Lead to Account Matching: An Ultimate Guide

Lead-to-account matching is an underrated and often unappreciated process. It saves you from embarrassment. Here’s how. Suppose your sales rep is actively finding prospects and sending outbound emails. Then, they receive responses that are a bit awkward.An already-engaged lead says, ‘Hello, I am already interacting with XYZ at your organization. Are you talking about the same thing?’An old customer says, ‘Hi, we are your customer for 3 years now. Have you got a solution to fix the bug I talked about? Say hi to the team. Take care.’Do these responses sound familiar? Then, perhaps it is time to know about lead-to-account matching. Such scenarios are a result of internal miscommunications and when they happen, your sales reps waste a lot of time backtracking the responses. Also, your customers become aware of the internal issues. So, it’s quite embarrassing too. If you are already facing this issue, keep reading to know more about the benefits of lead-to-account matching.

What is Lead-to-account matching?

Lead-to-account matching is a process of connecting inbound leads to the appropriate accounts to use the lead data for routing, analysis, scheduling, etc. The process can be automated or manual. A manual lead-to-matching process requires no tool. It requires the email domain and uses a simple match. In an automated lead-to-account matching process, a new lead to automatically connected to the company they belong to. If the company is already represented by a sales rep, then the lead will be connected to their record.

Why is Lead-to-Account Match Important?

Time is valuable regardless of the space you exist in. If your customers are satisfied, your revenue creation will be better.But, if your sales reps keep chasing the wrong leads, they may miss out on the quality leads. Hence, that would ultimately result in a lot of missed revenue. So, if you want to create a healthy pipeline and keep the revenue flowing, lead-to-account matching is important.

Here’s how lead-to-account matching can help you make the most out of the inbound leads.

Saves time

Lead-to-account matching ensures that the right person in the organization is notified when there’s a new incoming lead. Then, your sales reps can take over and interact with the leads to bring in actual sales. They can minimize time wasted in finding answers or working with other salespeople to help them with their existing customers.Also, lead-to-account matching can cut down on the time spent on huge data clean-up projects. Once you run the application, you do not need to undertake days of manual clean-up work.

Boosts efficiency

If your incoming leads are not assigned appropriately, they will be useless. Also, if your sales team is hunting down the wrong lead, that’s wasted time and money. Lead-to-account matching helps you to assign the right lead to the ideal sales rep. In lead to accounting and routing systems, you can set the routing rules to decide which leads must be assigned to which salesperson.

Data reporting accuracy

As mentioned, lead-to-account matching software can clean up databases. They enable you to see accurate data in real-time and assess your performance over time. Manual lead-to-account matching comes with data error risks, duplicates, and outdated contacts. It takes a lot of time to find out about the leads – where they came from, the sales reps assigned to them, and the time of assignment. Hence, the hot leads start turning cold.But lead-to-account tools offer clean and accurate data. Hence, without wasting any time you can access the data, make reports, track and evaluate performances, and make better-informed decisions.

Minimize customer frustration

Suppose you are busy at work. You have tons of emails to respond to. Just then, another email pop into your inbox from the same company whose product you’re already using.

Won’t you get annoyed?

The same happens with your customers. Such situations not only infuriate them but also ruins your brand image. It shows that communication and collaboration among the employees are missing. Thus, using lead-to-account matching is the best way to avoid miscommunications and missed leads.

How Does Lead-to-Account Matching Work?

The simplest way to match lead to account is by looking at the lead’s email address. It requires you to look at the domain in the email address and perform lead-to-account matching based on that. That’s the manual way to perform lead-to-account matching!But using a lead to account software you can perform the same process more efficiently. A lead-to-account matching software can match a lead to the right account automatically by matching the domain name field. For instance, the tool can associate john@wincompany.com with www.wincompany.com. Suppose another sales rep from your team is working with another employee at Win Company when John’s lead comes in. Then, the lead will be assigned to the same sales rep. The working of the lead-to-account matching process usually depends on the technology and the features of the software.However, there is one basic concept on which these lead-to-account matching tools work. It scans the leads for distinct characteristics and matches those leads to the ideal account. The software performs this stunt by using the different fields in your lead record. Here are three common concepts based on which the lead-to-account matching tools work.

• Lead routing takes place based on your predetermined routing rules.
• A change in the CRM system launches a trigger event
• Sales reps are notified about leads via email or Slack so that they can follow up on the potential leads

Sure, all of it can be performed manually, but not as efficiently as a lead-to-account matching tool. Especially, when it comes to a growing CRM, manual lead-to-account matching can be disastrous. So, start implementing a lead-to-account matching software. But before that, know the list of features you must consider to pick the best lead-to-account software in the next section.

How to Choose the Best Lead-to-Account Matching Software?

There are several lead-to-account matching software out there. So, we thought of listing the features you must look for in the software. Here’s the list.

Fuzzy matching

The fuzzy matching technique helps to identify the difference between two text elements, entries, or strings. For example, when you have an inbound lead, your lead-to-account matching software must match it against your CRM to check if the lead belongs to an existing account or not. Here a simple string match would not be sufficient because the text may contain special characters, misspellings, nicknames, or legal company suffixes. This is where fuzzy matching comes in handy.The technique is accurate and fast. It can determine the smallest similarity/difference between two texts and decode its relevance. For example, it can identify that Apple Inc. and Apple or IBM, I.B.M., and International Business Machines are the same. The fuzzy matching algorithm works on 14 basic rules.

• Nicknames
• Name changes
• Acronyms
• Whitespace
• Suffixes
• Company name match
• Mergers and acquisitions
• Inferred industry
• Geographical spellings
• Geographical match
• Special characters
• Stock codes
• Email and web domain match
• Common words

You can define your rules for fuzzy matching and also decide its strictness. However, note that the stricter the rules, the lower the matches.

Tiebreaks customization

At times fuzzy matching produces many potential matches to a lead. Hence, you must have control over determining which account is the best match for the lead. This is where you need tiebreak rules.While lead-to-account matching solutions have default tiebreaker rules, look for customization features to meet your needs. You will need a sophisticated tiebreaker system to ensure matching your lead to the perfect account. So, get the software that has the custom rules feature for tiebreaks.

Conversion to lead to contact

Manual reviewing and processing of leads within your CRM system is nothing but a long, time-consuming process. Considering inbound leads, they are likely to include a mix of prospects and leads in current clients, target accounts, or partners. Among these, several leads would not be suitable for follow-ups. Here is where you need the lead to contact conversion feature.Advanced lead-to-account matching softwarehttps://revenuehero.io/ tracks the incoming leads. It continuously evaluates the uploaded, inbound, and entered leads that match accounts. Hence, the lead-to-account matching tool can instantly and automatically convert leads to contacts based on your criteria without any intervention or manual effort.Also, this feature can help you clean up the inbound data and list of leads in real-time.

5 Top Benefits of Lead-to-Account Matching

Here are the top five benefits of a good lead-to-account matching software.

1. Easy and efficient lead management

Most businesses focus on lead generation. But they do not think about managing the leads later on. Not knowing what to do with your leads, turns them useless. You cannot derive any benefit if you do not nurture them properly. That means if your leads aren’t well utilized, your marketing strategy, directed towards lead generation, can produce no results. Hence, you need software that makes it easy to generate leads, nurture, route, and manage them appropriately. Only then you can make the most out of your marketing campaigns.

• Excellent lead nurturing can generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower costs.
• 79% of the leads never convert to sales due to a lack of nurturing
• On average, nurtured leads produce a 20% increase in sales opportunities

Source: 21 Insightful Lead Nurturing Statistics & Facts You Must Know (crmnext.com)

2. Seamless process and better customer experience

Multiple calls from the same company annoy customers, leading to dissatisfaction. It usually happens when a sales rep does not know that another team member has already made contact with the lead. Lead-to-account matching helps you to avoid this hassle. It makes the entire process seamless by mapping accounts and ensuring better internal communications.Further, long wait times also ruin the customer experience. But lead-to-account matching and routing platforms instantly match the leads, route them to the right person and ensure proper lead nurturing. Thus, it enhances customer experience and increases retention.

3. Improved CRM experience

Average CRM systems can be full of faulty, incorrect, and missing data. They may be highly unreliable and ineffective. This is why you need lead-to-account matching.Lead to accounting matching software helps you to clean up databases. It ensures accuracy and systematic flow of data. Lead-to-account matching optimizes the CRM and the marketing automation system. It improves the data quality and enhances your CRM experience.

4. Increased sales

As mentioned above lead-to-account matching platforms enable instant lead routing, assignment, and nurturing. Further, it also ensures faster and more efficient data matching. It helps the sales reps to focus more on interacting with leads and closing more sales. Lead-to-account matching software also offers a clear view of the leads in the marketing pipeline and makes it easier to measure sales activity across the organization.

5. Effective lead distribution

Like the best lead distribution software solutions, lead-to-account matching platforms also ensure effective lead routing. The software enables users to build intelligent lead routing rules based on which they can assign leads to the right sales reps. The leads are usually assigned based on a combination of fields, like company size, territory, account ownerships, etc. Also, advanced lead-to-account matching tools let users account for ownership so that the already assigned leads are not re-distributed.

The Key Takeaway

Lead-to-account matching is your answer to missing leads, unsatisfied customers, and loss of revenue. It helps your revenue team to run effectively and efficiently. So, if you are looking for ways to close more deals, automation is the key. Consider automating your lead routing and distribution processes with platforms like RevenueHero. The solution can save your time and ultimately contribute to higher sales with its lead qualification, routing, and prioritization features. The platform also offers CRM integration to ensure hassle-free lead management.

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