How to Identify and Match Leads to an Existing Account in Salesforce

Sales professionals pitching to existing accounts can be an embarrassing mistake which might end up in confused prospects who might reply, “yes, we already know your company and have been talking to some other representative at your company.” For the sales team, these miscommunications and oversteps can occur quite frequently. In aggregate, such mistakes can end up costing in terms of disruption and wasted prospecting time.

Various issues can end up causing this trouble. New leads might appear that erroneously roll up to an active opportunity that belongs to some other sales team member. Similarly, leads from target account lists for outbound campaigns can also end up in the wrong place; and in some cases, leads might be duplicates. Now for the big question: why does this even happen?

The Challenge with Lead Data

For a sales rep, outreach and engagement with prospects can be the biggest success drivers, and likewise, these activities should occupy most of their time. But in most cases, they end up spending too much of the time verifying that data in Salesforce is correct before outreach. It indicates that sales reps spend too much time on non-revenue generating activities, missing out on the genuinely pressing tasks. 

In such cases, the data cleanup inevitably gets abandoned in favor of prospecting, and the data drift in Salesforce CRM of the company continues. And the solution to this problem in sales is lead-to-account-matching.

Lead-to-Account Matching for Productive Sales Effort

Lead-to-account matching is a subtle but impactful method for tightening sales and marketing alignment. It acts as a central component of account-based marketing, which increases sales productivity by avoiding any confusion or data discrepancy. 

Lead-to-account matching can be thought of as an automated process that helps match and filter out incoming leads from existing accounts. It also prevents the sales team from prospecting leads at customer accounts or active opportunities. 

How does it work?

Lead-to-account matching allows the sales team to analyze leads, utilize characteristics of that lead, and match the leads to the right account. By including more sophisticated technology, lead-to-account matching can be done using algorithms, rules, and multiple fields, like geography, to intelligently find the potential matches. 

This method of identifying leads from existing accounts by looking at different variables makes it easier for the sales team to make judgment calls on whether a lead should link to any specific pre-existing account in the database. It saves time in two different ways:

1) Data cleanup: Bulk matching

Running the process of lead-to-account-matching helps to cut down all the time spent on a massive data cleanup. The process works by pairing leads to accounts by the thousands, which takes days in cleanup work when done manually.

2) Data maintenance: Individual on-demand matching

Even after a data cleanup, the team needs to work on maintaining the data quality. Lead-to-account-matching can also help with that, enabling users to see potentially matching accounts and easily match leads to accounts with a click of a button. 

Deliver Excellent Customer Support while Saving Time on managing Leads

With lead-to-account matching, you’ll finally have the confidence that your sales team is engaging with the correct leads. This not only saves your team from a world of confusion when a sales rep transfers a lead to another team member but also minimizes the possibility of redundant lead records. Get your sales team the help they need to manage leads efficiently. Talk to our Salesforce experts for more ways you can improve your custom lead generation process. Reach out to us at sales@360degreecloud.com.