One of the core tenants of dynamic book management is the ability for sales reps to easily return an unworkable account.
With dynamic books, reps are able to return accounts for review if they identify an issue with data quality, fit, or timing. You want to make sure reps don't have too many accounts to work appropriately. Reps know that if they identify an account as unworkable, they’ll be able to get a new one to replace it. It's good for morale, productivity and data CRM data hygiene.
Because you're more consistently flagging bad data for review, you'll find that your CRM data will improve. This also means you don’t need to worry about having perfect data right now. This approach will actually help you clean up your CRM data over time.
For example, if a rep discovers there’s incorrect data associated with an account, this alerts the RevOps team to an issue while allowing the rep to continue to be productive with a replacement account. RevOps can then resolve the issue and reintroduce the account into circulation or determine the account is invalid and retire it.
What are valid return reasons? That will vary depending on your business, but we recommend reasons like these:
- Duplicate: The account already exists, data needs to be merged with another object
- Get back to me: Currently under contract with a competitor, new budget coming, other timing reasons
- No ICP fit: Could be the wrong industry, not the right company size or stage,
- No relevant contact: No one in the role of the personas you target
- Not interested: The prospect said no
- Out of business: The company shut down or was acquired
- Bad data: Contact info or company details incorrect
- Retrieval: An automatic return due to RoE criteria
You want to be sure there are data quality reasons (a duplicate account, missing or incorrect data), account fit reasons (not in your ICP, wrong persona), account timing reasons (get back to me, out of business), and reasons specific to your sales process.
What do you do with return reasons? Take time to review your reps’ return reasons regularly (weekly or at least monthly). This will help you identify trends and fix issues as they arise. It also provides an opportunity for coaching. For example, if one of your SDRs is returning a high number of accounts because an account is not interested, you should review their pitch. If there are a lot returned because they’re not an ICP fit, you may need to review ICP criteria.
And be sure the RevOps or sales ops team reviews the data as well. There may be larger-scale data issues they can correct.
Interested in moving to a dynamic territory or account allocation model that allows reps to return accounts they can't work? Gradient Works can automate this in Salesforce. Learn more here.
Get our free SDR toolkit here, with more about using returns for your SDRs.
