Hi guys, in this B2B Marketing Tip I will talk about account hierarchy. You have all accounts in your CRM but do you have account hierarchy? In a B2B environment your customer are rarely isolated entities, they belong to a group, they are part of countries, BUs and if you don't organize those relationships you will miss very important opportunities for your marketing and your sales. In this video I will show you why the account hierarchy is crucial, how to build that efficiently and how it can help you sell more smartly. So, account hierarchy, why is it important? Let's take an example, parent company with two company A and B and this company A is already a customer here. Obviously it will be easier to convince company B that your service and your product are a good fit because obviously company A already chose you. Marketing also will be able to do more personalized campaigns on the account that are already part of a group whereas there's only already one customer. marketing also the sales will be able to do more personalized campaigns on the account. The sales will be able to target those low hanging fruits and try to convert them more easily into customers and you will be able to have a consolidated view for your reporting on at group level. So how do you build your account hierarchy? So first you have to build a parent-child relationship between account to account. and you have to create this hierarchy either manually with your sales team or your sales ops team or through an integration with an external database such as the end, rest rate and others. This relationship here may be multi-level here. It's very simple example. But you can have a parent company, a company at the country level, then subs in the country. It can be very detailed. You will have to put some attention to the naming convention used for those accounts because you don't want any duplicate and you want to for those accounts to match with the public database. And obviously here with this model with one parent and many child, we will not be able to address the joint venture because a joint venture has many parents. So we don't want to complexify the same. So we don't want to complexify too much at first the model. So usually joint venture are managed as an exception. Once you've built your hierarchy and put the process in place to maintain it, you can calculate KPIs on every account. One of those KPIs I love is the status, an automated status on every account that's for instance goes to sleeping, engage if there are any activities on the account or on the contact of this account. MQA for marketing qualified account, opportunity if there's an opportunity on it. Customer obviously if this account has become a customer and maybe former customer. It may be more complex than that, but that's a very good base. Then it's very good practice to bring at the account. So let's look at the account level the products or services this company has boot. Why is that? Because usually in your marketing automation, it's very difficult to get the whole hierarchy of tables you have in your CRM. So if I want to target the account who have boot product A, it's easier to have a field, for instance, a multi-valued field at the account level that will incorporate all the product and services boot. The estimate revenue or best the actual revenue that you add with this company. So here you need a close loop based on either your financial department or you have to trust your opportunities. But I could notice over the years that there's very often a very large difference between what's estimated at first when the opportunity is created and what is created and what is actually sold and what is actually sold and invoiced over the years. And a very good KPI to have also at the account level, it's the gross margin. Why is that? Because for the scoring and especially if it's augmented with AI and the predictive model, you want to target the accounts that first are the best to convert into customer. But then if you go beyond that, you want the account that's the best to convert into customer. But then if you go beyond that, you want the account that's the best to convert into customer. That will produce the best to convert into customer. And if you go beyond that, you want also the account that have the best margin because you don't want to end up in a situation where you target the account that are very easy to convert, but in the end will produce a low revenue and a not good margin. You may also want to target account that are a bit more difficult to convert into customer. But who will produce a high margin and high revenue? For instance, those public sector accounts or the accounts that will put a very complex RFP in place to select their provider. It's more complex to convert them. But in the end, if you go through and you win, you will have maybe more margin, more revenue. So it's very good. Those are very good KPIs to feed your AI scoring or your predictive model to be able to segment better your ABM strategy. Once you have those KPIs at the account level, you can roll up those KPIs at the parent company and roll up until the group head. So one very good indicator you have to have. So one very good indicator you have to have. You have to put in place at the account level is the group head field, which should be true for the parent company because so that it will be easier to target the parent company and the other, the subs. And you can aggregate here at the group level, some status. So for instance, customer, if at least one subs is a customer, or former customer, or former customer, or former customer, or former customer. So you can define automated rules like that. You can also aggregate at the group level, what kind of product or services are both in the subs and where they are both. So here, it's a bit tricky to correctly render this kind of information. Usually, we put that in a very large comment field with a product slash sub and then product slash sub two. It's very good to have a quick view of where are the product services that have been bought in the group. And you can roll up the global revenue here and the global gross margin at the account level. Why is that? Why it could be useful? Because you can, for instance, have this account with three subs. With not so much, not so high revenue or gross margin in each subs. But when you sum up at the parent company, you will end up with one of your main account. So that's a very good indicator, a very good KPI to measure and to have in your CRM and in your other systems like marketing automation, AVM solution to target very precisely your strategic account. If you want any help to put that in place, work on your CRM and your other solution to create those KPI and hierarchy, don't hesitate to contact us. Talk to you soon.