Get Salesforce ABM ReadyHow to Prepare Your CRM for a Seamless ABM Strategy

What you’ll learn from this guide

As a growing number of companies adopt account-based marketing (ABM), there’s a lot of information available to marketing operations professionals about general best practices and how to align marketing with sales.

But equally important is to consider carefully how your core CRM will accommodate ABM in tandem with inbound marketing, demand generation, and account-based sales.

This guide aims to make your journey into adopting ABM a bit smoother by answering one core question:

How can you transform Salesforce into a well-oiled ABM machine?

Table of ContentsData Changes for ABM • The Account Object.................................................................................................................................4• The Lead Object.......................................................................................................................................6• The Contact Object..................................................................................................................................8

Ownership Lifecycles in ABM• Object Ownership ...................................................................................................................................11• Typical Ownership Models ……….........................................................................................................12• Unassigned Organizations & Inactive Users.........................................................................................13• Ownership Changes ...............................................................................................................................14

Measuring ABM• Marketing Funnel Metrics........................................................................................................................17• Service Level Agreements.......................................................................................................................18• Activity Tracking........................................................................................................................................19• Reporting ..................................................................................................................................................20

About Lane Four ...........................................................................................................................................22

Data Changes for ABM

When your organization adopts ABM, you’ll need to think about how this new approach will be integrated into core Salesforce objects—and how to square your new marketing needs with existing sales processes.

The Account Object

Accounts are at the heart of every ABM strategy. In Salesforce, the account object is a critical source of truth on customers and prospects, and aggregates information from leads, contacts, opportunities, and tasks. This object stores critical ABM metrics and enables reporting around qualified names, activity tracking, engagement statuses, and more.

Since accurate account data is vital to a healthy customer journey and good conversion rates, it’s critical for marketing and sales teams to speak the same language, and use the same data, when it comes to accounts.

With ABM, marketing teams are becoming more focused on accounts—but it’s important to remember that accounts have always been the central focus for sales. Sales teams traditionally invest significant time and resources in maintaining and analyzing the data in accounts—to sales, this object is sacred.

When rethinking how you’re using Salesforce for ABM, it’s best to manage the marketing/sales overlap on accounts in a precise and data-driven way by taking a close look at how account data is managed.

Remember that sales owns accounts—they were there first.

How does the account object function in ABM?

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Adhere to Account StandardsSales and marketing should agree on minimum data standards that will qualify data to become part of an account. Then you can develop measures to enforce these rules, which will allow for effective segmentation and assignment activities across teams.

Consider Multiple TeamsABM complicates how the account object is managed in Salesforce: accounts can be handled by multiple sales development reps, owned by account executives, and interacted with by numerous others as they move through a range of statuses.

Understand how account data impacts financial planningAccounts are the home for territory and capacity planning. This information ensures adequate territory coverage for sales reps and enables named account distribution. These use cases must be taken into consideration when creating or assigning account-based data, as it must align with the organization’s segmentation model.

Account data will have a direct impact on your go-to-market strategy. So, unlike leads, it needs structure.

Tips for Aligning ABM with Sales Data

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The Lead Object

A Case for LeadsWe know that high quality account data is critical to functional ABM processes—but most companies still have to deal with the often lower-quality data that comes from inbound sources like webinar registrations, form fills, and tradeshow lists.

Putting this data straight into your contact and account objects can create problems—like unqualified and duplicate accounts. Junk accounts will inevitably pollute your sales data, so you need a place to stage information.

Luckily, the lead object is designed to mediate this issue—it’s the perfect place to stage unvetted inbound data while maintaining the integrity of your account object.

ABM-focused organizations are using the lead object as a highly effective triage system for their data—there they can vet, de-dupe, audit, and score leads before populating accounts and assigning leads to reps.

Leads are integral to keeping account data clean.

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Lead-to-Account MatchingBy their very nature, leads don’t contain account information, which creates the need for lead-to-account matching. This kind of tool matches leads automatically and accurately to individual accounts that already exist within Salesforce.

Since data from inbound and demand gen sources is often of poor quality, you’ll also need the ability to match leads to accounts based on fuzzy logic including domain, address, region, and even custom fields.

If you’re dealing with account hierarchies in Salesforce, keep in mind that you’ll need to work with a tool that allows you to prioritize matches based on account type, region, and other factors.

Lead Auto-Convert RulesManaging leads and contacts simultaneously is critical to ABM, but it can be confusing. Many organizations, particularly those with a high volume of leads, set up lead auto-convert rules for when a definitive match is made between a lead and an account.

Automatically converting leads saves an enormous amount of time that would otherwise be spent creating new contacts or manually converting sets of leads.

When deploying auto-convert rules, many organizations find that 30-50% of their MQLs already match accounts. With such a high volume of data, you may need to carefully refine your rules to handle the matches.

Scaling The Lead ObjectThe reality of ABM is that it forces marketing teams to enter a world run by sales operations. The challenge is to operate in an effective way while adapting to the existing sales environment. Given the importance of using leads for ABM, and the extra work created by managing this additional object, automation can be a great way to make ABM processes work for everyone.

Scaling inbound lead volume requires automation.

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While it is absolutely necessary to use leads, housing data in this additional object does make things more complicated.

Contacts are typically the home for outbound prospecting and ABM activity and information. And despite the introduction of leads, contacts will still be a core part of your data model and your processes.

This means maintaining a funnel between leads and contacts: how will it look to manage both leads and contacts in your data, reporting, activity, assignments, actions, and more?

When ABM is introduced, you’ll need to ensure that leads and contacts are harmonized and mirror each other—in both form and function—every step of the way.

This means defining the same (or corresponding) statuses for these objects, and taking both into consideration in all of your processes to avoid qualified leads or contacts being missed.

The Contact Object

Consider contact statuses along with leads to align processes and reporting.

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• Remember that sales owns accounts—they were there first

• Account data will have a direct impact on your go-to-market strategy

• Leads are integral to any data management strategy—but they do complicate things

• Managing leads is much easier and more efficient with automation

• Consider both leads and contacts every step of the way

SummaryData Changes for ABM

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Ownership LifecyclesABM makes existing ownership models more difficult, because now different teams and individuals are responsible for the same data as it moves through the system.

Even with data to define a fit model, account intent, and lead-to-account matching, your ownership model has to work at scale, or you’ll be stuck managing ownership manually.

A good ownership model makes it simple and clear who is responsible for a lead when it comes in the door—and holds reps accountable for following up.

Object OwnershipOne of the biggest challenges that comes with ABM is maintaining clear ownership between multiple objects: there will now be up to three objects with the same account data, each with a different potential owner. Further complicating this is the fact that accounts and contacts lack out-of-the box tools to manage assignments and keep these object owners in sync, so you will need to invest in an additional tool to keep this process running.

The general ownership model for each of these objects can be evaluated using the following questions:

Accountsq Are named accounts owned by specific

account executives?

q Will sales development reps own prospect accounts or will they always be owned by account executives?

q When an owner becomes inactive, which user will their accounts be assigned to?

q When an account becomes a customer, will it be assigned to an account executive, account manager, or customer success manager?

Contactsq Do sales development reps manage

prospecting activity for specific account executives?

q Should sales development reps manage contacts while an account executive manages the associated account?

q Will the entire account and contact structure transition to an account executive from sales development rep ownership?

Leadsq Who owns a lead that matches an account

owned by an account executive, sales development rep, or inactive user?

q Who owns a lead that matches a target account or a named account?

q When a lead does not match an account, should it be assigned right away or when it becomes a marketing qualified lead?

q Will leads be assigned to specific people or will assignment be based on factors like region or round robin?

Before working with sales to create your ideal ownership model, consider the many implications of ownership in ABM.

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Typical Ownership Models

Pick an ownership model that aligns with your business, and apply it to your Salesforce processes.

To have a functioning ownership model, you’ll need to define the events that will result in a particular person performing follow up or targeted outreach.

Typically, marketing teams make this happen by defining an SLA with the sales team or by owning a team of internal SDRs.

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Unassigned Organizations & Inactive Users

If you’re not working with a segmentation model, round-robin rules are a simple way to assign incoming leads evenly across your sales team.

If you are working with a segmentation model based on factors like regionality, you can use round-robin rules as a complimentary strategy—assigning leads using round-robin rules based on region, vertical, or other factors, or re-assigning leads when follow up is delayed.

Automating this process simplifies assignments so that the account owner, SDR, and round robins (outbound and default) are assigned automatically when a record meets the criteria.

A good regional segmentation model will drive your resources to where you intend your business to grow. This opens up new possibilities for territory planning and ensures that the right team member is assigned to engage with a particular account.

If you use a region automation tool, incoming leads can automatically be segmented according to available data and mapped to listed regions, according to a number of account factors such as number of employees and revenue. When a lead is associated with a specific segment, the field can then be used in reports and assignment rules.

When a lead comes in from an organization that’s not a target, and therefore not assigned to any particular individual on your sales team, there are two common ways to ensure follow up on the lead.

Clear segmentation and automation will help your assignment flow run like clockwork.

Regionality

Round Robins

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Ownership Changes

When accounts are reassigned.

Sales team members regularly re-align accounts based on segmentation models and changing day-to-day needs. The re-assignment of these accounts will likely require contacts and leads to be updated to different SDRs.

Staff changes and turnover are inevitable, so your assignment plan must easily adapt to the reality of high sales turnover, staff promotions, team realignment, and more.

Plan ahead, and be prepared to manage these common assignment changes.

When team members leave.

Before disabling a user, consider what will happen when new leads are matched to their assigned accounts—and how you will manage any round robins, account team assignments, and owned leads, accounts, and contacts upon a team member’s departure.

When an SDR is promoted.

In many organizations, SDRs begin at an entry level and are frequently promoted. When a promotion happens, you will need to update an SDRs round robins and account team assignments, and reassign their leads, accounts and contacts.

When teams change.

As your sales organization grows, so do the number of SDR teams, causing a periodic re-alignment of account teams. You’ll need to realign any associated assignments to fit the updated team assignment model.

Be proactive in considering how ownership might change to avoid gaps in your ownership model.

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SummaryOwnership Lifecycles

• Before working with sales to create your ideal model, consider the many implications of ownership in ABM

• Pick an ownership model that aligns with your business, and apply it to your Salesforce processes

• Clear segmentation and automation will help your assignment flow run like clockwork

• Be proactive in considering how ownership might change, and you’ll avoid losing leads

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Measuring ABMOnce your data and ownership model are in place, it’s time to monitor your ABM activities and results. Fortunately, it’s not as difficult as many people believe to create sophisticated systems in Salesforce for measuring, tracking, and following up on your ABM strategy.

Consider the following tactics to ensure that you know what’s really happening as a result of your ABM efforts.

Intent

• Days to record engagement• Actions taken and follow-up time• % of accounts with intent who engage

Booked Meeting

Engagement

Qualified Meeting

Key Measurements

• Days to book a meeting• Number of meetings booked• % of Engaged Accounts with a Meeting

• Number of qualified meetings• % of meetings that are qualified

Marketing Funnel MetricsBefore you can measure your important metrics within Salesforce, you’ll need to define them. The best place to start is with your marketing funnel. Look at each stage of your funnel, and come to a consensus on key measurements you want to track.

Here are the typical metrics that ABM-focused organizations look at in each stage of the funnel.

17Identify which metrics in your marketing funnel matter most.

What is an SLA?An SLA can track the date and time a lead is qualified, and the exact amount of time it takes a sales rep to log a follow-up task. This can be effective for accountability—allowing you to send reminders to reps who are slow to respond, automatically re-assign leads when follow-up is delayed, and report on open SLAs, average response times, and the performance of individual sales reps.

What gets measured gets managed, so SLAs often improve the response time on MQLs and ultimately conversion rates.

Customized SLAsA good tracking system will determine the exact age of a lead in business hours (based on your company’s needs) and calculate an appropriate average follow-up time. This allows your system to recognize, for example, that a Friday evening demo request isn't 3 days old on Monday morning.

Remember—In ABM, Contacts Can Be MQLs TooIn an ABM strategy, MQLs can be created from contacts, so include both leads and contacts in your follow-up tracking.

Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

SLAs can help ensure timely follow up and increase conversion rates on leads.

SLAs are fast becoming the backbone of ABM processes. An SLA can overcome the operational challenges between marketing and sales to ensure that time doesn’t burn your leads.

If you want to increase conversion rates on the MQLs that you’ve worked so hard to generate, an SLA agreement will ensure accountability and timely follow up.

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ABM requires reps to simultaneously manage leads, accounts, contacts, and opportunities, which spreads task tracking across multiple entities. There are two common ways to track activities:

What to think about when tracking tasks• Tasks should be rolled up to leads, contacts, and opportunities. Then,

task counts should be rolled up to the account. This will allow you to track frequency of follow-up by lead, contact, and account.

• Tasks created by various automation systems should be filtered out—these tools create exponentially more tasks than people and will distort your metrics

Activity Tracking

Tracking Task TypesThis approach measures the types of activity being carried out by the sales team as a whole, and/or by individual salespeople.

This will allow you to determine where efforts are being directed, for example: Are leads only followed up with via email or are calls being logged as well?

Tracking Last Activity DatesThis approach tracks how many days has it been since the most recent activity on a lead, contact, opportunity, or account.

These dates can help to identify leads, contact, or accounts that have gone dead.

Get the big picture on a range of activities by tracking them.

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ABM spreads your data across leads, contacts, accounts, and opportunities. With out-of-the-box Salesforce reporting, often only one object can be analyzed at a time—so ABM requires you to actively bridge the gaps between these objects with some simple customization. For reporting purposes, we advise creating the account as early as possible in your cycle to facilitate the aggregation of data on the account object.

Reporting

ABM reporting in Salesforce is not only possible—but also pretty simple.

Reporting on Core Metrics1. Account with Campaign Reports: Account with campaign reports are possible with a process

builder automation to populate the account lookup field on a campaign member. This report type is useful for metrics like multi-touch attribution before an account qualified date, number of campaigns interacted with by an account prior to a given date, or the number of touchpoints on an account before a particular event.

2. Account with Meeting Information: If you’re logging meetings on both leads and contacts, lead–to-account matching will allow you to bridge the gap and generate account-based reports within your activities. Then you can see what specific activities are happening at an account level, and break this down to look at how much of any activity type is occurring on a given account. This report type can give you the big picture on which accounts are being worked most, which aren’t being worked enough, and the breakdown of activities on these accounts.

3. Campaign with Activity: With a bit of automation relating a task or event to its most recent campaign, you can create campaign with activity reports. This will give you detailed insight into follow-up activity to your targeted ABM campaigns. For example, following a high-touch ABM campaign you could report on the number of touchpoints that have happened on a given account since the campaign happened.

4. SLA Follow Up: When a key action is identified, you need to be sure there’s timely follow-up. Reporting on response time can allow you to identify reps who are not complying with agreed upon follow-up activities, or re-assign qualified accounts which haven’t been worked.

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SummaryMeasuring ABM

• Identify which metrics in your marketing funnel matter most

• SLAs can help ensure timely follow up and increase conversion rates on leads

• Get the big picture on a range of activities by tracking them

• ABM reporting in Salesforce is not only possible—but also pretty simple

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Account-Based Lead Management Tools

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Lead-to-Account Matching

Automated Lead Conversion

SLA Capabilities

Lead Routing

Round Robin Assignment

Region Automation

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