A Day in the Life of Account Based Marketing: Day 5 - Dirty Data

So enough pontificating on ABM, it’s time to begin. It’s ‘discovery week’ at ABM central (aka, the SDR pit in the office where i sit when I’m not in meetings or traveling). Here’s the plan for the week:

1. We’ve got our list of accounts. Nine account reps in the pilot, five target accounts were picked per rep.
2. Three Account Development Reps (ADRs) joined. Each one will work on discovery for about 15 accounts.
3. All 45 accounts are in Salesforce already. So far so good.
4. Now: Get into Salesforce / Marketo (our CRM / Marketing Automation tool) and dive into each account. Understand history of contacts in all of the 45 target accounts. Are there / were there existing opportunities in the accounts? Map leads to the accounts and collect history of contact and lead engagement so far.
5. The discovery will give us a baseline for beginning the process of building out org charts and creating marketing plans for each account.

Insert grinding halt noise.

Salesforce. Love it and hate it. Here are the issues we found:

Issue #1: Multiple accounts with the same domain / same company

• Everyone I’ve talked to about ABM projects agrees that SF cleanup is step one. This step is complicated by the fact that there are current open opportunities in multiple accounts for the same company, so it’s hard to consolidate accounts.

Issue #2: Multiple domains within one account (and all are legit, think of coca-cola and subsidiaries like Honest Tea, Odwalla…). We do have the ability to link multiple domains into one account, but since we also have problem #1 above, cleanup is needed and we probably need to create some parent/ child relationship between accounts / domains. Someone also needs to determine which accounts are the right ones to be the parent.

Issue #3: Associating leads with accounts — ADRs need to see lead activity, not just contact activity. Reporting would be improved if all leads were contacts but this creates a mess — some accounts will have 1000 contacts.

• There are hundreds of questions and discussions online about why SF leads and contacts work the (flawed?) way they do. You can see how people attack this issue here and here. The latter is interesting and we are considering implementing it. I learned a lot this week about ‘fuzzy logic mapping’ :)

Issue #4: Lead assignment rules — how do ADRs get updates on activity when they are not the contact / account owner?

• There are a number of ways to handle this — we already map accounts (by Geo) to SDRs, so we can do the same for ADRs, but it’s complicated by the fact that not all of the ADRs are mapped to specific geographies.
• We see other companies have created an “ABM owner” field to solve this. We can implement that.

Issue #5: Sharing info with the AMs — ADRs need to be able to share notes and activity easily with AMs — currently they are working outside of SF with Excel and OneNote, but this creates duplicate data and i prefer that SF be the master of all account info.

Issue #6: Campaign activity / interesting moment activity from Marketo is not easily visible at the account level. The ADRs can get alerts from Marketo (assuming we fix the lead assignment rules (#4 above)), but there’s no connection to see this at the account level for leads.

We’ve had three meetings this week to resolve these issues. We also looked at some tools like Engagio and others that help solve issues # 3, 5 and 6 above.

In essence, this post has been the hardest to write so far — it shows my lack of expertise / experience with the SF and data aspects of this project. But i wanted to get it out there for two reasons:

1. other marketers will probably encounter the same issues, and as we resolve them, I’ll write more about how we tackled them
2. other marketers may have solved these things in interesting ways that i can learn from. If you have experience with any of these issues and / or think about them in a different way, I’d love to hear from you in the comments!