Every company, from a bootstrapped startup to a sprawling enterprise, is faced with more potential
accounts than they can effectively focus on. That’s because an unrefined Total Addressable Market
(TAM) is huge.
Historically, most companies dealt with this challenge in an ad-hoc way. The largest companies, FAANG companies, would systematically prioritize their accounts. They had the resources to collect or buy large datasets, farm the necessary insights, and bring order to how they targeted prospects.
But in small or mid-sized companies, account scoring was a mix of “tribal” knowledge, post-it notes, and on-the-fly decision-making.
This has all changed. Today, the tools needed to build a sophisticated account scoring framework are available to every company, big or small.
This is doubly true right now, with macroeconomic headwinds. Budgets are down, belts are tight.
Companies need to do “more with less,” they can’t afford to squander resources chasing prospects
that won’t convert. Every prospecting dollar must be allocated toward accounts with the highest
likelihood to become a paying customer.
For this reason, account scoring is more important than ever. However, it’s deceptively complex and
there are a host of different frameworks.
In this guide, you’ll find a proven method for account scoring, why it matters, how to do it right, and which tools to leverage on your journey.
Account scoring is no longer an elite practice, companies of all sizes use account scoring to prioritize and target their best-fit accounts. And at HG, it’s the most sought-after use case for our product.
Every sales department sits on a list of accounts. Hopefully, these accounts are neatly organized in
a CRM like Hubspot or Salesforce. But they might just be an exhaustive list in a Google Doc, or not
even written down!
Account scoring is the process of evaluating and ranking target accounts based on their likelihood to
purchase a product or service.
Traditional account scoring frameworks have focused on behavioral attributes at the top of the funnel. This is in part thanks to the success of early marketing automation products like Marketo, Pardot, and Eloqua, which made behavioral scoring the norm. However, the reality is that most B2B buyer journeys are more complex and nonlinear, making this legacy approach less effective.
It’s no longer enough to know if an account read one of your whitepapers or clicked on an ad. Now, you need more advanced methods, utilizing deeper data points, to deliver more telling intent signals.
Account scoring and lead scoring are similar. In an effective organization, both should be happening. However, there are some key differences.
To put it simply, account scoring is the most effective way for a company to maximize revenue. Without an account scoring framework in place, organizations are unable to focus on the accounts most likely to buy their product or service. Here’s a breakdown of how account scoring benefits a company, from the organization as a whole all the way down to individual teams.
The Key Benefits:
Account scoring undoubtedly has macro-business benefits. To understand its multifaceted power, it’s useful to unpack how account scoring positively influences different departments.
The first question company executives will ask of any new initiative or tactic is, “What’s the ROI on this?”
When done right, account scoring drastically improves conversion rates across the board.
When you utilize an account scoring framework, sales reps will drive more revenue, more inbound leads, better conversion rates, and easier onboarding for your customer success teams.
At HG Insights, we have a proud history of using our proprietary data to build account scoring models. Since
implementation, here’s what our GTM and sales teams have seen:
Chapter 2
Your Guide To Account Scoring
HG is the pioneer in Revenue Growth Intelligence. With over a decade of experience in developing granular intelligence on technology adoption and spend, we’ve become the trusted partner of the Fortune Tech industry.
