When it comes to account-based selling, having a bird’s eye view of each account keeps you updated about your pipeline progress. It avoids unnecessary account and team conflicts. Ever been in any of these situations?
- “Peter is already in contact with us, what’s this about,” says a prospect when a new rep contacts the lead already pursued by someone else.
- “But, we are already a customer for the last 5 years,” says a customer as you contact them.
Believe us when we say it can get chaotic without proper account visibility.
- Multiple reps unknowingly contacting the same leads
- Reps stepping on each other’s toes because of overlapping ownerships
- Leads falling through the cracks due to poor buyer experience.
Frustrating, right? Without an efficient Lead-to-Account Matching process, this is how your account-based sales process looks like. However, with complete account visibility, you can prevent these situations and improve the efficiency of your account-based process.
Leads vs Accounts
Leads and accounts are both terms used in sales and marketing. A lead is a person from an organization who has shown some interest in your product or service. This interest could be filling out a form on your website, attending a webinar, or downloading a whitepaper. In short, a lead is a potential customer who has expressed interest in your offering. On the other hand, an account refers to a company or organization you are targeting as a potential customer. An account can have multiple leads, as different people within the organization may be interested in your offering. To simplify it further, think of leads as individual people who could become customers and accounts as the organizations or companies that these people work for. By focusing on leads and accounts, you can create a comprehensive sales and marketing strategy targeting individual buyers and larger organizations.
What is Lead-to-Account Matching?
Lead-to-account matching is used to match individual leads to appropriate accounts in a company’s customer relationship management (CRM) system. In many cases, a single lead may be associated with multiple accounts, making it difficult to determine which account it belongs to. Lead-to-account matching solves this problem by using various data points, such as company name, email domain, and job title, to match each lead with the correct account in the CRM. By accurately matching leads to their respective accounts, sales and marketing teams can ensure they work together to target the right accounts and leads, providing a personalized experience for the potential customer. It also helps avoid the confusion and inefficiencies that can arise when multiple reps target the same account with different leads. Overall, lead-to-account matching is essential to a successful account-based selling strategy, ensuring that leads are effectively nurtured and that sales and marketing efforts are targeted and coordinated.
Why match leads to accounts?
- Avoid duplication
When a new lead is entered into a CRM system, the system uses certain matching criteria, such as the lead’s name, email address, phone number, and company name, to search for any existing accounts that match this information. If a match is found, the lead is automatically linked to the existing account, which prevents duplication.
If no match is found, the system creates a new account for the lead. However, before creating a new account, the system may perform additional checks, such as verifying the email address or phone number, to ensure that the lead is not a duplicate.
By matching leads to accounts, CRM systems ensure that all customer information is organized in a single database and prevents the creation of duplicate records. This not only saves time and resources but also improves data accuracy and consistency.
- Poor lead management
Companies lose a staggering $1 trillion every year to poor lead management and lost sales reps’ productivity. When leads are not matched to existing accounts in CRM, it results in poor lead management and lost sales reps’ productivity. Unmatched leads in your CRM create duplicate records, confusing your sales team.
It can cause multiple sales reps unknowingly contacting the same leads because of a lack of visibility into the account’s ownership. In addition, it can cause them to waste time following up, calling, and emailing leads due to a lack of contact interaction history within the account. Ultimately, it limits your reps’ ability to contact more unique, uncontacted, qualified leads, further impacting their productivity.
Imagine being bombarded with sales messages all day long. It hurts your buyer experience, resulting in churn.
Intelligent lead-to-account matching tools enable companies to go beyond just simple lead-to-account matching. By providing visibility to your entire sales team into each account, you can ensure no rep ever prospects into contacts/leads owned by their team members. It eliminates the risk of duplication of efforts.
- Lack of account-wide visibility
Without a consolidated account-wide view, tracking who is working on which leads, who owns which accounts, and who is engaging with which contacts is difficult. It can create a lot of duplicates in a single account, causing confusion and frustration among the entire team. Additionally, your reps might end up contacting the same leads multiple times or wasting time qualifying them manually. Your sales reps could take longer than usual to prioritize leads because of duplicates, outdated contacts, or incomplete lead details.
With a lack of account-wide visibility, your pipeline can become messy and the account management process chaotic. Hence, the entire timeline of your sales process can be delayed, leading to frustration among your sales reps and the management.
You can implement custom matching criteria to match any type of Salesforce record to the parent account, including leads, contacts, and opportunities. It ensures a consolidated view of all accounts in your pipeline. Every rep knows who owns an account, lead, contact, or opportunity.
- Save time
Sales reps often spend a significant amount of their time on tasks that are not directly related to selling. Research shows that sales reps spend a mere 28% of their time selling. It is due to the time-consuming nature of repetitive and unproductive tasks like data entry, lead qualification, and segmentation.
When leads are not matched with accounts, it becomes even more challenging for reps to manage their time efficiently. They may struggle to track different interactions in the target account and with different contacts/leads within that account. It leads to duplication of efforts, where unaware reps might unknowingly contact the leads already engaged by someone else in the team.
It doesn’t just waste their time but can also lead to disappointment and reduced morale, leading to a lack of motivation to perform well.
With intelligent lead-to-account matching automation, reps no longer have to manually map records to their accounts. It saves your salespeople a ton of time and hassle.
- Avoid prospecting customers
Receiving the response “But, we are already a customer” to a cold call can be a frustrating and embarrassing experience for sales reps. Unfortunately, this can happen if incoming leads are not properly matched with existing accounts in the CRM system.
When leads are not matched with existing accounts, sales reps may unknowingly reach out to existing customers. It creates an awkward situation for the sales rep and the customer, potentially damaging the relationship and leaving a negative impression.
To avoid such situations, it’s important to ensure incoming leads are matched with existing accounts. It ensures that sales reps have accurate and up-to-date information on the leads they are working on, reducing the chances of reaching out to existing customers as new prospects.
By matching incoming leads to existing accounts in real-time, you can avoid the risk of assigning existing customers to salespeople.
- Account conflicts
Gartner research shows that B2B buying committees typically comprise 6 to 10 members, highlighting the importance of effective account management. However, managing multiple reps and contacts across one account can be daunting. When leads are not matched to accounts promptly, reps are left in the dark about who owns which contacts, leads, and accounts. This lack of visibility can lead to a waste of resources as sales reps prospect into contacts already being engaged by someone else in the team. It leads to frustration and causes inefficiencies in the sales process.
Speed is of the essence. But, without accuracy, speed can only lead to irreversible mistakes. With fuzzy-matching algorithms, you can match leads to accounts accurately to avoid matching to wrong accounts.
Also, with transparency and 360-degree visibility into each account, the chances of reps stepping on each other’s toes reduce drastically.
- Buyer experience
A disorganized pipeline can be a major roadblock for your sales team, and ineffective lead-to-account matching can significantly contribute to this chaos. When there is no clear process for matching leads to accounts, sales reps can prospect haphazardly without a structured plan or visibility into the engagement patterns of accounts.
This lack of control can ultimately hurt the buyer experience, leading to lost deals and missed opportunities. Prospective buyers may feel bombarded with multiple messages from different reps or may receive disjointed and conflicting messages from different sales team members.
To avoid this, it is crucial to have a streamlined lead-to-account matching process in place. This allows sales reps to understand which leads and accounts they are responsible for and how they fit into the broader sales strategy.
By leveraging the process of duplicate matching and lead-to-account matching, you can streamline your entire account management process. Eliminate duplicate records, match leads/contacts/opportunities to the right accounts, and make ownership of each account/record visible across your team. It helps avoid duplicated efforts, delayed responses, and poor buyer experiences.
- Better tracking
Ineffective lead-to-account matching makes it difficult for sales reps to prioritize their time effectively. It leads to missed opportunities, lost deals, and overall lower sales performance, as they are unsure which accounts and leads should be given the most attention.
Similarly, for managers, the lack of visibility into the sales pipeline and team performance can make it challenging to track the right metrics. It’s difficult to understand which leads and accounts respond well or which reps are closing deals effectively.
By merging duplicates and matching records to parent accounts in real time, you can also improve the efficiency of your tracking process. With dedicated and personalized account-based dashboards, you can have a complete view of how many duplicate records are being created each, how many upsell opportunities are being created, and how many accounts are being converted efficiently.
- Missing out on upsell and cross-sell opportunities
A consolidated account view is crucial for effective upselling and cross-selling strategies. When an account is not consolidated, it becomes challenging to identify opportunities to sell additional products or services. With a consolidated view, sales reps can easily identify which products or services are already being used by the customer and pinpoint the areas where there is potential for additional sales.
For example, a sales rep can identify a customer using only one service or product and recommend additional complementary products or services to enhance their experience. This helps increase revenue and strengthens the customer relationship by showing that the sales rep understands their needs and is actively working to improve their experience.
Not all customer inquiries are cases or complaints. What if an existing customer fills out a form to learn more about your product/service? That’s a potential upsell opportunity. Although matching it with an existing account provides a deeper understanding of the opportunity, it may not always be an ideal solution.
By matching incoming customer inquiries about upsells and cross-sells to active contacts or opportunities, your reps can tap into these opportunities effectively with the CS team’s help.
Overall, better visibility = better account-based efficiency
Lead-to-account matching is a game-changer for effective account-based sales. With effective lead-to-account matching, you can effortlessly match incoming leads with existing accounts, giving you a comprehensive overview of the accounts you need to manage. This approach improves visibility into accounts, making it easier for you to identify and prioritize high-value accounts. By providing a clear picture of the accounts you need to target, you can personalize your approach and tailor your messaging to resonate with your target accounts. This approach increases the likelihood of closing deals and building long-lasting customer relationships. In short, lead-to-account matching streamlines your account management process, improves your account visibility, and boosts your account-based selling success.