This course has been brought to you by Reveal, the first Collaborative Growth platform that enables Partnership professionals to achieve and accelerate ROI from their partner relationships.
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My fellow Partnership professionals, I’m Daniel Lancioni, Director of Cloud and Strategic Partnerships at Quantum Metric. I’m ecstatic to be covering this topic as part of the Collaborative Growth Academy, because Account Mapping, is the cornerstone of Partnerships. It will make or break the impact of your partner program, so better know what you’re doing!

Done well, account mapping has the potential to drive company growth by bringing ecosystem insights across your organization. Your sales and marketing teams will be forever grateful. I also cannot emphasize enough the importance of an account mapping platform (we use Reveal at Quantum Metric), and what it can bring to your role as a Partnerships professional, but also to your business. I use Reveal almost every day with my partners to access a goldmine of data to make informed decisions.

• If you know the account mapping basics, skip right ahead to the next lesson.
• If you’re new to Partnerships and an account mapping newbie—read on.

What is partner account mapping?

Account mapping is the process of cross-referencing contacts between two companies. This can be done through CSV files or the entire CRM. This exercise is done to uncover common customers and prospects, as well as mutual opportunities. The goal is to identify opportunities to help each other win, and generate ROI.

Why is account mapping important?

In short, account mapping enables businesses to make decisions guided by DATA, not gut feel. With account mapping, you get a clear picture of what opportunities are available to your company. Based on individual KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), you can use this information to decide who to partner with and in what capacity.
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How does it work? (The process)

There are currently two main ways to do account mapping: Account mapping with spreadsheets, or account mapping platforms. Simply put, here’s a visual representation between account mapping with spreadsheets and account mapping using a platform like Reveal.

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Account mapping with spreadsheets

Shared spreadsheets is how the majority of Partnership professionals do account mapping today.

The process:

1. Decide on a segment of your customer or prospect base to compare with your partner
2. Determine what type of data you’d like to share with your partner. Usually the company name—account owner is typically the minimum
3. Export the data as a CSV
4. Ask your partner to do the same and try to copy the same structure the data columns
5. Use a file-sharing service (such as Google Sheets) to exchange the data
6. Search for matches. Using VLOOKUP or even, manually by sight

There are a few caveats to using shared spreadsheets:

• Not accurate. Since your partner likely organizes their data differently to your organization, there’s always a large margin of error in matching. Never mind the custom formulas required or data de-duping to even begin to match up your datasets. I don’t know about you, but I prefer to work with partners, not troubleshoot VLookups.
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• Time consuming. You’re sifting through your data, trying to spot the inaccurate matches, and then there’s also having to sync with each and every partner on a regular basis. Say goodbye to all of that precious time.
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• Not secure. Sharing sensitive customer data over a service that wasn’t designed for account mapping securely poses a huge risk. Some companies even share lists over email, which I don’t even to explain why it’s a big mistake!
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• Outdated information. Once data is exported, it’s static. Any changes on whether the account has moved from a prospect to a customer will need to come from your partner sync calls, and then manually updated on your spreadsheet.

And this just applies to 1:1 account mapping. Doing this across multiple partners (imagine 10+) becomes a truly frustrating task.

Account mapping with a platform

Luckily, advancements in technology have meant Partnership professionals no longer need to settle for painful processes. Efficient teams use account mapping platforms to share data securely and in real time.

The process (using Reveal as an example):

• You connect your data source—usually a CRM (i.e. Salesforce or HubSpot) or CSV file
• You invite partners to connect with you to authorize sharing and set sharing rules on what type of data can be shared with the specific partner based on your relationship. For example, you can highlight private accounts that will not be shared, disable Account Mapping in one click, and share only common accounts
• When you open a partner account mapping, the matching happens automatically
• You can use filters to get specific views that are useful for your goals, i.e. check with of your top prospects are existing customers of your partner. Get the exact number of those accounts that fit this profile

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With some account mapping platforms you can also do account mapping across multiple partners and essentially get a bird’s eye view of your ecosystem.

Security also gets improved when you’re working with a platform that already takes into account that sensitive data is being shared. For example, Reveal can show you high level statistics while keeping the actual data private and secure. But you can also control exactly what data gets shared, and with which partners.