Virtual Account has been a long sought after feature for many Marketing and Sales professionals. Before we get in deeper into details, let’s define a common understanding of Virtual Account.
Virtual accounts refer to the companies that are not in the CRM Accounts yet. Your sales and marketing team may still be reaching out to leads from these accounts, but since these are not in the system, there is no way to aggregate and report on these accounts. As a result, not only the reporting capabilities are lost, but also the strategic advantages that come with knowing a prospect in greater detail.
Creating a real account record for every Virtual Account in a CRM tool (such as Salesforce) may not be in the best interest of both the Sales and Marketing team as they may often confuse the targeted list. It may also flood the CRM with bad data since Virtual Accounts are mostly unqualified at the time of creation. Still, having a dedicated Virtual Account list, and a process to report/act on these accounts can do wonders to a company’s top line revenue. In this post, I am going to discuss 5 ways Virtual Account can help your sales and marketing strategies.
Would you like to drive and convert more leads for your B2B business? Then it is high time you leveraged virtual accounts in your marketing strategy.
After all, you want to convert your virtual account list to your prospects and then clients. While at it, it is essential to manage your inbound leads properly to market to them effectively and boost your conversion rate.
Develop greater understanding of your leads
Understanding your potential prospects is vital to convert them to sales. Identify if incoming leads are already a customer (a cross or up sell opportunity) or the green field accounts (Virtual Account by our definition). Once all the leads from a Virtual Accounts are grouped together, their behavior and needs can be analyzed and can also help with accurate messaging to leads from these accounts.
Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is essential in your lead management process. Lead scoring is even more important for the Greenfield accounts since there may be a greater potential for few leads to convert. Use the Virtual Account as a common denominator to group all the accounts from the same company. This way, leads can now be scored based on company attributes as well as their cumulative activities.
Segmentation and Targeting
With Virtual Accounts, it’s easier to segment the net new accounts, and the leads from these accounts. These leads are often very early in the buyer journey, thus need a different messaging than the leads who are well into the buying cycle. A virtual account can be segmented into a set of products and services, and then can be used for website personalization and retargeting along with personalized sales messages.
Lead Routing
It saves time and money to be knowledgeable about the lead and its company when making the very first sales call to the lead. At the same time, it delivers a surprising pleasant experience to prospect when Sales Person shows greater understanding of their use case, and presents a relevant solution. Since the objective of the Virtual Account is to help sales person develop better understanding of the prospect, thus enable account based marketing and selling, it also enables to route leads from same Virtual Accounts to the same set of sales team (or sales rep).
Bottom Line
In this fast moving business universe, it is important to act quickly. At the same time, it pays to understand the customer and provide them a very positive first experience. With the help of technology, it is possible to achieve both the speed and accuracy without cluttering your CRM database.
Please consider checking out LeadAngel’s automated lead management solution. B2B lead management is our forte. We can help you automatically create and maintain your virtual accounts list on our platform to ease your lead routing, messaging, or segmentation.
Contact us today to help you manage your virtual accounts better to close more deals in the B2B selling world.