Understanding Lead to Account Matching

What’s the difference between a lead and a contact and why do they need to be matched?

A lead is a prospective customer from an account around whom traditional volume Marketing and Sales are based. A salesperson may pursue a relationship with each lead to work towards a closed win. 

A contact represents one attribute of an account that allows Marketing and Sales to see the prospective customer as part of the bigger picture for the entire account. 

Since your CRM keeps track of your leads, Demandbase helps you to be account based by integrating with CRM and matching leads to target accounts. You can then analyze and take action on these leads in the context of Account Based Marketing/Experience.

How does matching work?

Once accounts are added to an account list, Demandbase starts performing Lead-to-Account (L2A) matching, continually driving your account based analytics, orchestration, and actioning capabilities.

Demandbase considers the company name and email address when matching a lead to an account.

In addition, we use geographic fields (country, state/region, city, postal code) to differentiate multiple equally good matches based on company name and email address. The system compares the company name on the lead with the account name, performing fuzzy matching to normalize variations in how names are entered. For example, Demandbase recognizes that Microsoft Corporation, Inc. and Microsoft are the same company. For email addresses, the system compares the email domain on the lead with the company website from the account.

The prioritization / differentiating rules when there are multiple matches work as follows:

• When there's both a company name match AND an email address match to the same account, that match has the highest priority.
• A company name match alone (without an email address match) has second priority.
• An email address match (without a company name match) has third priority.

If there are multiple accounts that match to a given lead with the same priority, then one is selected based on the best geographic match.

The quality of a geographic match depends on how far down the geographic hierarchy a match exists: Country < State/Region < City < Postal Code. When performing a geographic match, the system understands that different spellings resolve to the same country or state (example: United Kingdom vs. the UK).

When matching occurs, Demandbase updates the Matched Account field on the Lead with the mapped account.

When does Demandbase match leads to accounts?

Demandbase syncs leads at multiple times every hour. After leads are synced from the CRM, it can take as little as 10 minutes for matching to occur in Demandbase. A high volume of lead to account matching might take longer to complete.

How does Demandbase indicate a lead is matched to an account?

After a lead is matched to an account, Demandbase updates the Matched Account field on the lead record with the matched account name.

Why isn't a specific lead matched?

 For the system to run L2A matching:

• The account must belong to an account list.
• The user syncing Demandbase and CRM together must have access (visibility) to that lead.
• To convert to a contact, the lead cannot be a queue. It must have an explicit owner.

Lead Matching Report 

To generate a report or manage the lead to account matching, go to the Lead Matching Report page.

To access the page, from the left navigation bar, go to Settings > Lead Matching > Lead Matching Report.

• To unmatch a lead to contact, click Unmatch.
• If you tried and were unable to match a lead to an account and would like to try again, select the down arrow next to Unmatch and select Retry Match.
• If you have accounts that are matched but unsynced, select the down arrow next to Unmatch, and select Retry Write to CRM.

Lead to Account Matching Features by CRM 

Salesforce CRM 

The following features are supported for Lead to Account matching with Salesforce CRM. 

In Salesforce: 

• Matched Account write-backs: Demandbase automatically matches leads to accounts and populates the Matched Account custom fields in Salesforce. 
• Lead to Contact Conversion: You can manually convert your Leads to Contacts associated with the Account in Salesforce. See Set Up Lead to Contact Conversion in Salesforce. 

In Demandbase: 

• Fields available in the Demandbase Lead Matching Report: 
• Created Date
• Salesforce ID
• Email
• Company
• Account Name
• Match Status
• L2A Sync Status
• L2A Account Match Notes
• Fields available on the Demandbase Person record: 
• Name (account) 
• First Name
• Last Name
• Title
• Lead or Contact? (Contact if contact record in Salesforce, Lead if lead record in Salesforce)
• Email
• Status 

HubSpot CRM 

The following features are supported for Lead to Account matching with HubSpot CRM. 

In Demandbase: 

• Fields available in the Demandbase Lead Matching Report: 
• Create Date
• Email
• Company
• Account Name
• Match Status
• Fields available on the Demandbase Person record: 
• Name (account) 
• First Name
• Last Name
• Title
• Lead or Contact? (Contact if there is a matched account, Lead if there is no matched account.) 
• Email

The following features are in development for future release.  

• Matched Account write-backs to HubSpot CRM. 
• Lead to Contact conversion in HubSpot CRM.