Configure Contact Roles on Salesforce to Unlock Immediate Efficiency Gains

Let’s begin by simply defining what is an opportunity contact role (OCR).

An OCR is a standard object on Salesforce within the Opportunity object that links Contacts to Opportunities, specifying the Contact’s role in that Opportunity.

Having great OCR hygiene means sales leadership teams gain better visibility into the buying committee for each opportunity. Better visibility helps monitor if reps have at least identified the necessary people needed to win the deal. If the necessary people are involved, then sales leaders can guide their teams on the right engagement playbook to navigate the deal toward success.

While sales teams know the importance of identifying and engaging the entire buying committee, not many follow this through to execution. This becomes worse when we consider the OCR data available in a CRM. Open any CRM today, and you will notice that a majority would have an average of 3 contact roles. Of those 3, one is usually a required field made mandatory by the revenue/sales operations or CRM admin. In companies that practice MEDDIC (and its variations), the ‘Economic Buyer’ and ‘Champion’ are identified and added to the CRM, but the remaining buyer roles are either identified but not added to the CRM or not identified at all.

So why should OCRs matter?

The answer to this question lies in whether or not you’re working on improving sales execution, rep efficiency, win rates, and forecasting. You’d be surprised if we told you how often we hear prospects say “We have no idea who our sellers are talking to” or “We don’t know how often we’re engaging buyers in open deals”.

‘Who’ you are talking to and ‘how often’ are you talking to buyers are the fundamental units of generating revenue. The ‘process’ of generating revenue can only be improved by tracking and measuring such fundamental units. You may be doing a great job with creating contact lists from third-party data tools like Zoominfo or Lusha or by auto-creating contacts in accounts with tools like Clari or Gong, but if such contacts are not being linked to opportunities, you are losing out on critical data. Technically, in CRM terms, opportunities are won, not accounts. And so having contact data is not good enough. You must aim to have granular and comprehensive contact role data.

Introducing Configurable OCRs

Using AI, automation, and graph inference, Nektar automatically creates contacts in the relevant accounts present in Salesforce. Until recently, Nektar would automatically associate these contacts as OCRs within the relevant open opportunities. There was no configuration needed. However, through customer feedback and research, Nektar is excited to announce ‘Configurable OCR’.

An OCR record is only useful if it is:

1. associated because it is actually involved in the deal
2. a buying role was identified and assigned to it

With configurable OCR, you can define rules using buyer-seller engagement data that Nektar has already added to the (open) opportunity and account. For example, a rule can be: “If engagement with contacts in an account is more than 5 times in the last 10 days, and if there is an open opportunity in those accounts, then associate such contacts as opportunity contact roles.”

This example considers the recency and frequency of buyer engagement. So, only those contacts that are frequently engaged by the seller will get added to opportunities as OCRs. As a result, sales leaders gain instant visibility into who is actually involved in deals. This is just a simple, straightforward example of a rule. You can define your own rules. Additionally, you can customize the rule for the different segments you may have. For example, have a rule specifically for strategic accounts, expansion accounts, new business accounts, vertical-specific accounts, or any other segmentation you may have.

Next, you can configure the second component – the buying role. If you’ve used Nektar, you would know that it extracts job titles from email signatures. A default capability we’ve always offered is to map out job titles to the respective buying roles. With this one-time configuration, as and when Nektar links OCRs, it also assigns a buying role to the OCR based on the corresponding job title.

Now, using genAI automation you can define rules to assign an appropriate buying role. You can consider a combination of job titles and engagement trends, job titles and seniority, job titles and engagement and segment – whichever factors address your requirements. After all, the process of generating revenue is unique to a company.

The best part is that all this is done using the standard Salesforce records, so they are easily reportable on Salesforce. This can also be achieved for your historical opportunities by backfilling them.

Benefits of configurable OCRs

Nektar customers use this OCR data for deal inspections, win-loss analyses, playbook optimization, and enhancing their multithreading strategy.

Every opportunity has only those contact roles that are involved in the deal while the remaining stakeholders such as legal remain in the account as contacts. So sales leaders are able to monitor which job titles and buying roles are being engaged.

Since historical data is also plugged in, you can study buying committee engagement for won and lost deals to analyze what worked and did not work. Some of our customers identified new personas in their closed deals, and have now started prospecting this persona actively to generate new pipeline. By studying won deals, you can also track the engagement pattern and work towards improving your multithreading strategy.

Lastly, playbooks can be transformed. For example, one of our customers now has made it mandatory to have a specific number of contact roles if the deal is in stage 3 of the sales process. Similarly, answers to who, how often, and when should different people of the buying committee be engaged can be detailed out.

Outside of the sales team, a clean and complete OCR list is also helping marketing teams with targeting highly relevant campaigns meant for specific buying roles and job titles. This eventually contributes to the direct impact marketing teams have on deals and revenue.

Experience efficiency gains immediately

Focusing on OCRs and buying committees is not the secret weapon for revenue teams. With efficiency, in both terms – cost and effort, being a core business metric, prioritizing granular data and insights is a low-hanging fruit. After all, this is data that is already present in your business. It’s just scattered across different tools, teams, and channels. With AI and automation, you can bring this data into your CRM or data warehouse to transform how you generate revenue.

Try configurable OCRs today. Get in touch.