Shared funnel stages and group-level accounts across retail banners and buying offices
Marketing logged leads by banner and store while sales owned the group, so the same buyer appeared as several accounts. Parent-group mapping and agreed stages give both teams the same funnel.
- Challenge
Banners, franchise stores and buying offices logged as separate accounts, with mismatched stages.
- Approach
Parent-group account hierarchy, shared lifecycle stages, handoff SLAs and group-level routing.
- Result
Leads reach the group's owner, and both teams review the same funnel.
The situation
Retail pricing analytics companies sell to groups that trade through several banners, franchise stores and a central buying office. Marketing records a webinar sign-up from a banner's pricing manager and a download from a franchisee as new accounts, while sales owns the group. Leads go to the wrong seller or to nobody, the same group looks cold to marketing and active to sales, and stages differ between the automation platform and CRM. Each pipeline review starts with a debate about lead counts instead of the groups that are moving.
The question that mattered
Which account structure, stages and handoff rules would let sales and marketing work each retail group from the same funnel?
What we did
- 1
Build the parent-group hierarchy
Map each banner, franchise store and buying office to its parent group, record where pricing and range decisions sit, and merge duplicate records.
- 2
Agree the lifecycle stages
Define lead, marketing qualified, sales accepted, sales qualified and opportunity in joint sessions, each with written entry criteria and counted at group level.
- 3
Set routing and handoff SLAs
Route every lead to the owner of its parent group, fix response times, require a reason for every rejection and build a recycle path to nurture.
- 4
Sync the CRM and build the funnel view
Map fields between the automation platform and CRM, let rules change lifecycle status, and create a dashboard by group and format for a joint weekly pipeline meeting.
What we delivered
The evidence and working documents the team kept.
- Account hierarchy linking banners, franchise stores and buying offices to parent groups
- Lifecycle stage definitions signed off by sales and marketing
- Routing rules by parent group, with handoff SLAs and rejection reasons
- Field mapping and deduplication rules
- Group-level funnel dashboard and joint pipeline meeting agenda
The outcome
Leads
from any banner or buying office routed to the group's owner
Sellers
calling with the group's full history across banners and franchisees
Rejected leads
returned with a reason and recycled to nurture
Joint pipeline meeting
run from the group-level funnel view
The weekly pipeline meeting now covers which retail groups are moving and who owns each next step.
What changed in the GTM motion
A named RevOps owner adds new banners, franchisees and buying offices to the hierarchy before any lead from them is routed. Changes to stages or routing rules go through the same owner, and the weekly pipeline meeting reviews any lead not yet matched to a group.
Services in this programme
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