The barebones of lead-to-account matching or named account matching is to map a prospect to an existing company in their CRM records.
But what about its implications on your inbound workflow such as pipeline management, account ownership, and sales hand-off?
If you’re not sure how to picture a lead-to-account matching system solving for these use cases, this blog is for you. Because it’s never too late to bring it into your workflow and automate named account matching without overhauling your GTM motion.
Tip: If you’d like to start small and understand the topic a bit more tribally, head to this blog on what is lead-to-account matching and how it works.
1. Make the smoothest SDR-to-AE transfer with lead-to-account matching
Most SaaS companies have dedicated SDRs to hunt for leads, put them on their roster, and prioritize outreach after qualifying them – especially for outbound campaigns.
An AE might get involved early in a few special cases, but the buck starts with due diligence from your SDR. Which means, your SDRs need to know when a lead flows in (or identified for outbound) from an existing account.
In this situation, access to account ownership data will enable your SDRs to pass the baton like a relay to the relevant AE.
How does this add a better experience to your prospects and sales team?
a) Fetch initial context with lead-to-account matching before outbound touch
When your SDRs identify prospects for an outbound campaign, chances are that they might find some of them to be a part of an existing account in your CRM. If it’s not a converted account, SDRs can make the outreach warm by getting context from the AE who owns the account. They can also collect deal status and past engagement records of the company from the CRM to offer a pain-aware and empathetic experience to the leads.
b) AE hand-off after first touch with prior history of lead-to-account matching
SDRs can avoid involving a random AE who has no prior context about the account or company. The AE who previously interacted with other decision makers from the same account can swoop in, with a better understanding of what the new lead might be looking for in the demo.
2. Set up all possible lead-to-account matching conditions to avoid mapping errors
There are many tools that provide basic lead-to-account matching i.e., matching leads to an account in the CRM based on their names, email addresses, and domains.
But this mechanism can seriously fall short if your CRM records aren’t data-rich. There are always outliers that can wreak havoc on your named accounts. Or worse, result in duplicate contact entries of the same leads.
You need fuzzy matching capabilities to decrease your dependency on mere names and email addresses as your source of truth.
With fuzzy matching, you can automate lead identification and account matching using the following parameters, apart from email address and domain name:
- IP address
- Acronyms
- Variations of company names
- Suffixes like stock codes
- Industry
- Geography
- Nicknames
- Syllables and regional spellings.
Types of matching you can configure to power your lead distribution
There are 3 types of automated lead-to-account matching rules you need to set up to handle all lead routing scenarios.
- Match to the owner of existing contacts This lead-to-account matching rule assigns the prospect to an AE if it’s an existing contact they’ve handled before. Which means, if the prospect re-submits a demo request having already taken one, they are automatically matched to the same AE who did the first demo.
Example: Imagine paul@clickup.com, a US contact, who submits a demo request for a prospecting tool on August 21. RevenueHero will automatically qualify Paul and route him to Nina, a rep from the US.
If Paul comes back on September 4 to book a demo, RevenueHero will remember the last rep who he matched to and route him to Nina again.
- Match to the owner of similar contacts Here, the contact is matched to an AE who owns a related contact. This can be done by assigning the lead to an AE who handled the most recent contact with the same domain as this new contact.
Example: rachel@clickup.com, a new lead, fills up your demo request form. But angie@clickup.com is a contact in your Salesforce CRM, whose owner is Lucy.
RevenueHero will recognize that Lucy has owned an account similar to Rachel and match them with each other.
- Match to the owner of a company The quintessential one of them all. The contact is matched to an AE who owns the entire portfolio of leads from a company. This is particularly helpful for enterprise and mid-market companies where there are a lot of leads and decision makers. Matching to the owner is also a great fit for ABM campaigns, which includes targeted marketing towards multiple stakeholders of a single account or company.
Example: irfan@clickup.com submits a demo request form. His contact is not available on Salesforce.
But Salesforce has an account for ClickUp with other leads, which is handled by Paula. Here, RevenueHero will match Irfan with Paula who owns the ClickUp account.
A sneak peek at how Fello used lead-to-account matching to double their demos
When we were setting up the demo request flow for Fello, one of RevenueHero’s customers, we realized something different about their named accounts. Since they were a lead generation tech for real-estate, there was a unique predicament.
Prospects that evaluate Fello are real estate professions, most of whom have the same email domain called “@dw.com”. This was just the extension of a common directory and didn’t mean that the professionals were from the same company – a unique predicament because a conventional matching system would only add to the complexity here, since it can’t match by company name.
With RevenueHero’s fuzzy matching capabilities, Fello made simple changes to their demo request form by adding a company field. So, it’s imperative that you look for the best of custom matching rules that don’t limit you to basic mapping.
3. Turn your GTM motion into a consistent, repeatable playbook
There are too many variables that need to conspire together to make your inbound GTM motion run like clockwork.
While demo form experience, landing page messaging, and paid campaigns move the needle for the marketing function; your sales reps need the best hand-offs, routing mechanisms, and meeting scheduler experience.
Even if one piece breaks down, you get a marketing+sales mudslinging game which breaks down your GTM motion into too many pieces. Pieces that don’t communicate well with each other at all.
Automating your lead qualification and named account matching will reduce the friction between your GTM functions, and make funnel optimization an organization-wide effort.
GTM use cases that lead-to-account matching can help you solve
a) Managing campaign-specific leads: New leads from your inbound marketing or demand generation campaigns can be routed to your AEs and SDRs with complete details about their named account and also the campaign they came from.
Your campaigns will most certainly have different sets of positioning or messaging. Some could be based on competitor comparison, some around a feature, and a few about events.
So, when your AEs take over, they can tailor the meeting with the prospect in keeping with the campaign messaging – which reflects the intent behind the lead’s interest in your product.
b) Closing the feedback loop between sales and marketing: Having your sales and marketing work in tandem will help your GTM motion with a better ICP, run more personalized campaigns such as ABM, and address concerns in your overall pipeline to win prospects over.
There are a lot of unknown variables that only AEs and SDRs can inform the larger organization from their interactions with prospects.
Consider this mini internal questionnaire that your sales and marketing can periodically fill in:
What made the prospect convert?
What was the single differential USP that helped us land the customer?
Why did the deal fall through at the last moment?
Why did the account pick a competitor over us?
What’s the reason behind meeting drop-offs after booking a demo?
Do we need a better demo scheduling workflow?
Imagine what you could do with the learnings from reaching out to the leads of the same company. Growth hypotheses can be fed back to the marketing team from sales and vice versa.
4. Plan account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns with AEs in the lead-to-account matching flow for specific contacts
Imagine you're running a SaaS company targeting a specific set of enterprise clients, who could use 100+ seats or licenses of your product.
Here’s the thing with enterprises – just because of their sheer size, your AEs would have most likely made contact with different leads from the same company.
With lead-to-account matching, you can identify that several individual leads from different departments within a large corporation are actually connected to the same parent account. This data lets you tailor your ABM strategy.
For instance, you could create a personalized campaign that highlights how your product can streamline processes across various departments—that have engaged with your demo forms, marketing resources, and AEs—to demonstrate a deep understanding of the account's unique needs.
5. Segment high-engaging leads from an company to nurture them with lead-to-account matching
Every company has its own lead scoring system for outbound contacts. When your outbound leads match certain criteria such as designation, proximity to leadership, revenue of the company, and team size – you segment them into different buckets to personalize your outreach for them.
But what about your inbound strategy? You can’t afford to take inbound leads for granted because you have their explicit interest in the product. So, just like in outbound sales, you can segment high-engaging leads from an important account or a high-ticket company based on certain actions that they do.
Imagine you’re using a CRM like HubSpot, where you want to check on the activities of your leads. You have 3 contacts matched to the same account. The three of them have performed different actions:
- Contact A: Signed up for a demo after hitting your product landing page from an ad and also checked out your ‘About Us’ page.
- Contact B,C: Downloaded a product whitepaper, went on to visit 3 feature pages, and checked out your pricing page before scheduling a demo.
- Contacts D, E, F: Visited your landing page from a referral source, which is an invite-only newsletter. Went on to sign up for a demo after spending some time on your website.
Now, wouldn’t you clearly prioritize contacts A, D, E, and F over the rest based on the intent they’ve shown?
The above examples are at an engagement-level. You can also repurpose this strategy to identify the designation of the leads – to prioritize leaders and decision makers over the practitioners or vice versa.
Whispered aside, RevenueHero can instantly qualify a lead as soon as they form-fill for a demo request, check matching rules, and display the calendar slots of your best AE or SDR right there.
When you have too many leads from a single account, you might lose your way on choosing the best decision makers and high-intent leads to reach out to.
Creating intent-based segments will help you double down on the most valuable contacts that might need to be nudged or reactivated with a nurture campaign when they go cold after a demo request.
Also Read:
RevenueHero champions lead-to-account matching use cases to add the missing mojo to your pipelinepipeline
Lead-to-account matching might be a small feature in RevenueHero’s inbound acceleration software. But it seamlessly matches up to the tools that offer lead-to-account matching as their primary offering.
Lead-to-account matching in RevenueHero is a purpose-built painkiller of pipeline headaches and not merely a good-to-have.
So much that we’ve had our customers sing heaps of praise on the functionality!
But let’s also look beyond lead-to-account matching, which is just one moving part of your pipeline goals.
How RevenueHero can fix your leaky inbound funnel
1. Perform instant, automated lead qualification upon form-fill and avoid the manual vagaries of switching between tools and excel sheets
2. Display your best reps’ calendar slots right after a demo or meeting request and enhance your buyer experience. You can also personalize your demo request page like what Spendflo—a SaaS management tool—built with RevenueHero (personal meeting links)
3. Assign leads by automatically routing inbound requests based on fully customizable mapping rules to distribute leads evenly; and also display your best AE’s calendar slots to high-intent leads – simultaneously.
If you’re considering transforming your pipeline fortunes by fixing your meeting scheduling workflow, I really think you should give RevenueHero a try.
