In this new episode of B2B Marketing Tips, we address an often underestimated yet fundamental lever in B2B strategies: account hierarchy.
CRM, marketing automation, ABM… All your tools are more powerful when they are based on a well-thought-out account structure. And yet, few companies have really implemented one.
In this article, we explain:
- Why an account hierarchy is crucial,
- How to set it up in your CRM or your MarTech stack,
- And which indicators to follow to realize its full potential.
Below is the Miro I use in the video
📌 Why a hierarchy of accounts?
In B2B, your customers are almost never isolated entities. They are often groups, made up of:
- subsidiaries,
- business units,
- entities spread across countries or regions,
- sometimes joint ventures.
If you don’t structure the relationships between these entities, you miss out on a strategic lever for:
- selling more effectively (social proof effect),
- target more intelligently (ABM segmentation),
- manage your business (consolidated view of turnover and margin).
Simple example:
A parent company has two subsidiaries. If one is already a customer, you have an obvious gateway to sell to the other. But you still need to know it! This is exactly what a good account hierarchy allows.
🧱 How do you build a good account hierarchy?
Here are the 3 pillars of an effective structure:
1. Maintain a correct hierarchy
This involves:
- Identifying the group head via a dedicated field (e.g.
Group Head = True), - The creation of parent-child relationships (Parent > Subsidiary > BU),
- The standardization of names to avoid duplicates,
- The management of complex cases, such as joint ventures, which sometimes require separate treatment.
This structure can be fed manually by a SalesOps team or via an external database (Dun & Bradstreet, Société.com, etc.) integrated into the CRM.
2. Automate KPIs at the account level
At each level, you must automate:
- The status of the account: Sleeping, Engaged, MQA, Opportunity, Customer, Former customer, etc.
- The products or services purchased,
- The turnover (for the current year and the last 3 years),
- And the gross margin (same granularity).
These indicators are used to calibrate your marketing campaigns, ABM strategies and scoring models.
Above all, they help you avoid a common pitfall: targeting accounts that are easy to convert, but unprofitable.
A good marketing strategy should target accounts with a high lifetime value and high margin.
3. Roll-up the KPIs up the account hierarchy
Once this data is in place:
- Aggregate it at the parent company level,
- Deduct an overall status (e.g. “customer group” if at least one entity is a customer),
- Identify the Subsidiary / Purchased Product pairs, to refine your knowledge of the group.
This consolidation allows you to:
- to have a global strategic view of your major accounts,
- to adjust your commercial priorities,
- to feed your predictive models with solid and business-driven data.
🎯 In summary: 3 major benefits
- Marketing/sales alignment: a unified vision of the group and its opportunities.
- Better ABM segmentation: by targeting subsidiaries that are not customers but are close to active customers.
- Strategic management: thanks to a consolidation of turnover + margin, essential for arbitration and prioritization.
Need help structuring your account hierarchy?
At Merlin/Leonard, we help you:
- set up a reliable hierarchy in your CRM,
- automate the right indicators,
- and exploit the full potential of your data to sell better.
