The Three R’s of Account-Based Marketing focus on reputation, relationships and revenue according to ITSMA, who started the concept back in 2004. 

One can think of ABM as a demand-generation marketing funnel, whether traditional or “inverted” as Jon Lombardo of LinkedIn or Sanjay Vajre of Terminus has referred to it as. 

If look at the structure of a traditional demand-generation marketing funnel, we see the top as our awareness, the middle as engagement and the bottom where conversions occur. Take this marketing funnel and apply it to a real-world business setting where reputation is influenced by education (e.g. awareness), relationships are developed by frequency, relevancy and proximity (e.g. engagement) and revenue is driven by nurturing that relationship to a sale which in turn can create real business revenue (e.g. conversion). 

Here’s the breakdown of the three R’s

• Reputation (Preference, awareness and knowledge)
  • Drive preference for accounts and clients
  • Build reputation 
  • Improve credibility
•   Relationships (Number of relationships across accounts)
  • Identify and engage key stakeholders
  • Deepen relationships amongst contacts with an account
  • Strengthen relationships through events, briefings and other relevant activities
• Revenue (Annual revenue per account)
  • Grow and accelerate growth by account
  • Revenue growth
  • Increase win rate and deal size

Each business will have different objectives and the idea of this structure is to organize those into this format in order to measure the impacts of those objectives for each account.