When faced with managing partnerships, it's easy to become overwhelmed with information, but luckily it doesn't have to be that way.
In a world of endless connections and countless leads, account mapping can be your savior. A simple process that allows organizations to crossmatch data and discover hidden opportunities.
Still, without help, account mapping can be an arduous task. As traditionally, it relies on manual input and complicated data streams. Yet, with the right tools, the process becomes effortless, taking you from manic to blissful with just a few clicks of a button.
Want to learn more? Well, this post has all the information you need.
So let's get started.
Partner account mapping is sharing your contacts with other organizations within your partner ecosystem to find new leads and profitable opportunities.
Although account mapping is a simple concept, it's essential to understand that the phrase can be used to describe varying approaches.
The two main ones are “individual” and “partner” account mapping. Which, although similar sounding, mean entirely different things.
The second, “partner account mapping,” is what we’re talking about in this article.
The first approach, “individual account mapping,” is a process Sales teams use to fill in missing or critical information about accounts in their sales pipeline.
Let’s pretend the logistics division of Big Box Store, Inc is your dream customer.
To better understand the account’s top decision-makers and other relevant information to help close the deal, you would “map” the account using a spreadsheet or chart. Maybe you discover the leading decision maker’s name from a mutual friend on LinkedIn, and you learn the account’s budget from the account’s consulting firm.
Slowly but surely, you’re filling in the missing pieces that could accelerate the sales cycle.
The Goal: To intimately understand a single account to advance them in your sales funnel or improve retention goals.
Partner account mapping entails comparing your account lists to your partner’s to identify opportunities.
The Goal: Drive exponential business growth through activity with partners that accelerate deals, drive retention, and create new business opportunities (like entering new markets) that would be difficult or even impossible without the help of partners.
Now the nitty gritty is out of the way, it's time for the part you've been waiting for—our step-by-step guide on how to map accounts with your partners.
There are two ways to map your accounts. The traditional way, which requires you to labor over a spreadsheet for hours or the pain-free way, where you use a tool like Reveal.
We’ll cover both below.
Traditional account mapping relies on sending spreadsheets back and forth to your partners and manually matching the company names. To do this, you need to:
It looks like a simple process, but the more your company grows, the more time-consuming and the more resources you need to keep this process at scale.
Besides not being able to use manual account mapping at scale, the other main disadvantages are:
You need to use an automated account mapping platform like Reveal to get all your partner insights.
Reveal was designed to make the process of securely connecting with your partners, checking common customers and common opportunities, and gaining insights in order to make more data-driven decisions easier and more effective.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you unlock the value of partnerships:
Now you understand how to map your partner's accounts—it’s time to dive into how you can use account mapping to drive success for your business.
It’s a lot harder to recruit a partner than it is to keep one. So it pays to know which partners are driving the most value.
A really quick and easy way to get a sense of who your key partners are is to see which ones you have the most account and contact overlaps with .
The greater the number of overlaps, the more likely it is that they’ll have significant influence within your ecosystem and are someone that you will want to work hard at maintaining a relationship with.
You can quickly gauge your key partners on Reveal straight from the dashboard. Once you’ve synced CRMs it gives you a snapshot of the Account Overlaps and the Contact Overlaps.
Quick wins are the best wins. But they don’t come around too often unless you can easily identify businesses that:
Account mapping makes that a lot easier.
You can quickly work with your partners to identify the businesses they’re currently working with where you’ve got a complimentary product/service that they need.
You can identify accounts you can work on with your partners using Reveal, as it stores all of this information in one place.
You can filter by the “account owner” to get valuable insights on your customers’ tech stack or digital maturity.
The end result is that you should have a list of prospects that you know your product/service will solve one of their problems and you’ve got someone who is able to make a warm introduction for you.
According to a study by HubSpot, the average sales cycle length for B2B companies is 4 months.
That’s potentially a lot of time and effort spent on trying to get somebody onboard, so you’re going to want to make sure that if you’re spending that length of time on a business, they’re worth it.
Quickly evaluating the size of the lead and the overlap it has with your partners is an easy way to prioritize leads, because you’ll have a good idea of the potential deal size and that there is some sort of synergy with your product.
You can use the 360° Mapping feature with the “New Prospects” view to see accounts that exist in your partner's CRM but don’t exist in yours.
Reveal Tip: You can then bump all of these accounts to the top of your sales team's prospect lists to make sure that all that time and effort isn’t wasted.
Your strategy is going to be dictated by how big the market is and how much of it you own.
If you’re a small player in a big market, then you’ve got a lot of potential growth ahead of you, and you might want to be aggressive with it.But if you’re a business that dominates, then your strategy is either about maintaining share or diversifying into other markets. Or sometimes both.
In order to make those big strategic decisions, you need to be able to answer those first two questions, and weirdly enough, you can use account mapping to do that.
By syncing up your CRMs with your partners, you can get a really quick snapshot of how much of your immediate market you’ve tapped into and how much is still out there to play for. That can help to accelerate any decision to double down on what you’re currently doing or whether you need to de-risk and diversify.
This mastermind is for all partnership professionals who want to optimize the daunting process of creating partnership agreements. Learn how to optimize your contracts to accelerate your partnership acquisition process.
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