How does your company handle contact/account ownership?

[Anonymous]

Hey,

My company is in the middle of evaluating all of our sales/marketing processes, and are stuck on the topic of account ownership.  Currently we have two types of sales teams, account executives (for existing customers) and sales executives (for new).  None of the sales reps own any accounts.  They own a lead, but after it converts to an opp/sale or closes, it goes back into a round robin.  We also have very distinct product families, and our entire sales team is not trained on all of them.

I think this was done for a few reasons.  The first being we used to use our own software as a CRM, and it couldn't accommodate owners.  They probably also had fears about reps taking their "books" with them when leaving.  Cross training some of our sales reps may be difficult.  It's nice having some subject matter experts that can jump in to other calls to help out.  We might lose that with account ownership.

Either way, I think to get the most out of automation, we need account/record owners for all entries.  This way we can do more personalized messaging from sales reps, and they can have a more consistent experience whenever they call in.  We'd probably have to make considerable changes to our commission structure to do this, which is why it's such a difficult issue.

How does everyone else do this?  I look forward to reading your responses.

Vinnie

[Justin_Norris1]

Best practice I have seen among clients I work with is certainly to have a dedicated account owner and typically to align this with contact ownership on an account.

A dedicated point of contact makes sense as it allows people to build a relationship over time.

There may occasionally be reasons to have contact/account ownership not aligned but generally this is a headache and easier if you can keep them the same.

I would suggest the Sales Exec own the lead, account, and opportunity throughout the process and then after the first opportunity closes hand them over to an Account Executive if you want to maintain that division.

Distribution Engine (Distribution Engine makes lead routing easy in Salesforce ) is a great way to help automate your account round robin to the AEs and can allow you to do territory management and align accounts with AEs on product skillset etc.