Engagio CEO Explains Why Time Is The Best Way To Measure Sales And Marketing Impact In ABM

Engagio is helping to close the traditional gaps between B2B sales and marketing departments by adding attribution capabilities to a tool that designed to offer a more holistic way of measuring account activity.

The San Mateo, Calif.-based firm last week said Engagement Minute Attribution will allow its Dash product to move beyond the likes of Brightfunnel by looking at the impact of web visits and intent data as well as sales calls and meetings. According to Engagio co-founder and CEO Jon Miller, the firm acquired Dash about a year and a half ago and continues to build upon its core capabilities.

“Now when we do attribution, instead of just looking at campaign data, which is what everyone does — we can do attribution using a full set of activity signals at the account,” Miller told B2B News Network. “We know if the sales person sent that account an e-mail. We know if they scheduled a meeting. It’s not just, ‘How many pages did they visit?’”

One of the reasons a lot of B2B firms struggle with account-based marketing (ABM) today, Miller argued, is that they tend to focus on how many people were touched in a particular campaign, whether it was attending a webinar or downloading a white paper, and treating them all equally. That’s why Engagio has Dash use Engagement Minutes to get a better sense of how hot a particular account might be.

“If I’m including every web page visit and e-mail opened, it just doesn’t make sense to weigh those things the same as if they attended a two-hour demo, or a one-hour webinar,” he said. “Before someone spends money with you, they’re going to spend time with you.”

Engagio will take those Engagement Minutes and offer Dash customers a visualization that indicates whether or not an account is ready to move into the next stage of a campaign. While some firms might choose to try it out as they begin a new campaign, Miller said he expected it will be part of a more strategic shift within some companies.

“Whether you’re the CEO or CRO that oversees both marketing and sales, what you have to be thinking about is, ‘Would my incremental dollar better put into more marketing programs or more sales people?’ That’s a really hard question for most companies to answer,” he said. The idea is not to take money away from one group or the other, he added, but to determine the best mix of resources.

“The big challenge ABM marketers are facing across the board is that the bigger the deal, the longer the buying cycle is going to be,” he said. “When companies start moving to an ABM model, they’re often challenged by the fact by focusing more on quality than quality, the number of leads go down. That gets marketers into trouble, if they don’t have their metrics right.”

Engagio included a reference from Marchex, a provider of call tracking and analytics software, as an early adopter of Engagement Minutes in Dash.