TekStack’s account-centric engagement process allows you to manage the customer lifecycle from the customer account instead of the individual contact or lead. That’s because the buyer is nearly always a group of people in an organization working together rather than an individual acting alone.

More traditional lead generation marketing aims to connect with potential buyers through various media where a number of those leads could be associated with a single company.

Account-centric marketing overcomes this by associating every lead, or contact, with an account. It’s great for complex sales cycles with multiple decision makers.

Stages in the Customer Lifecycle

Our process uses terminology that was originally defined in the SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall, a sales generation process that uses scoring to advance sales in the demand line up. It’s now known as Forrester B2B Revenue Waterfall™. We’ve used these terms as part of our customer lifecycle and added some of our own. See TekStack’s take on Forrester’s B2B Revenue Waterfall (Big Fans!).

We changed Forrester’s Closed stage to include Implement, Expand and Advocate. These provide more insight after a new customer acquisition.

Forrester B2B Revenue Waterfall terminology

How it looks in TekStack’s Account-centric Customer Lifecycle

See more information about this lifecycle in Learn the Stages of the TekStack Customer Lifecycle.

The Purpose of Engagement Scoring

As a seller, how do you know what’s happening with the hundreds of leads in your databases? You don’t. To better track all those leads, ideally, you would want to better understand your buyers’ intent.

Buyer intent is when a visitor to your website, a potential buyer, shows some level of engagement with your company. This could be visiting the website or providing an email address in exchange for a hot piece of content or online demo. Or they may attend an event or engage with an email that your marketing team sent. All of these are examples of intent.

The idea of engagement scoring is to collect these intent signals and only engage with buyers that reach a certain level of intent (or engagement). For this, we typically use a scoring system. Here are some examples:

Table 1: Sample engagement scoring

The system tracks these different activities, each of which adds value to the overall account engagement score. If 0 means they’re not interested, then 100 means they’re a sure thing.

When an account gets to a high enough point level, it’s probably time to contact them. Take a look at the Average Engagement Score in case one contact is exhibiting greater interest. This might affect how you approach this potential sale. You can set this threshold number for your own sales process.

But what if a number of buyers in one company takes action? A person in one role may tell a colleague to check out some marketing material. Each of them may be collecting points in your system but individually they don’t accumulate 100 points.

In account-centric engagement management, we collect points from all contacts that are part of an organization and group them at the account level where they are automatically totaled. Now you are building relationships throughout the company and learning what role they play in a final buying decision. And scoring their interest as part of the whole.

This is the power of the account-centric engagement process.

How does TekStack work with Engagement Scoring?

We use engagement scoring in two of our apps: outbound sequencing (TekStack Outbound) and marketing automation (TekStack Marketing). Whether you use a marketing automation system or not, the concept is the same.

1. Without Marketing Automation

• Open email
• Click email
• Attend an appointment

2. With Marketing Automation 

Here you can set engagement scoring based on a number of factors such as those outlined in Table 1. The engagement scoring is combined with the TekStack scoring done in outbound sequences.

What happens with the Engagement Score in the TekStack Customer Lifecycle?

Engagement scoring plays a significant role in progressing your sales opportunities.

You can configure TekStack so that the account stage advances based on the engagement score. For example:

That means that scores automatically progress in the account through the customer lifecycle.
Once a score reaches a specified threshold, it moves the account to a defined stage. Examples of engagement scoring thresholds are:

If, for example, the contact engagement scores total 35, it might move our account to the Engaged stage.

To move the account to Prioritized, the total engagement score needs to be 99 or greater based on our configured threshold. Let’s assume the scores total 99 or greater.
An account that moves to Prioritized is flagged for action via a Teams notification to the Account Owner. The customer, or account, has exhibited buying signals which have resulted in engagement scores that trigger the next step.

It’s time to connect!

TekStack’s Account-centric engagement process is automated so you can focus on connecting with prospects and winning business. Yet, all the information you need is at your fingertips to help you make decisions and rethink your selling strategy, if necessary.

Learn more about the TekStack processes in the related articles.