Gartner Research

How to Move Pipeline Generation From a Lead-Centric to an Account-Centric Model

Published: 16 August 2023

Summary

Sales and marketing often define target audiences and priority accounts differently, creating alignment gaps that can result in disappointing outcomes. Forward-thinking sales operations leaders partner with marketing on an account-centric model, progress milestones and supporting technologies.

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Overview

Key Findings
  • Sales organizations seeking to unify their commercial strategy look to the account-centric model to drive effective deployment of their go-to-market approach. However, they often face resistancewhen shifting from a traditional lead-centric model.

  • Successful account-centric models require alignment across commercial functions, yet agreement on milestones to track remains elusive. This creates skepticism about reporting, an inability to determine optimization steps and divergent perspectives about the results achieved.

  • Traditional tech stacks are more conducive to lead-centric models and lack the key capabilities required to support account-centric models.

Recommendations

Sales operations leaders responsible for sales execution must:

  • Drive agreement among commercial stakeholders — including,

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Analysts:

Keith Jones Greg Hessong

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