Account based selling is the industry's approach to prospecting, instead of the the lead-based and contact-based approaches. The focus here is on highly-personalized communication efforts on high-value accounts. Unlike other approaches, ABS involves a collaborative effort amongst teams across practically all departments. It is not just one marketer or salesperson who has engagements with a target company. The effort is coordinated across the entire organization!

1. Account Status Detection

2. Customer Spaces Fields from Salesforce

3. Lead Matching

Account Status Detection

While the lead and the opportunity object in Salesforce have a "status" field that reflects where they are in their life-cycle, the account object has no such field out of the box. However, in the account-based sales world, it is key to understand the current status in order to orchestrate all involved stakeholders (marketing, SDRs, AEs, etc).

Inferred Status

Groove can automatically detect the account status by analyzing opportunities, as well as open activities and the activity history. The status is automatically evaluated every 3 hours and surfaced in the field "Inferred Status" on the account object. This field is a formula field that combines the values on the fields "Account Tags" and "Engagement Status" into a single value, using a specific logic. You can create your own formula field in order to customize the logic behind the account status. Your own formula field could use the fields  "Account Tags" and "Engagement Status" plus other custom fields that are indicative for the status of the account.

Account Tags

The field Account Tags is a multi-select picklist field that can include these values:

• Untouched: There are no activities or opportunities on the account.

• Cur. Effort: There are activities, indicating that the sales team is currently reaching out to the account, trying to generate pipeline.

• Past Effort: There are activities that indicate the sales team was reaching out  in the past but there was no recent effort. The threshold between "current" and "past" is 13 weeks by default but can be configured.

• Meeting Scheduled: There is a meeting scheduled

• Meeting, no Opportunity: There was a (qualification) meeting and you would expect an opportunity should have been created - but there is no opportunity. This could mean, the account was disqualified or the sales rep forgot to create an opportunity.

• Open Opportunity: There is an open opportunity on the account.

• Lost Opportunity: There are only lost opportunities on the account.

• Current Customer: There is at least one Closed Won opportunity and the field "Churned Customer" is not checked. That must be an existing customer.

• Churned Customer: The field "Churned Customer" is checked. This field is part of Groove and can be set to true according to your business process when a customer churns.

Engagement Status

The field engagement status indicates how the customer has engaged as a result of your outreach effort. It can have these values:

• No engagement

• Past Engagement

• Recent Engagement

   

The threshold between "past" and "recent" is 13 weeks by default and can be customized. Engagement is indicated by a customer opening an email at least 3 times (that value can be customized) or replying to an email. A phone call is considered an engagement if a conversation happened.

Adding Account Status to Groove

To make your account status field available to people via the Accounts page, you'll need to toggle on this option found in your Manage My Org page.

After enabling the toggle, set the Salesforce field to Groove's Inferred Status field. This will be required for Account Status Detection to work properly.

Note: If you are using a separately calculated Status field in your Salesforce instance, you can set that here instead.

Lead Matching

Salesforce's contact object has a parent relationship to the account object. But the lead object has no relationship to the account object. This can lead to lost business potential.

​For example, an inbound lead is not automatically associated with the matching account record. And therefore the account owner misses the implicit engagement signal. Considering inbound leads an account engagement signal is a typical feature of account-based sales.
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Groove includes a high-fidelity lead matching algorithm that can match leads to the related accounts, based on email domain, company name or website. This allows the account owner to monitor lead activity on their accounts and maximize the outreach potential. Groove establishes a many-to-many relationship between the Lead and the Account object through a custom object called "Lead Match".

To activate and utilize Groove's Lead-to-Account matching, please follow the directions below.

Note: after configuring Lead Matching for your Salesforce org, please reach out to support@grooveapp.com, as we need to make an additional modification to your account on our end for this to work.

• Make sure you have Account Based Sales Features enabled (open the tab "Account-based Sales" in this page and enable the option "Enable Account Based Sales Features").

• On the lead page layout(s) add the related list "Matching Accounts" and add these columns: Match Type, Account, Account Owner, Account Status (Inferred), Convert; then remove the New button.

   

• On the account page layout(s) add the related list "Matching Leads" and add these columns: Match Type, Lead, Lead Owner, Lead Source, Lead Status, Lead Created Date, Convert; set the sort order to Lead Created Date - Descending, and remove the New button.

Notice: Groove will not match leads by email domain if the email address of the lead is a free mailer domain such as gmail.com, msn.com, icloud.com, etc. Such leads will only be matched based on company name.
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Notice: Groove will not match leads if the email address of the lead is on your domain blocklist. Such leads are considered test records.

Real-time versus Scheduled Matching

By default, Groove scans your Salesforce org every 60 minutes for new lead matches. If you want Groove the match leads instantly when they are created or when they are updated, you can set up a process builder workflow that triggers the lead matching job directly. In order to do so, follow these instructions:

1. Create a process builder workflow on the Lead object

2. Choose between the options "only when a record is created" and"when a record is created or edited" depending on whether you need the lead matcher to run when the lead is created or when the lead is updated too.

3. As Condition select "No criteria—just execute the actions!" or select a condition if required by your process

4. Create an "immediate action" of type "Apex" and find the Apex class "Match Lead to Account".

5. Set the Apex variable "leadIDs" and assign the value "[Lead].id" via a Field Reference.

6. Hit Save and Activate in order to enable the workflow.