Importing accounts with many CRM ID's or domains

Background

CRM often has an overly complicated structure of the accounts, which serves a purpose for sales, but not for ABM. In practice you may have several instances of the same account in the CRM including a parent account, subsidiaries, country organisations and even sites / offices of the company. Additionally each of the different instances of the account may have a different domain, e.g. ibm.com for the parent, ibm.de and ibm.co.uk for country organisations.

It would be simple to just import the parent account data and omit everything else, but there are two reasons why the entire data structure is very important:

1. Opportunities are not always created to parent organisation, so omitting child organisations will result in omitting valuable attribution data.

2. From targeting perspective it is very useful to ensure all the domains associated with the account are also utilised.

Account groups

On N.Rich accounts with different CRM ID’s, names and domains can be grouped under one Account Group. When use properly, this will ensure utilizing all available domain data for targeting and to attribute the engagement with any opportunities related to the account id’s within the Account Group.

Example CRM data structure for Intel

Resulting Account Group data structure for IBM on N.Rich

In simple terms, Account Groups enable grouping several different instances of the same or related accounts into one data structure.

Using Account groups

Account groups can be accessed on any account list view by clicking the number under column “Account Group”

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Viewing or editing account groups on account list views

While within the account group you can view the alternative CRM ID’s and account names under the Parallel accounts tab. Here you can also set the Main entry, i.e. which account id and name will be visible on the account lists.

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Setting the Main entry for the account CRM ID and name

Under the parallel domains tab you can manage alternative domains for the account, select the Main entry domain and see how much reach is available from each of the domains.

Importing to account groups

When importing to account groups it’s very important to ensure that every time you perform and import you keep in mind what is the unique key that is used to associate imported data to the account group. N.Rich uses two unique keys: CRM ID and Domain. This allows flexibility but also results in a pitfall to be avoided; you can’t have two unique keys simultaneously for the same account. The best practice is as follows:

1. Start by importing the account groups by importing the “parent” or main account CRM ID, Name, and Domain (e.g. ID: 10000 | Intel Corporation | intel.com). For this import, do not include any parallel accounts or domaŋs, so just one name, CRM ID, and domain per account.

2. Next, import the parallel Account names and ID’s, i.e. the child or country accounts for example. In this import, you need to use the same domain as was included in the first step (e.g. ID: 10001 | Intel GmbH | intel.com ). You can add as many parallel account names and id’s as you want using this method.

3. Finally, import the parallel domains by including any CRM ID’s of the accounts existing in the group already and domains associated with them. The best practice is to use the parent account CRM ID and name in this import. (e.g. ID: 10000 | Intel Corporation | intel.de). You can add as many parallel domains as you want using this method.

Note: Account Groups are independent of the segment, so any changes in the account groups reflect your entire N.Rich account across all segments.

Things to consider when letting N.Rich find domains

When you use N.Rich to find the domains, i.e. importing accounts without the domain, there are two cases:

1. If you include the CRM ID in the import, the resulting domain will be added to the Account Group that includes the imported CRM ID, if it exists

2. If you don’t include the CRM ID, i.e. only use account name and country, the resulting domain will be added to the account group that includes the found domain, if it exists. The pitfall here is that you don’t know the domain up front, so you can’t know what account group the domain will be added, if any. Therefore it is always recommended to use CRM ID when letting N.Rich find the domains,.

Old guidelines

There may be instances where your import list contains several domains per account. You can easily import accounts from lists with multiple domains by repeating the full import per domain column.

To keep the account groups consistent with multiple imports from the same list, N.Rich uses the CRM ID as the key factor per import so that the system will understand that you are importing the same accounts but with different domains. Such an import will result in an “account group” on N.Rich that can be viewed and edited on the account list view.

See the template below for an example of a properly prepared account list with multiple domains associated with each account.

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A file like this can be imported easily by doing the following:

1. Import 1st batch: After uploading the excel file containing all the domains, you can select the first domain column when mapping the columns

    

2. Import 2nd batch: [Account CRM ID] + [Account Name] + [Account Domain 2]

3. Import 2nd batch: [Account CRM ID] + [Account Name] + [Account Domain 3]

The system will distinguish between duplicate accounts and domains that have not yet been imported and place them into one group.

NOTE: If you don’t have CRM ID’s available, you are going to have to include dummy values as the CRM ID, otherwise it’s not going to be possible to create account groups with several domains. Also, please be aware about the fact that if you use dummy values as CRM ID’s those will be stored into N.Rich and also shown on the account lists.