Account Hierarchy enables you to organize families of companies to understand both the chain of ownership and the ultimate corporate parents for each company and subsidiary. By understanding the relationships between companies, your sales organization is better able to manage account ownership, upsells and cross-sells within organizations, and management of territories.
Prerequisites
- It is best practice to cleanse your data before embarking on an Account Hierarchy project. If you don't already have this process in place, please discuss with your Customer Success team.
- It is strongly recommended that Account enrichment is done before the Account Hierarchy process is begun so that all parent companies can be identified.
Using parent account data from your CRM, or from data vendors like Dun & Bradstreet, you can link the account records together according to your specific go-to-market requirements. Beyond just basic legal entity hierarchy, this can range from simple head-of-family designation with flat hierarchy, to full multi-layer tree-style hierarchy.
First, locate the immediate parent of any given account and link them together within your existing account dataset. You can also locate additional accounts that do not currently exist within your CRM and add them as net new accounts via sources such as Dunn & Bradstreet. In addition to creating the account links, you can also add parent-child lineage data to each account record so teams can better understand how each account is situated within the hierarchy in a single view. After you create the updated record, sales and marketing teams can see the hierarchy natively in the CRM or in other data visualization tools.
Additionally, you can assess specific key attributes of each account (such as number of employees and location) in order to determine whether or not the company is a proper parent account, or can be bypassed as a holding company or rolled up into its parent account.