We’re living in an era of disruption. To stay competitive, businesses and sales teams need to optimize with both intelligence and speed.
The best way to get there is an account-based approach to sales and marketing fueled by high-quality data. When you build your sales foundation on account-based marketing (ABM), you’re able to focus your revenue-generating efforts on your highest-value accounts.
Yet for too many businesses, account-based marketing doesn’t come easy. A seamless ABM customer experience requires solving a number of data problems, including making your account-level data more accurate, comprehensive and complete.
How can you target the right people within the right accounts? With the right systems in place and data as the foundation, you can solve your pipeline bottlenecks and start executing true account-based selling.
What is Account-Based Marketing?
Account-based marketing targets accounts that fit your organization’s ideal customer profile (ICP). ABM requires strong alignment and buy-in across all your revenue-generating teams. Once aligned on initiatives, a solid data foundation will support sales strategies that are timely, personalized, and targeted.
What is Account-Based Lead Routing?
Successful account-based marketing is only possible with account-based lead routing and lead-to-account matching.
After identifying the leads within accounts that fit your ICP, a fundamental requirement of ABM is assigning leads to the right rep or account owner.
What’s the difficulty in this lead routing motion? In CRMs like Salesforce, leads aren’t linked to accounts, even though it’s an integral part of successful account-based selling. Additionally, lead-to-account matching is necessary for an intelligent account-based routing strategy.
Dynamic Account Teams
The most successful operations teams take advantage of automated account hierarchies — a key component to routing at scale. With account-to-account mapping, operations teams can effectively automate the process of building account hierarchies within their CRM.
The results? Once account hierarchies are formed, ops teams can properly assign subsidiary companies to the right sales team based on a number of different criteria, like location, to execute account-based selling motions.
The Dynamic Account Teams feature in the ZoomInfo platform can be leveraged to route incoming records to an entire account team, rather than to an individual sales rep. If your account team consists of a channel manager, a sales rep, and a solutions engineer, the entire team will be able to work in unison to win larger accounts.
What are the Risks of Not Enabling Account-Based Routing?
Misalignment between revenue-generating teams
Without a relationship between leads and target accounts, you can’t connect and nurture businesses toward a sale. Hot leads on hot accounts slip through the cracks because sales reps aren’t alerted when an incoming lead is linked to a key account. Or even worse, the lead that an account executive is already working on gets assigned to another sales rep.
This creates disarray among the sales, marketing, and customer success teams. Meanwhile, the customer is left confused and more susceptible to a competing alternative.
The bottom line? Marketing and sales must be on the same page for an ABM approach that ensures target accounts receive a coordinated and engaging buying experience.
A slow and disjointed customer experience
Internal friction among revenue operations teams hurts the customer experience. In the absence of an optimized ABM strategy, leads aren’t scored correctly. Moreover, they run the risk of being misrouted or not being routed at all.
A slow and disjointed customer experience at critical points in the sales cycle can lead to brand erosion, hamper your revenue generation efforts, and result in deals lost to competitors.
Solving your Account-Based Issues: Here’s What to Do
Account-based issues can be solved in four steps:
- Cleanse, enrich and normalize your data to for a more streamlined routing and sales strategy
- Match and link your leads to their corresponding account
- Segment and score your leads based on your ICP using data from the linked account
- Assign linked leads to the right people in your teams for the stage the account is at on the buying journey
What are the Results of Enabling Account-Based Lead Assignment?
A more complete customer view
By coupling lead-to-account matching and account-based routing, reps and account owners see a more complete customer picture. This includes all lead activity on the account record and an expanded view that surfaces new cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
A more accurate view is also available at the lead level. An account’s data can be used to segment, score, and prioritize leads for correct assignment based on its stage in the buying journey. Now everyone on your revenue generation team has a complete 360-degree view of activities within an account.
Shift from lead-based routing to account-based routing for true ABM
Data management functions, such as lead enrichment and lead-to-account matching, can be used in conjunction with an intelligent routing solution. From there, it’s easy to create and automate workflows for qualified leads based on specific account data (like company size and industry) to prioritize those that meet your ICP.
Alignment of marketing, sales, and customer success into a single RevOps stream
By matching leads to accounts and applying intelligent account-based routing, you can facilitate lead transitions between marketing, sales, and customer success without friction. All team members have awareness of where an account is at in the buying journey and conflicting lead assignments are eliminated. Your revenue generation teams can work together as a single unit to deliver coordinated, consistent, personalized selling campaigns.
Efficient account-based marketing
With account-based routing you support your ABM efforts and:
- Route with speed to the right people at the right time
- Keep sales reps from wasting time looking up account information
- Ease tension among your revenue-generating teams
- Improve the buyer journey and customer experience
- Derive more revenue from your GTM motions
Account-Based Routing for a Seamless Customer Experience
With OperationsOS Route, marketing and sales operations teams can improve their speed-to-lead, successfully run account-based marketing campaigns, and automate record assignment with an advanced routing platform.
With an integrated solution that offers the data hygiene and enrichment component critical for an aligned sales workflow, OperationsOS Route enables an end-to-end ABM process that keeps you competitive and top of mind.