Determining Account Engagement for Your Business
An Account Engagement Score aggregates activity from all the people who are interacting with your company at the account level so you can understand and act on it. Ideally, you want to focus on high-value activity.
For instance, CaliberMind prioritizes companies that spend time browsing our product pages over those that merely visit our high-level blog posts, as this is a clearer indication of potential interest in our product. The ability to monitor individuals who are not in your database (and are therefore anonymous) is an important capability.
Importance of Engagement Scoring
If your focus isn’t on account-level engagement but on individual leads, you could have different members of your team engaging with various contacts from the same company without realizing it. For instance, an inside sales rep might be qualifying one contact, your marketing team could be emailing another, and an outside sales rep could be demoing the product to a third contact.
This lack of coordination can lead to confusion for your buyers, who might find themselves in overlapping sales cycles. Moreover, it can result in wasted resources for your marketing team and potentially jeopardize or delay the sales opportunity.
Who Account Engagement Is Valuable For
Demand Generation Teams
Drive better lead nurturing campaigns and communication to help convert more leads.
Marketing Ops
Optimize your campaigns and account segmentation by understanding where leads are in their buying journey.
SDRs/ BDRs
Improve your ability to customize outreach with precise timing to increase conversion rates and improve communication efforts.
Account Executives
Optimize your prioritization and increase your ability to identify at-risk accounts.
Marketing & Sales Executives
Increases your ability as an executive to make smarter decisions that help drive growth in the areas that are a priority.
What Is Needed For Account Engagement Scoring
Data Sources Required
- Product data warehouse
- Chat app
- Advertising platforms
- Social media management platforms
- Content syndication platforms
- Marketing automation platform (Marketo, Hubspot, Eloqua, Pardot, etc.)
- CRM (Salesforce, SAP, etc.)
- Analytics JS
Data You Need
- Email engagement
- Product usage (for B2B SaaS organizations)
- Live chats
- Meetings held
- Ad campaigns
- Trail sign-ups (B2B SaaS)
- Social media
- SDR outbound campaigns
- Webinar (attendees)
- Events (attendees)
- Content syndication
Key Characteristics to Tackle Account Engagement Scoring
When building an account engagement scoring model there are a few differences from lead scoring to keep in mind. Here are some key characteristics to consider when navigating engagement scoring:
1. Track the Account Across the Entire Journey
With traditional lead scoring, the activity score usually stops once the lead becomes an MQL. However, stopping so early in the buyer journey doesn’t allow your team to capture true engagement once it’s passed over to sales. Why is this important? Think about it – your prospect account hasn’t engaged in email, meetings, phone calls, or web visits in weeks – wouldn’t you want this information to be able to craft a plan of attack? This is just one use case of how you could use engagement scoring – or in this case the lack of engagement.
2. Identify Key Players on the Account and Use a Multiplier to Elevate Their Score
If you’ve developed personas (even loosely), you know that there are many components to a buying committee – the decision maker, influencer, researcher, etc… a few of those are more important than others. So, how could this be reflected in your account engagement score? Add a multiplier to that role. So, for the decision maker, you might want to say – anytime this person has activity or engages with us – add a 1.2x multiplier to their score. This could accelerate the account to meet the threshold and in this example – get the account over to sales faster.
3. Don’t Just Create a Report, Operationalize It For Your Sales Team
If you’re on the marketing team a report looking at engagement scores across a segment of your target accounts is a great way to see how your top-of-funnel activity is translating to results through the journey. But, you’re missing a ton of value if you stop there. Instead, push the data to your CRM (Salesforce) and allow your sales team to track engagement for their target accounts (territory, vertical, etc…) daily. This gives them insight into their accounts (and not just leads) that they wouldn’t have otherwise.
4. The Change in Engagement (Surge) is Just as Important as the Score
We’re seeing this more and more. There are entire companies built on the notion of surge intent (think Bombora). Yes, it’s important to track both the change and the score — but as we mentioned in one of our funnel reports — the pace or velocity with which this activity is happening is so important. Especially in the age of information chaos. Be sure you’re ready to capitalize when someone is surging with your company.
Here’s an example of an account engagement report we use at CaliberMind:
