All Collections
Use case guides
Sales and Marketing
The use cases of company and contact lists
The use cases of company and contact lists

Tracking or excluding lists of prospects, customers or target accounts ensures your team gets the most value from identification data.

Rohan avatar
Written by Rohan
Updated over a week ago

Ever wanted to filter out existing customers from Segments so you can focus on net new company identifications?

Or have you considered tracking the behaviour of your existing prospects and key accounts?

Thinking about dipping your toes in the ABM waters?

Well now you can with Lists πŸ₯³

Introduction

This guide will explain a few use cases of Lists and hopefully inspire you to create new ones.

If you would like to see how set up Lists, please check out the implementation guide.

ABM may come to mind when you think of tracking key accounts. While we did design Lists with ABM in mind, the applications are much wider and you don't need a fully fledged ABM program to take advantage of them.

Key accounts could be a target list of companies marketing and sales teams are placing specific emphasis on winning. Or lists of your largest customers, partners and most promising deals.

They could even be a list of competitors.

In essence a key account is a a business you want to stay informed on if anyone from the company interacts with your website.


How do you select key account or customer lists?

Just like defining an ICP or building prospecting lists, it's important that the key account lists are filled with relevant companies with specific commonalities.

This will enable you to track related behavioural actions and get the right information to the right team member.

1️⃣ Split them into meaningful groups (Lists).

There's a couple parameters you can use to figure out how you to split companies effectively.

πŸ‘‰ Which team needs to receive the notifications or behavioral information?

Is it Sales, Customer Success or Marketing? Don't worry if it's multiple teams that's also possible. Alternatively, individual team members may want to create their own Lists of key accounts. In essence you are making the split based on who needs to receive information.

πŸ‘‰ Can they be separated by priority?

It's helpful to split key accounts by priority, we keep it simple and assign a low, medium or high priority score to each of our key accounts. This enables us to configure different notifications on each group along with the knowledge of how we need to react to a notification.

πŸ‘‰ Do they use different products or services?

If you offer multiple products and services it's valuable to seperate key accounts by what they have purchased. The result will enable your team to easily see when an account is actively researching new solutions and spot upsells.

πŸ‘‰ By region, industry or size?

This split will likely also be dependent on the team responsible for the accounts. For instance are sales teams assigned to different geographies or verticals?

2️⃣ Define the behavioural actions you would like to know about.

Depending on how you've split your key accounts into Lists and the purpose of each list you'll need to define what behaviours from each group are important.

Here's a couple examples:

πŸ‘‰Customers visiting your terms and conditions pages

If there are existing customer busy looking at your terms and conditions page, this signifies a churn risk or potentially and upsell onto an annual plan. Either way, it's information your team can benefit from.

πŸ‘‰ Visits longer than a few seconds to high intent pages

This one is a bit of a no-brainer, key accounts spending time on Pricing or Case Study pages is valuable information.

πŸ‘‰ Aggregated behavioural information

You might also want to know when key accounts hit aggregated behaviour milestones. Such as 15 pages views or more than 10 minutes on site, indicating that they have reached certain milestones within awareness stages.

πŸ‘‰ Visit sources

Every wondered if key accounts are clicking on the ads you've designed for them? Or which sources your key accounts typically follow to hit your websyeinked<


Putting it together to track customers 🀝

When tracking customers, it's important to take some time to consider what behaviour you would like to know about. The risk is selecting to many behavioural notifications so it all ends up just becoming noise.

We find it works best by selecting a few high priority behaviours to start with that you know your team will act on. You can always add more as you go.

Here's a few examples:

1️⃣ At risk signals from existing customers

In this example we are creating a Segment (filter group) of companies belonging to a List named Customers that visit our terms and conditions pages.

You may have other pages on the website that customers typically don't visit unless they are considering making a change or moving away from your service.

From there it's possible to send notifications through to relevant team members.

πŸ’‘ remember to trigger notifications using ''new sessions''.

2️⃣ Spotting upsell opportunities from existing customers.

To set this up we Split customers into lists based on the product they purchased and then configured notifications when they visited new products or services.

The result of enables your sales or customer success team to receive instant updates on potential upsells and support customers in exploring additional products and services in a well timed and meaningful way. Leading to consistent expansion revenue.

πŸ’‘ In the above examples we used pushed the behaviour notifications to Slack channels. This can also be done via Email, Microsoft Teams or directly to your CRM

3️⃣ Filtering out existing customers

You might also want to filter out existing customers (and prospects) from Segments focused on collecting new leads.

To do this, please make sure you have configured an Automation to add tags to your customers. Step 6 in this guide.

Be sure to select Tag ''Doesn't Contain".

From there it's easy to add the additional filters you use to find ideal new leads. If you haven't already, we advise configuring Lead Scoring.


Tracking target accounts and existing prospects πŸ’΅

Let's say you would like to know when a prospect or existing deals visits one of your case studies for more than a few minutes.

Or maybe you would like to know when they spend time on your pricing page.

Simply select the correct list and add in the behaviours.

From there you can configure notifications for the relevant team members.

Here's a few ideas of behaviors to track:

βœ… Case studies (you can also match these up against specific industries)

βœ… Product or service pages

βœ… Landing pages

βœ… Technical implementation content

βœ… Pricing pages

βœ… Guides or long form blogs

βœ… Contact pages

In essence it's the high intent pages on your website that if viewed for longer than e.g. 2 minutes signify your prospect or key account is in a deeper stage of research. With this information you can support them with additional content or a meeting to really dive into the details.

πŸ’‘ While working with customers and using the process for ourselves we learned that's important to be critical with the actions or behaviours you track. If team members receive updates and everything a key account does, it's not uncommon to start ignoring or taking less notice of new updates. On the other hand if updates always contain high quality information, team members will keep a sharp eye out for new information.


As always, please drop us a message if you'd like some help, have a cool idea or just want to say hello πŸ₯³

Did this answer your question?