Account Scoring & Intelligence – What is it, why should I being doing it, and how do I get started?

Account scoring is a process that involves evaluating and ranking the potential value of a company or organization as a customer or business partner based on various criteria. In today’s B2B world, it’s rare that one individual makes the whole buying decision.  This is where account intelligence comes into play.  Prior to attempting to embark on development of a good account scoring program, companies should be aware of 2 additional concepts:

• Account-based marketing (ABM) is a marketing strategy that focuses on targeting high-value accounts that have been identified through account scoring. ABM uses personalized messaging and tailored campaigns to engage with these accounts and nurture them through the sales funnel.  Account scoring can help to power your ABM programs so you know a customer’s propensity to buy and can educate them with the proper messaging.  This brings us to the next concept….
• Intent, this measures an account’s readiness to buy, and is the culmination of the way multiple members of an account consume and interact with your content and company. To know when to best engage with a prospect, the intent score generally maps to your stages of the buying journey (or your ABM audiences’ stages for example, target accounts, active demand accounts, marketing engaged, dormant, etc.).

You won’t need to dump all the work you’ve done on your lead scoring!  This is leveling-up your scoring performance and adding another indicator to your toolbox to guide your sales & marketing resources. It’s becoming increasingly critical to look at and service your customers as a whole entity, not person by person.  Benefits of this method include better on target messaging, wider visibility to xsell/upsell opportunities, and generally enhanced customer relationships.  Use proven reliable data methods to help find accounts that share similar attributes and focus your resources on accounts more likely to close.  The outcome of an effective scoring program should be uniform messaging across that buying group along with pipeline acceleration.  This is where account scoring can help, similar to the contact level scoring ideology, it aligns high value accounts with your mission critical ABM strategy.  If an account overall scores higher and is therefore more valuable and sales ready, you want to spend more quality time and programs to move them across the finish line and maintain important customer communications.

There are many ways to do account scoring, often dependent on vendor chosen, but the general concepts are similar looking at the overall account’s engagement and behavior with your company.  This can be accomplished many ways ranging from the simplest, viewing and assessing data of the contacts that belong to that company and bubbling it up to a higher-level account score (often referred to as the ‘roll up method’).….to the more advanced models which assess firmographics, technographics, and publicly available data also using artificial intelligence.  What we are trying to achieve is an indicator as to how close this prospect is to your ideal customer profile (ICP).

How do I get started with an Account Scoring plan you might ask?

We recommend framing out a plan that covers how you will do account scoring in ABM:

• Created your ideal customer profile. You’ll need to know what does my perfect buyer look like and start modeling a profile of characteristics & behavioral patterns to look for after that.  These are ‘buying signals’.  Don’t go this alone, involved sales management for input!
• Create your account scoring matrix. This is basically a predictive model based on your ICP.  Much like contact level scoring you need to define attributes and weight them to equal a 0-100 point-based score.  Don’t overcomplicate this to start.  Models can be as simple or complex as needed but start easy to get it off the ground.  Simply weighting behaviors as well as company attributes and Martech stack attributes can be very valuable.  For example, they get x points for owning certain tools in their stack, or x points for being in a particular industry, x points for previous product purchases.
• Implement your scoring by selecting a supporting 3^rd party vendor and optimize this over a few months gathering feedback and making tweaks as needed.
• Once you are confident in your scoring model, identify your best prospects and align your ABM programs to them. Prioritize the spend based on most valued, highest scored accounts.
• Lastly, and very important is to circle back and review if the higher scoring accounts are the ones you are helping to accelerate opportunities for based on the ABM programs. You should easily be able to track this with looking at closed won deals against the scores.

At the end of the day, you have to align your ‘in-market accounts’ with your high value marketing & sales efforts.  At any point in time, only a very small portion of your overall targets are ready to buy what you are selling.  Account scoring coupled with an aggressive ABM strategy will help you find them.

There are several vendors that master the above to concepts such as 6sense, DemandBase, Oracle Eloqua Advanced Intelligence (AI) Cloud Service also offers an account scoring component.  Oracle Data Fox has a solution as well.   If you are in the early stages of evaluating this process, Relationship One can assist!  We work directly with many of these 3^rd party vendors and can manage a non-biased vendor evaluation for you to help with vendor selection and help craft your ABM strategy as well as implement your account scoring model.  Contact us and start creating your future pipeline now!

Brenda Barrelle is a Senior Eloqua & SFMC Consultant and Managing Director of B Automated Consulting