline velocity, win rate, CLTV, and CAC. While some of these KPIs may be more immediately impactful to certain teams, they matter to all of them.

For example, when marketing can see what percentage of their marketing qualified leads (MQLs) are actually leading to sales, that can give them valuable insight into the value of those MQLs and whether or not they need to adjust their engagement strategy.

When each team is sharing the same KPIs, it makes it easier for those teams to work together. With a shared knowledge base, teams can more easily communicate with one another and troubleshoot solutions to issues that affect them all.

Tools and Technology

You’ll need to integrate data across multiple platforms and reporting tools in order to properly analyze and convert it into actionable insights. For example, CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce contain opportunity and revenue data and marketing automation platforms, including Marketo, Pardot, and HubSpot, are excellent for engagement data.

Other platforms, such as 6sense and ZoomInfo, can provide insights about buying signal data, while paid media platforms, including LinkedIn and Google, will provide you with impression and engagement data.

With so many tools and platforms to choose from, the challenge is finding the ones that can help you connect leading to lagging metrics. Directive’s Stratos technology combines CRM, paid media, SEO, finance, and ops data into one powerful dashboard. With AI-powered insights and full-funnel visibility, you’ll be able to better take advantage of data from multiple tools without suffering from information overwhelm.

Measuring Attribution and Influence

Measuring attribution can be especially challenging for ABM campaigns. Because a deal involves multiple touchpoints across many channels, it’s difficult to assign attribution to just one channel or team.

This challenge is solved with multi-touch attribution, which assigns credit across all touchpoints a prospect has interacted with. Instead of assigning this data by individual lead, it does so according to the target account. That way, you’ll have a clearer view of how your ABM strategy influenced the target account’s decisions.

This multi-touch attribution is another sign of how Directive’s ABM strategies go beyond vanity metrics. Data is used to measure revenue impact instead of focusing on metrics that have limited value in terms of profits. With multi-touch attribution, teams work together and are less incentivized to pursue metrics that may have little impact on others or on overall revenue. When high-value metrics drive decisions, ABM becomes a predictable growth engine, not a guessing game.

Read more: Precision Targeting Strategy: Leveraging AI to Identify and Convert High-Intent Audience Segments

Choosing the Right Account Based Marketing Partner

If you’re looking to pursue an ABM strategy, partnering with an ABM agency is essential. With an experienced ABM partner working alongside you, you can more easily source data, generate insights, and drive revenue growth.

What to Look For in an ABM Agency

When comparing different ABM agencies, focus on the following factors:

• Experience with multi-channel ABM campaigns: ABM campaigns span paid and organic search, social, email, content, account-based advertising networks, and direct sales outreach. Your ABM partner should have experience across all of these channels and understand how each one fits into an overall strategy.
• Ability to connect data across the funnel: Your ABM partner should be able to clearly explain how data fits into the funnel and how it impacts the entire team. This ability to fit data into a cohesive strategy avoids siloing teams and ensures you don’t get bogged down in vanity metrics.
• Metrics that matter: Similarly, the best ABM partners focus on metrics that have a direct impact on revenue, such as pipeline, CLTV, CAC, and NRR. Your ABM partner should be able to explain why the data they’re tracking is important and how it connects to lagging metrics, such as revenue growth.
• Transparent reporting: ABM reporting shouldn’t be complicated. Your ABM agency should be able to concisely explain how many dollars of pipeline their work helped bring in and what the cost of it was.

Why Directive Leads in ABM Performance Measurement

Directive leads in ABM performance measurement because of our Customer Generation methodology, which aligns data, creative, and sales insights into actions that drive growth. This methodology is opposed to traditional demand generation which has a more linear funnel focus that misses opportunities for innovation and tends to silo teams.

Our dashboards connect leading indicators to lagging KPIs, giving you real-time visibility into campaign effectiveness and which areas may need optimization. Instead of focusing on low-value metrics like email opens and impressions, we focus on opportunities created and their effect on revenue.

This emphasis on revenue efficiency helps brands scale their pipeline rather than just increase engagement and other vanity metrics. Learn more about the importance of B2B SEO in 2025 to see how our multi-channel ABM strategy aligns with C-suite objectives.

Why Directive Is the Data-Driven ABM Partner for B2B Growth

Modern ABM success depends on balancing leading and lagging metrics. You require real-time data into whether or not campaigns are working so you can optimize and stay agile. But you also need proof that your ABM strategy is growing revenue.

Directive’s ABM measurement frameworks achieve this dual focus by tying every step to ROI. By integrating across your entire tech stack, we help align marketing, sales, and success teams with shared data and KPIs. Instead of getting lost in vanity metrics, we show how ABM data drives revenue.

With our integrated analytics, media, and CRO, full-funnel visibility, and transparent reporting, you’ll be better equipped to close more deals. Connect with Directive’s RevOps team to learn how our ABM expertise can help you scale your pipeline and boost revenue.