With great growth comes great responsibility. As your organization grows in leaps and bounds, it becomes impractical to manually match leads to accounts each time a new one chimes in.
What is Lead-to-Account Matching?
Lead-to-Account Matching refers to the automated process of connecting leads to the correct accounts/companies in your CRM. It provides for a seamless customer journey and prevents the occurrence of internal miscommunication that may reflect poorly on your overall brand.
Let’s suppose Pipedrive is an existing account in your CRM, with a rep assigned to it. One fine day, Austin from Pipedrive reaches out to you. With automated lead-to-account matching, Austin gets assigned to Pipedrive’s account in your CRM. The rep representing Pipedrive can then take care of communications with Austin.
Why is Lead-to-Account Matching Important?
Now let’s look at the previous scenario without lead-to-account matching.
Austin from Pipedrive gets handled by the inbound sales team. Since the outbound team isn’t necessarily cognizant of the inbound accounts, they could end up reaching out to another lead, say Mike, from Pipedrive as well.
These two connections are happening simultaneously, but also separately, each with no knowledge of the other. Can you imagine what an intersection between the two would look like?
The impending miscommunication, confusion, and chaos this can cause can be catastrophic for you, your customer, as well as your brand image.
So what’s the fix? Manual lead-to-account matching isn’t an option because it’s not only a poor use of your time but also highly inefficient, potentially inaccurate, and prone to human error.
By the time the manual matching is done, who isn’t to say that a merger or acquisition hasn’t happened? After all, data decays with time.
How Does Lead-to-Account Matching Work?
So what are the situations in which lead-to-account matching happens? Let’s look at some examples:
- Three leads from the same organization, but differently labeled—say, “Salesforce”, “Salesforce Inc.”, and “Salesforce.com”—all get assigned to the same account
- Commas, dashes, quotes, and other special characters are ignored. For example, “Johnson and Johnson” and “Johnson & Johnson” are one and the same.
- Acronyms and abbreviations are expanded, assessed automatically, and assigned to the same account. For example, “Hewlett-Packard” and “HP”.
Whitespaces, email and web domains, nicknames, name changes, etc., are other examples of scenarios where lead-to-account matching comes into play.
The 3 Key Benefits of Lead-to-Account Matching
For many a sales rep, hearing replies along the lines of “We’re already working with Damon from your team” can sting more than rejection. The rep has not only wasted their time wording an email to a lead that’s already taken care of but also made a poor impression of the company’s internal communications on the lead.
Let’s take a look at how lead-to-account matching helps in scenarios like these.
1. Increased Efficiency
Accurate lead-to-account matching saves your reps their valuable time and energy that is best spent prospecting and closing deals. Manual lead-to-account matching leads to increased time wastage only to obtain minimal results.
2. Well-maintained CRMs
The average CRM is cluttered with expired, inaccurate, or missing data. Manual clean-ups can be painfully inconvenient and time-consuming and hence, ensuring your CRM’s health with automated lead-to-account matching is your best option.
3. Better Customer Experience
Most importantly, lead-to-account matching makes way for a better overall customer experience by providing a clean CRM that adequately helps your reps manage the leads in your database. A better customer experience leads to higher conversion rates.
How Inaccurate Lead Info Impacts Your Lead-to-Account Matching Process
Your lead-to-account matching is only as good as your lead info. Inaccurate lead info could match your leads with the wrong accounts and potentially cause much more chaos than manual lead-to-account matching.
Some other undesirable consequences of incorrect lead data include:
- Replacement of quality lead data with incorrect data
- Loss of your sales team’s productivity
- Incorrect lead scoring
- Loss of leads despite good quality accounts
- Internal miscommunication
- Poor reflection on brand image
As a Slintel user, you needn’t worry about inaccurate lead info infecting your CRM. We make sure you have access to only the most relevant, accurate lead info for your outreach and prospecting.
Accurate Lead-to-Account Matching With Slintel
At Slintel, we leave no lead unattended. Lead-to-account matching is embedded seamlessly into our product and every lead is matched to an account from the get-go.
In fact, Slintel can offer you multiple leads from the same account. That way, if a lead from an account is unresponsive, you can always reach out to somebody else from the same company. You can even find leads from a particular account name, from multiple target accounts in your industry, or even from multiple industries at the same time.
Sounds interesting, doesn’t it? Let’s find out how you can do all this!
First of all, have your TAM (Total Addressable Market) as well as your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) ready.
Using Slintel’s search filters, you can customize your search to your most specific requirements as per your TAM and ICP. Let’s take the following search filters to find the accounts associated with your desired leads:
- Your leads are in the computer software industry
- They work in organizations with an employee size greater than 200
- They are located in the APAC region
Slintel can find accounts with each of these specific criteria met. Now let’s suppose we’ve come up with a list of 100 such target accounts. We have leads for each of these 100 accounts that you can reach out to.
But it doesn’t end there.
We want to make sure that you don’t just get a bunch of leads to contact. We want to make sure you get the leads that are most relevant for your business. And how do we do that? Filter again!
Let’s assume you apply the following filters to your lead list:
- They are salespeople
- They have high decision-making authority
- Their contact details are available
Now, you have the most specific set of leads matched to the most specific set of target accounts as per your requirements. You’re unstoppable now!
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Endless Opportunities
With Slintel by your side, you can make sure you’re utilizing the full potential of your target market. Slintel gives you extended access to your market with accurate lead info and even alternate leads to back you up.
With the right leads matched to the right accounts, you can shift your focus to where it’s required—prospecting. Find the accounts in your target market as per your specific requirements and reach out.
Your leads are waiting!
