A New Metric for B2B Marketers to Track: ICP Accounts in Orbit

Marketing is working if your buyers:

• have heard of you
• understand what you do without talking to a person
• are consuming your content and assets to educate themselves about their problems and your product
• are primed to buy when the time is right

Traditional MQL tracking doesn't exactly help you keep tabs on the above, which is why it's time to turn to a more effective metric.

The Death of the MQL: Why It's Becoming Obsolete

So, what are the problems with traditional MQL tracking?

• MQLs are typically poorly defined, which means you end up accumulating unqualified leads
• MQL tracking doesn't follow whether these leads actually turn into revenue — this is a common problem faced by sales teams
• Not every account is going to come inbound on their own. People may need a little push to take a demo

Why You Should Track Accounts in Orbit Instead

Marketing should have a pipeline or revenue goal. This forces them to focus on better qualified leads as opposed to volume alone.

But it's important to remember that a win for sales is a win for marketing. Don't restrict marketing wins to just inbound demos and signups.

An upstream metric to track that's better than MQLs or traffic is accounts in orbit for sales-led companies.

If an account in your ICP is actively engaged with your content on site, social media, your YouTube channel, et cetera, that's a marketing win.

Now if marketing can get a person to sign up of their own accord, that's great — but for expensive B2B software, that's not always possible. That's where sales comes in.

The prospect is now primed to buy and more receptive to a pitch — sales can close the deal.

You Need to Get Crystal Clear on Who Your ICP Is

To do this, sales and marketing need to be very strict about aligning on what makes a good potential customer.

Don't focus on factors like company size, industry, and role alone. Zero in on:

• who your customer is at these target accounts
• what their top problems are
• what the cost of these problems is
• what the status quo or default state of things are
• what their tech stack is
• why they need to solve these problems and how urgent these problems are
• what the triggers that make these problems important to solve

How to Track Accounts in Orbit

Companies can loosely measure ICP accounts in orbit with better analytics and de-anonymization software like Clearbit or 6sense.

You can combine them with tools like Letterdrop to understand exactly what content people from an account are consuming, label them, and understand what else you can send to them to initiate a conversation.

Letterdrop lets you see which accounts are engaging across both your site and your LinkedIn accounts, and you can view detailed historical data.

Make Buying Customer Friendly and Track In-Orbit Accounts

Marketers should take care of the qualified inbound and sales should be the human touch at the end of the line to seal the deal.

We can help you de-anonymize and track the process if you're interested.