The Revenue Optimists

Who owns enterprise accounts?

Here’s how Andrey Levin and Gainsight manage ownership of enterprise accounts.

Should a rep own an entire enterprise account?


Video Transcript

Dave:  When someone at Gainsight owns one of these strategic accounts, knowing now that you have east and west do they own the entire family tree? Across borders and whatnot?

Andrey: Yes. Someone could contest it occasionally but starting with the easy ones, companies which there’s no argument about where they’re headquartered out of, ownership starts at the top of the tree. And historically that’s also applied to customers. So if you have, let’s say you have a subsidiary that’s a customer inside of a large corporate tree, whoever owns that customer will actually end up owning the tree as well.

So usually that’s going to stay in our sort of field sales, sometimes it moves into our customer account management organization. That’s one of the things that I think is interesting, kind of transitioning, looking to next year and thinking about our existing customer base, even more than a prospects is how do we change that mix. But that’s the really easy case. The harder cases where you don’t have as good information about where headquarters is or multiple data providers might not agree.

So one of the exercises that we have to do before we set territories for next year is to actually get everyone to agree on headquarters for companies which are extensively headquartered in India, but ZoomInfo might say they’re in the US, LinkedIn might say they’re in France, and what’s true right? Beyond that we’ve actually seen come out as well that is it headquarters that matters, or is it where your sort of target persona is located that matters?

Which is a bit hard to do at scale and people tend to move around right? And who’s to say, I’m in Boston, does that mean that if I’m the target persona that this should be in sort of an enterprise east rep when the company’s actually headquartered in California right, but these are pretty fundamental questions which are also new post-COVID.

Dave: Yeah, no, you’re exactly right. Because it’s a lot easier to come visit you in person if your territory is out east.

Andrey: But generally speaking, if it’s a US-headquartered company and they have a subsidiary somewhere in Europe, the US rep owns it. Arrangements can be made, exceptions can be made, but generally speaking, that’s how it goes.

Want to learn more?

Ready to hear more from Andrey Levin, including how Gainsight scores and grades accounts?

You can listen to his in-depth interview in Episode 6 of the Revenue Optimists series. We’ll see you there.