Article How Lead-to-Account Matching Drives an Account-Based Strategy

Looking for a Lead-to-Account Matching solution for Salesforce? Check out Align.ly Lead-to-Account Matching.

If you're deploying Account-Based Marketing (ABM), but you're still working out of Leads in Salesforce, this post is for you. Every time someone asks me what is the first step to deploying ABM my answer is always the same: Lead-to-Account Matching.

How Lead-to-Account Matching Drives ABM

There are several reasons why Lead-to-Account Matching is foundational to an Account-Based Marketing and Sales strategy.

#1.) Focus

I wrote about why going Account-Based is about Focus in a previous blog post, so I won't elaborate on the details. However, Lead-to-Account Matching will help sales and marketing align and focus on the best fit accounts leading to greater efficiency with marketing budgets and increased productivity from sales.

#2.) Efficiency

Poor routing of marketing activity to sales is a productivity killer. I think in most companies this inefficiency is chalked up as the cost of doing business. However, a good Lead-to-Account Matching solution can solve 95% of this problem resulting in much more efficient sales follow-up.

#3.) Effectiveness

Delivering a great buyer experience is the future of B2B marketing and sales. Matching new inbound Leads with existing Accounts helps with delivering on this promise.

For example, let's say you were engaged in a sales cycle with an Account, but ultimately lost the deal. Three months later a new Lead from the same company responds to a marketing campaign. Without a Lead-to-Account Matching solution in place your inbound sales rep might not realize that there was prior history in the Account and follow-up cold. Now, what if that new inbound Lead was matched to the Account and now the rep could research the history and follow-up strategically?

#4.) Accountability

Without a good Lead-to-Account Matching solution it is almost impossible to accurately measure B2B KPIs and conversion rates. If you're interested, I wrote about this in detail in the blog titled 11 Reasons Why Measuring B2B Conversion Rates is (Nearly) Impossible. However, once marketing deploys Lead-to-Account Matching and can accurately measure their ability to source net new opportunities or accelerate existing opportunities it creates a level of urgency and accountability across the entire marketing team, which typically bleeds into the sales team.

#5.) Organization

Finally, a good Lead-to-Account Matching solution helps organize your Salesforce database. It drives data hygiene, CRM adoption, and overall reliability of the data. More importantly it helps marketing run targeted campaigns and for sales to quickly and effectively follow-up with the entire buying committee for true Account-Based Sales Development (ABSD).

So, if you're thinking about going Account-Based or already have a strategy in place, but are missing a Lead-to-Account Matching solution, do yourself a favor and go download Align.ly Lead-to-Account Matching for Salesforce.