Building Successful Contact to Account Relationships

In the B2B world, marketing is done along the many different business relationships of contacts to accounts.

Your contacts can have multiple relationships to one account or relationships to several different accounts, each one using a different channel of communication. Contacts often work with more than one company. Executives often lead more than one company and serve on the board of multiple corporations, or a consultant might work on behalf of multiple organizations. Since successful relationship marketing depends on being able to direct personalized communication to your contacts whatever their functional role, it is important to target your marketing campaigns precisely to the right people with the right relationships to the right accounts.

The SAP Marketing Cloud Contact-to-Account Relationships solution provides business relationship capabilities to enable you to address contacts acting in a specific capacity for a specific account. It leverages the many-to-many relationship data model between accounts and contacts and simplifies the data integration and lead creation process.

The graphic shows the different relationships that the contact Peter Smith has with different accounts, as an employee of HANA company and as president of the DSAG user group association.

Let’s take a look at an example.

Business Partner data is extracted from the CRM system into the Interaction Contact. Relationship information is stored in the Projection node and is explicitly available for downstream marketing execution processes.

The projection represents the best record for the contact's relationship to the account. Marketing execution can rely on separate specific projection records for each relationship the contact has to one or more accounts. The projection records contain the exact data to be used for campaign personalization and execution (name, address, function, email, and so on), when addressing the contact in a given capacity.

The graphic shows the different relationships that the contact Peter Smith has with different accounts, as an employee of HANA company and as president of the DSAG user group association.

As shown in the graphic above:

1. In your contact database, contacts can be associated with multiple accounts in different capacities or work relationships.
2. In Segmentation, you want to identify all contacts with the relationship "works for". In addition, segmentation attributes of the account should be used. Thanks to the pre-delivered segmentation profile All Contact Relationships specifically for the Contact-to-Account Relationships scenario, when you select this segmentation profile, it determines that campaign execution is now based on the contact's relationship best record, and not on the origin best record.

   You first segment on accounts, for example, using firmographics or geographics. Based on the resulting list of accounts, you then segment on contacts based on their work relationships with the accounts.

3. You next create a target group consisting of the contacts you want to address. The target group contains the relationship best record (projection) for each of its members. You can display this on the Contact Relationships tab of the target group. Additionally, you can display each of the contact profiles and view the relationship best record there.
4. The resulting relationship-based target group can be used for personalized email campaigns, addressing the contacts in their specific capacity, with the relevant email address and IDs.

Watch the following video to discover how you can benefit from Contact-to-Account Relationships for Campaign Management in SAP Marketing Cloud:

Now let’s learn how to set up Contact-to-Account Relationships.

In the Check Your Marketing Solution app, choose the Contacts and Profiles scenario and perform the steps contained in the setup item Contact-to-Account Relationships (B2B). Then, complete the eight setup activities described below.