From Silos to Synergy: How Reputation Implemented ABM Buying Groups on Salesforce to Sell More Effectively

Reputation is a leading provider of reputation experience management solutions, helping businesses manage and optimize customer feedback, online reviews, and brand reputation. Seeking to bridge the gap between marketing and sales to drive smarter revenue growth and executive visibility, Reputation partnered with OpFocus to implement an ABM buying group solution on Salesforce, resulting in more effective customer identification, streamlined handoffs between marketing, SDR, and sales, and data-informed decisions at the leadership level.

challenge

When Liz Carter joined Reputation as Chief Marketing Officer, she was tasked with owning demand generation, external communications, brand building, and creating awareness at the top of the funnel. 

Liz quickly recognized several key challenges that hindered marketing and sales alignment to grow revenue. One of the most pressing issues was the lack of a unified GTM and revenue operations framework: with 150k accounts in Salesforce and verticals as diverse as auto dealers to hospital systems in different parts of the world, how does the team sort and prioritize the right accounts? How should marketing allocate resources across programs? Moreover, with industry reports indicating that buyers made 58 online touches or searches before making a purchase decision, Liz wanted to help marketing & sales prioritize the right accounts at the right time in their buying journey, and make the biggest impact with the resources available. 

Reputation’s business model, which sold B2B2C to a variety of verticals, had different definitions for what an Account or Opportunity was, which resulted in a murky view of the pipeline. When she looked deeper, Liz also heard a familiar tune: sales was frustrated with demand quality, marketing found it difficult to market with lots of duplicate accounts and didn’t know who sales was going after, and executives were limited in their ability to make timely, data-informed decisions.

Liz knew that bridging these gaps would be essential to scaling Reputation’s success and ensuring that marketing played a strategic role in revenue generation. Reputation’s private equity investor, Marlin Equity Partners, recommended OpFocus, an early and proven leader in implementing ABX on Salesforce, to partner with Reputation on this GTM transformation initiative.

solution

Reputation brought in OpFocus as an expert that not only had extensive experience implementing ABX on Salesforce, but also the bench depth and bandwidth to power faster execution and rollout. They sought a team who was familiar with their Salesforce tech stack, which already included sophisticated tools like 6sense, Hubspot, Outreach, and later Dun & Bradstreet and LeanData, understood ABM/ABX, and was experienced in implementing Forrester’s B2B Revenue Waterfall buying journey.

Key initiatives included:

• Creating a Prioritized Plan of Attack: With different needs in each team, what Reputation sought badly was to figure out what initiatives were on the table and what to tackle first. This meant pulling together all of the right stakeholders, including sales & marketing leadership, finance, revenue operations, sales operations, and marketing, and leaning on OpFocus to hear and understand what each team needed the most, look at the tech stack, get into Salesforce and review each team’s use of the system and data, and build out a structured timeline. This upfront exercise was about capturing tribal knowledge from people who had been on the team for a long time, understanding the dynamics and implications for how changes in Salesforce might affect other stakeholders. OpFocus then created a prioritized plan, which empowered Reputation to allocate the right internal and external resources to take on specific projects. Some of these recommendations included that the new initiatives focus on some verticals first, such as healthcare, and leave other verticals, like auto dealerships and OEMs, for a later phase, after the business saw value in the new approach.
  
• Tackling Essential Pieces of the Puzzle, including Defining & Implementing Account Types and Hierarchy, and Data Cleanup: Equipped with a robust tech stack, but built over time with different people and objectives, Reputation needed to identify the right architecture across their systems to ensure they were sharing the right information with the right systems, and that they could trust that the data was clean. For example, OpFocus helped Reputation clarify what a customer or partner account meant in an auto-dealership, or what a parent vs child account represented in a hospital system. Additionally, Reputation had to get laser focused on their ICP, so sales and marketing wouldn’t be distracted by high activity accounts they were never going to win. Finally, it also meant coordinating marketing & sales with data and tools to reach out at the right time, so sales weren’t doing first outreach too late in the buying cycle, after a prospect had likely already made their decision. To support these initiatives, OpFocus deduplicated Account & Contact records based on the new definitions, onboarded enrichment tools like Dun & Bradstreet for US accounts, Cognism for EMEA accounts, or HIMSS for healthcare, and thoughtfully mapped and connected the databases to Salesforce.
  
• Operationalizing Pre-Pipeline Opportunities and Buying Group UI in Salesforce: Serving up the right buyers within the right accounts at the right time in an easily actionable way was at the crux of this transformative ABM initiative. First, Reputation auto-converted Leads into Accounts, Contacts, and Opportunities, and assigned them intelligently to the right team and owners using logic built out in LeanData to reduce response time. Then, using OpFocus’ proprietary Buying Group UI, Reputation could highlight Opportunities that were the best ICP fit early on, with the right buying signals, and help marketing, SDRs, and AEs go after target personas with all they have in a timely manner, without waiting for a form fill. Better yet, sales was now able to see which personas were missing from their Opportunity buying group to better reach out to stakeholders that weren’t yet involved, and establish meaningful multi-threadedness in each stage of their sales process. 

Following the engagement with OpFocus, Reputation noted many signs of a successful transformation:

Richer Pipeline & Increased Average Sales Price (ASP): Shortly after rolling out the new Buying Group UI, powered by a clean and connected database, Reputation’s sales team started noticing higher average sales prices. Sales management also saw signs of a richer pipeline within their core ICP, where they have a higher propensity to win, and less noise from other Opportunities that may demonstrate a lot of activity, but have a low likelihood of closing. For example, after rolling out the Buying Group functionality, sales reported that 50% of Opportunities created in the first two months of Q1 were all from their Top 10 or Tier 1 Accounts. 

Proactive Prospecting & Sales Coaching: Sales management now uses a dashboard for sales that separates analytics for top tier accounts, and empowers sales with this visibility to take action early with a Target Account, not only waiting for SDR to reach out to create an Opportunity or call. With new SLAs in place for PPOs, the team is also able to flag which Opportunities are at risk of neglect while buying interest is still warm. 

Trust Across Teams and at the Leadership Level: As Reputation introduces the Buying Group UI and pre-pipeline process across verticals, early adoption is showing promise in improving pipeline visibility and sales focus. Sales and marketing are beginning to align more closely through this new approach, and Reputation anticipates that increased collaboration will drive better Opportunity Win Rates over time. Additionally, this enhanced structure lays the foundation for more reliable data, supporting informed decision-making at the executive level.