It isn't surprising to anyone in B2B that sales cycles aren't linear and buyer committees are only getting larger. So why do we still structure our marketing and sales metrics as though a single person will engage with our company in an orderly fashion?
Cue the infighting over who gets "credit" for sourcing the deal and arguing over whether or not the leads "suck."
Many of us are still looking at qualified leads, struggling with a bifurcated database of people (if you're using Dynamics, Salesforce, Zoho, or others with both leads and contacts) which confuses who is supposed to do what (the lead got assigned to an SDR but it's really an enterprise customer… oops!), and marketing is hell-bent on getting sales to follow up with every single person who engages with the brand.
In B2B, we sell to accounts. But marketing's systems and processes encourage individual people to engage with our brand. And sales needs to know who those people are and what they've done to warrant outreach efforts. How can we get marketing to focus on analytics that aligns with the rest of the business while still supporting the tactical needs of both teams?
Read on to find out!
Moving to an account model makes the most sense for organizations with an enterprise sales motion or a long sales cycle due to the nature of their product. These organizations rely on marketing to generate dozens of touch points over a sale cycle and have a lot of conflict over who "sources" an opportunity (even though that conversation is a bit pointless… shouldn't all go-to-market teams be involved?).
Other key signs are arguments between sales teams or inside sales and full-cycle sellers because leads are assigned to someone other than an account owner – or there's confusion and outreach to customers because an unlinked lead came in.
Moving to qualified accounts also helps marketing look at the world a bit differently than their core systems encourage them to do.
If we can think through engagement from a buyer committee or account perspective, we can begin to let go of forcing sales to use the "right" person to create an opportunity. This avoids forced data entry when the salesperson is already engaged with the account through another point of contact communicating internally with the "new" lead.
This methodology is just another way to reinforce that all go-to-market teams should have the same goal – to support the overall company north star metric.
Qualified accounts also give marketing more visibility into who is engaging at an account that already has an opportunity cycle. Without aggregated information, marketing is flying blind – remember that their systems don't typically give them a company or account object so opportunities are pretty well hidden.
The qualified account model doesn't shoehorn you into a demand generation waterfall methodology. Aggregating data at the account supports flywheels, bowties, or any other method you choose. With any model, we still need to capture key moments and measure them for efficiency's sake. An account aggregate helps us do so without inflating actual potential for pipeline by over-reporting a single account with seven people engaging simultaneously with your brand.
If you have a transactional sales process or can sell your product to multiple users or departments within the same organization, this approach isn't for you!
It also can be problematic for companies that have both direct-to-consumer and business-to-business selling models. However, when properly instrumented, it's possible to have both working in harmony.
Running leads through logic to automatically match them with an account takes time. Because it is automated, it doesn't add much time – but for companies obsessed with time to follow up, it may be a hard sell. However, we believe that conflict between teams and a poor customer experience (how would you feel if a salesperson is pitching to a coworker - and you already have the product!) should overrule minor timing objections.
As we mentioned earlier, it isn't tactically sound advice to completely move away from person-oriented signals in your system. Your sales team will still want to know if someone on the buyer committee has filled out a demo request or performed some other high-value activity.
But there are tools and automation you can use to simplify the data and prevent overwhelming the sales team – and we'll get into those shortly.
We recommend simplifying your lead qualification logic (you can read more about why we aren't big fans of lead scoring by clicking here) and basing a call to activate the sales team on activities that make sense to sellers – like an event attendee, demo request, or other high-value action – and a "fit" dimension. If it's hard to explain why a salesperson should follow up with someone, they won't.
Sometimes, the simplest concepts are the hardest to get signed off on across the organizations. It's not uncommon for Finance to define an "account" differently than sales thinks of them and for systems to have different account structures.
If you take on two tedious projects in the new year, let it be nailing down the definition of an account and what's considered a qualified lead or contact (you'll still need this for qualified accounts). Here's how we think about accounts and qualified leads, but you'll need to align your executive teams on definitions that work for your org.
Not doing this step will kill any qualified account project.
Qualified accounts will only work with an automated method to auto-match leads to accounts. LeanData, CaliberMind, Ringlead, and others have logic built into their systems to help you auto-match leads and accounts and perform an in-system conversion from lead to contact.
Things to think through before implementing a matching system include:
In order to maintain the integrity of your campaign data and whether or not a person is considered "active" and needs follow-up by sales, make sure whatever tool or manual workaround you use taps into your CRM's native merge or conversion logic. Test it out to ensure you're not losing qualified people due to a system limitation.
There will inevitably be some lead records created in your CRM because they can't be matched to an account. Perhaps marketing forgets to restrict forms to only accept non-freemium accounts, or you're dealing with a big tradeshow list without business information. It happens!
You will still need a process in place to review and follow up on leads. Hopefully, these aren't high-quality records or are occurring in high volume. If they are, it's time to figure out how to reduce the volume!
Because many people are at an account, it's easy to get your signals mixed or stuck in a logic loop. You must test your logic frequently, develop reports to ensure volumes make sense whenever you have a logic update and stay open to feedback from both teams. The last thing you want to do is inadvertently hide an excellent opportunity to gain a customer.
The logic for account qualification is complex because we're looking across an account object at all contacts and opportunities. If your process isn't well documented, you don't train your sales team and have on-demand job aides for them to reference, and you don't roll it out gradually after a lot of testing, you'll grow frustrated and vow it's not worth the effort (it is - even if just for the reporting benefits).
1. Pre-Qualified
Pre-Qualified accounts are valid targets that have never engaged via marketing or sales.
2. Nurture
Nurture is a stage for accounts that have been through the qualification process and not deemed ready to buy or qualified by sales OR accounts that have engaged but not met the qualification threshold.
3. Qualified
One or more contacts at the account have met a qualification requirement and have not yet been followed up on by sales.
4. Sales Working
At least one qualified contact at the account have been moved to a working stage. (Ignores others that have been put in Nurture.)
5. Opportunity Open
There is an open opportunity on the account and the account is classified as a prospect.
6. Customer
An active customer (has a current contract) that does not have active opportunities or contacts that have performed some kind of action that would result in qualification.
7. Customer Engaged
An active customer with a contact that has engaged with a form or demo request and has not yet been turned into an opportunity or put back into Nurture.
8. Customer Opportunity
An active customer with an open opportunity (this could signal a renewal is in progress or an expansion). Note: If you automatically create renewal opportunities for customers, make sure to have some kind of logic to indicate they are actively being worked or not (like stages have progressed, contract date is within three months of ending, etc.).
9. Churned
A customer with inactive contracts and no engaged contacts or open opportunities.
10. Disqualified
This status should only be used for accounts that will never be a fit. Sales should be trained that these accounts are “scorched earth” that will never be marketed to.
Other statuses may include Partner to indicate it’s not an account that can be sold to but is in the partner ecosystem.
1. Pre-Qualified
Pre-Qualified contacts are valid targets that have never engaged via marketing or sales.
2. Nurture
Nurture is a stage for contacts that have been through the qualification process and not deemed ready to buy or qualified by sales OR accounts that have engaged but not met the qualification threshold.
3. Qualified
The contact has met a qualification threshold and needs to be qualified in or out of the sales cycle.
4. Sales Working
The contact is in an active outreach pattern.
5. Opportunity Open
There is an open opportunity on the account and the account is classified as a prospect. If the opportunity is Lost, the person goes back into Nurture.
6. Disqualified
This status should only be used for accounts that will never be a fit. Sales should be trained that these accounts are “scorched earth” that will never be marketed to.
7. Partner
Is a contact at a partner organization.
X - No longer with company
Does not currently work at the organization.
Your sales organization will need to work with your team to determine if additional stages are required to help them understand whether someone is engaged or needs follow-up. Some salespeople even want additional stages to use as they are processing leads. Some may want to know if someone is a customer and mirror the account stages on the contact level.
You'll also want to understand if the sales organization wants to have all contacts designated as a customer or prospect or if they can rely on account information to make that determination. Perpetuating statuses across contact records is difficult to do well and easy to mess up, so be cautious.
The Logic
It's important to consider which status should be overwritten with logic and which should be maintained regardless of what's happening at the account. For example, "X - No longer with company" should remain in that status no matter what happens at the account.
Consider allowing individual contacts to be flagged as qualified even if the salesperson already has an opportunity open (wouldn't they want to know if someone else at the company also wants a demo??).
Automated logic will determine some of the contact stages. If a contact is Qualified and an opportunity is created with them as the primary contact, their status should automatically update to "5. Opportunity Open." If the opportunity is won or lost, the contact status should be updated to "2. Nurture."
If a contact is added to the system via enrichment or another source, the default status is "1. Pre-Qualified."
The rest of the stages should be manually populated.
Opportunities and contacts determine account statuses, so the logic is, by its nature, complex. Here's a visual that illustrates the steps necessary to determine the account status:
Because you aren't throwing out your contact-based infrastructure, it's a great idea to roll this concept out "silently" with reports and data rollups. This way, you're not overwhelming the sales team at an inopportune time with a new process and have additional time to test and validate your logic.
It also helps executives ease into moving away from a metric they may prefer because of their familiarity.
Once you're confident, start with a small pool of full-cycle sellers and collect feedback often. Does this method make it easier or harder for them to keep track of which accounts need engagement or are already in the sales process? Which method do they prefer?
The beauty of this method is that if salespeople prefer to stick to how they used to find qualified leads, they can! We're doing this for the reporting benefits as much as we hope to find efficiency gains in their workflows.
Reporting on engaged and qualified accounts will help align your organization with a more logical marketing and sales engagement approach. You have everything to gain and nothing to lose by instrumenting this logic.
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