Why structuring your account hierarchy is essential in B2B

📌 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

1. Marketing/sales alignment: a unified vision of the group and its opportunities.
2. Better ABM segmentation: by targeting subsidiaries that are not customers but are close to active customers.
3. 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.