Table of Contents

Setting Up Account Trend Emails

What Is an Account Trend Email?

An account trend email is a tool to help deliver the most or least engaged accounts to the people who need to act on that change. It leverages your default engagement (or surge scoring) model and system administrators can make various configuration choices to ensure only the most relevant accounts are being surfaced via email.

The Purpose of Account Trend Emails

"Time kills all deals" is a popular phrase in sales leadership circles for good reason. Marketers struggle to balance the need to gate hand raises being flagged to the sales team so they aren't buried in alerts with the desire to elevate accounts that are showing signs of brand engagement.

Salespeople are also already overwhelmed by the technology at their fingertips--sometimes lower tech is better tech when it comes to interacting with sales. By providing our customers unlimited read-only licenses and a way to email only the most relevant accounts, we give salespeople an easy way to see not only which accounts are engaged with your brand but also exactly what they are engaging with.

Account scoring helps marketing and sales by ranking accounts according to their level of engagement and surfacing top engaged accounts to the sales team in a format that works for them.

Read NetApp's case study here, highlighting how they uncovered 733 new opportunities in their target account list in a single quarter by elevating accounts engaging with their brand earlier.

Account Trend emails are also a great mechanism for flagging highly engaged customers that may be ripe for an upsell and accounts that are not at all engaged and may be at risk for churn. By elevating these accounts via email with links to your CRM and CaliberMind, we're also giving customer success a window into what accounts are (or are no longer) doing.

As we learn new, creative ways companies are leveraging these alerts, we'll continue to update the article.

Account Trend Email - Assumptions

You are a CaliberMind Administrator
Only CaliberMind Administrators for your organization can access and modify Account Trend Emails.
You have purchased "ABM Engagement" or Surge Scoring
ABM Engagement or Surge Scoring is often included with your attribution purchase. If you'd like more details on how your surge scoring models are configured, contact help@calibermind.com or check out our knowledge base articles on how to access and change your scoring models.
You have a default Surge Scoring Model
To see which scoring model is your default model, log into my.calibermind.com and click on the Settings cog. Then click on ABM to view the default model.
You want to alert the Account Owner
At this time, the set up for Account Trend Emails isn't flexible when it comes to who you can email. If you use custom fields to assign customers success or your account executive, you may not be able to email them alerts at this time. However, you can indicate which email addresses you would like to exclude from the alert, which is particularly helpful, for example, if you have a default user for accounts that are not sellable.
Emails should go out once per week
Right now, alerts are sent out on a weekly basis. You can select which day they are emailed, but you cannot change the alert cadence to monthly or daily.

Account Trend Email - Explanation

The Configuration Screen
You must be a CaliberMind administrator to access the following screen.

This screen is found by clicking on the Settings cog and then "Emails" in the left-hand menu bar.

surge email configuration screen
  1. This is the name of the kind of email you are configuring. You have three options:
    1. Top Surging Customers: These are the accounts with a closed-won opportunity that are the most engaged according to your default scoring model.
    2. Top Surging Non-Customers: These are the accounts without a closed-won opportunity that are the most engaged according to your default scoring model.
    3. Disengaging Customers: These are the accounts with a closed-won opportunity that are the least engaged according to your default scoring model.
  2. The "email subject" will appear in both your email alert subject line and the header of your email alert (pictured below under "2" in An Example Account Trend Email).
  3. "Email body" is an opportunity for you to give the recipient more context. We recommend explaining why they are getting the email and where they can click on the email to get more information.
  4. This is where you can type in the number of accounts you elevate to the sales team. We limit the volume to 100 accounts but recommend keeping the list much smaller to avoid overload. For example, at CaliberMind we only elevate the 5 most engaged accounts.
  5. This field allows you to remove certain people from the email alerts. This could be used to suppress emails for catch-all owners for non-sellable territories or to remove people who have requested not to be alerted.
  6. This is where you indicate which day of the week these alerts should go out. Mondays allow you to show which accounts were engaging over the prior week and Fridays allow you to show what's engaging this week. Which day you will select will depend on the preference of your account executive and customer success teams.
  7. This toggle should be turned on when your team agrees the alerts should go live. We recommend communicating with your internal stakeholders prior to turning this on so they know what to do expect and how to interact with these alerts.
  8. Changes to your configuration will not automatically be applied. Please click "Save" when you update your configuration.
An Example Account Trend Email
Surge Email example
  1. This is where the subject line will also appear in the body of the email alert.
  2. This is where your description will appear in the body of the email alert.

A. The account name will link to your CaliberMind Account Detail page. This page lists an engagement timeline for your account, including details on who is engaging, what they engaged with, and how these interactions are scored.

B. This is the URL of the business and allows sales or customer success to research the prospect or customer.

C. The link to your CRM will provide a clickable link for your internal personnel to research what is being logged in your CRM.

D. Score Change is the percentage change in the account score compared to the prior week. This will be positive for accounts that are becoming more engaged and negative for accounts that are engaging less.

E. WoW Change is the number of points engagement went up or down versus the prior week's engagement score.

F. Company Index is the percentile the account is in when it comes to engagement scores. For example, top accounts should be close to the 100th percentile but will vary by territory. In territories where engagement is higher, their top account percentiles will also be higher.

G. The last engagement date is the last day someone proactively engaged with your brand or performed an inbound activity such as viewing your website, becoming a campaign member, or replying to an email. What is included as a "Last Engagement" will also depend on how your system is configured (i.e., which systems are connected) and your default engagement scoring model.

Account Trend Email - Use Cases

The Original Use Case: NetApp

A few truths influenced the direction of CaliberMind’s Surge Scoring project with NetApp. As a rule, salespeople:

  • Don’t want to be distracted by a lot of low-intent or “noise”
  • Only care about a subset of targets or the most ready-to-buy accounts
  • Don’t want to log into another system

We developed a reporting structure that only elevated the most engaged target accounts in a given salesperson’s territory. To do this, we avoided promoting one-off activities with the NetApp brand. Instead, we used a scoring model to look at the aggregate of activities across every account over a limited period. What made the alerts valuable was the ability to sort and display only the companies with a change in engagement.

The result was an email delivered to each rep at the beginning of the week showcasing accounts they cared about that were proactively engaging with the NetApp brand.

“In our first quarter of surge email deployment, we identified surges in about 20% of our priority target account list. As a result, sales opened 733 new opportunities at those accounts within the same quarter,” reported Tracy Earles, Senior Director of Marketing Analytics.

For the full case study, click here.
When Do I Use Top Surging Customer Accounts?

If you have an upsell motion or would like to pursue renewals early, knowing which accounts are engaging with your brand and product can help identify the people who will be the most receptive to such a strategy. We recommend sending these alerts to your customer success or account executive team -- whichever team is responsible for these upsell and renewal sales.

When Do I Use Top Surging Non-Customer Accounts?

Non-Customer account alerts are the perfect tool to help your sales team understand whether their outreach is increasing engagement. It also helps them understand the full impact of your marketing efforts. When they can see all of the interactions that take place before an account engages with sales, they can better tailor their outbound efforts and dramatically shorten the sales cycle. Some customers have reported as much as a six-week decrease in sales cycle timelines.

When Do I Use Disengaging Accounts?

Chances are high that your company has a retention initiative. This tool is meant to help with those efforts. If your customer success team can see who is using the product less, they can get in front of training and adoption issues. Because you can see exactly what people are or are not engaging with, your proactive interventions can be tailored to the customer--and we all know how important personalization is when interacting with anyone online!

Account Trend Email - Configuration How-To

How did we do?

How to Email CaliberMind Reports

How does CaliberMind normalize the raw data for use?

Contact