How to Unify Your ABM Program and Performance Data to Gain Comprehensive Actionable Insights

Behind every ABM program is a busy marketer or three scrambling to piece together scattered, disconnected data from systems and spreadsheets for their weekly pipeline meeting, quarterly review, or upcoming board meeting. 

As growth marketers responsible for driving pipeline and revenue, having a complete and accurate account-based view of your marketing and sales performance data is critical for measuring, optimizing, and delivering results. But when your social, webinar, website, email, pipeline, and syndication metrics live in silos, it’s nearly impossible to make confident decisions on what’s working, what’s not, and where to invest. 

Unifying your ABM program and performance data

Data unification is foundational to ABM measurement. Without it, you’re left with fragmented insights, siloed performance metrics, and an incomplete view of how your ABM programs are driving results. Data unification requires connecting data from all your key marketing and sales sources, including CRM, marketing automation, ABM tools, contact databases, paid and social media platforms—anywhere you're capturing buyer engagement into a single, complete, and accurate view. 

While it sounds simple, any marketing, sales, or revenue ops pro can tell you the complexities of data unification are endless. Fortunately, solutions like NavigateIQ automate this process with built-in APIs and connectors to sync, unify, cleanse, and standardize your data for a unified view of your ABM program and performance data. 

The fundamentals of data unification for actionable ABM insights

Identify and connect your key marketing and sales data sources

Your data is everywhere. Just defining the systems that sales, marketing, and customer success use to engage buyers is a challenge in itself. And it’s only getting harder. Martech tools have exploded by nearly 28% year-over-year since 2011 (Scott Brinker), leaving marketers with an ever-growing stack to manage, wrangle, and somehow make sense of. 

Identifying key marketing and sales data sources is essential to building a unified account view and avoiding surprises when a salesperson comments, “We met that prospect at an event and you’re dashboard is all wrong” at a pipeline review meeting. After defining your systems, you’ll need to build APIs and connectors to integrate the data into a cohesive data set. 

Data standardization and cleansing to remove errors, inconsistencies, and duplicates 

Surprise. Sales and marketing databases are often a mess, packed with bad, incomplete, and non-compliant data. This is especially true as ABM drivers work hard to build out buying group contacts and capture all their touchpoints. Even accurate data will likely have different formats, structures, and definitions across your systems. Data standardization and cleansing are a must if you want to segment and prioritize accounts in a meaningful way down the line. If you’ve ever lost a day to spreadsheets, you know. This is the silent time-suck for every growth marketer. But it’s also critical for any unification project to remove errors, inconsistencies, and duplicates for a cohesive and accurate data set. 

Data governance to maintain quality and security

Your data is constantly in motion. New contacts at target accounts are added, sales dumps data, list uploads from the last event your team attended, and new systems being implemented, making keeping data clean, reliable, and accessible for insights a monumental task. Without strong governance and connected processes, things get messy fast. And when data dumping happens without oversight, the result is chaos: reporting becomes unreliable, campaigns underperform, and trust in the numbers erodes. Good governance creates structure, standards, and accountability needed to keep data clean, usable, and aligned to continuously understand what’s working, what’s not, and how to optimize for impact. 

So, what’s the bottom line?

If you’re serious about investing in ABM as a go-to-market strategy, disconnected data is a non-starter. Aligning systems, standardizing inputs, and maintaining quality to gain comprehensive, actionable insights requires a defined, automated approach. Now, you can show up to your ABM review meetings, every time, armed with intelligence and a data-backed plan to optimize performance.