Moving away from Leads to a Contact & Account model

For years, marketing teams have targeted individuals at a company for outreach. This leads to a long, back-loaded sales cycle that requires significant effort to identify and loop in additional stakeholders later on. So why does the marketing department target a single person when so many people are involved in the buying process? These pains have driven a shift in how sales teams operate, with more revenue operations teams pushing to adopt an account-centric model. However, this account-centric model creates a dilemma for how to structure Salesforce, because the system is designed to focus on Leads and individuals. What are our options, then?

The Traditional Model

The traditional Lead centric view of marketing targets Leads. It aims to convert a single person that sales are then able to work as an opportunity. Unfortunately, this just isn’t how some organizations work, there are many people involved in the buying process that a Lead centric model is not capturing.  

Some marketing teams are so focused on the number of Leads or MQL’s sourced, but most teams don’t care about this anymore. What they do care about is the number of target Accounts in the pipeline. They also care more about how many Contacts they have in these target Accounts and how many Contacts are involved in deals. There is a clear disconnect in how these two teams thing. Sales cares about working Accounts and marketing cares about

The Solution – An Account Centric Model

Many marketing teams have embraced the account centric approach. These companies have started moving away from Leads, using Accounts and Contacts to pursue Account. Companies that recognize they have strategic target Accounts that need to close, and that there are 3-5 stakeholders that are often involved in the deal can find out who those people are. Marketing teams can then engage those Contacts and pass them over to sales once they reach a certain threshold. Teams that think this way are more likely to strategically close this account and shorten the sales cycle.

Once you target those involved, add marketing stages, and work them as you would a Lead. Market to them according to these stages then when the account meets a threshold, pass them over to sales. Marketing will create early-stage opportunities, converting Leads to Contacts. An early-stage opportunity for target Accounts will be made and the correct people can be added to it. As the marketing opportunity performs certain behaviors, it will move through the stages, eventually being passed to sales.

A Hybrid Model

Some may ask “I have BDR’s and accounts, can I still use Leads and use Accounts?” – Yes, this is a hybrid model and this will require some explanation. Finding the right model is gonna be dependent on your business process and how you go to market. One option for this hybrid model, use Contacts for strategic Accounts, and Leads for non-strategic companies. Your BDR team can then review Leads coming in from organic areas, qualify or reject them, then convert them to a Contact, account, and/or opportunity when they meet your business’s qualification criteria. If they are a strategic account, you can set up Salesforce to automatically convert those Leads to Contacts to be worked at the account level. Quick tip, there are several third-party tools that can assist with this conversion such as Leandata and Engagio

A common question we get asked is “How do we keep track of Contacts as they progress through the marketing and sales funnel?” Salesforce out of the box has a standard field called Lead status. One quick tip is to create a custom field called Contact Status on the Contact object and map your Lead status to the Contact status. A key element here is to have matching values and additional values on the Contact that track the Contact’s status as it advances through the sales process.

Take a look at some of the Contacts statuses we have listed below. We also recognize that this model may not work for everyone depending on how your customers make buying decisions.

Final Thoughts

You should now have a better understanding of what an account centric marketing is and why many teams are adopting it. Depending on your situation, this may be the right fit or you may want to use a hybrid model. If you aren’t sure about what’s right for your team, connect with our marketing experts. We work with our clients to understand how they do business to prescribe the most appropriate solution for their team.

June 26, 2020

About the Author

Natalia is the Director of the SaaS Growth Advisory Practice at OpFocus. Her practice is part of our delivery team, working directly with clients to meet their growth targets, especially as it relates to business processes in marketing, sales, revenue operations, client success, and customer support.