Account based selling is a methodology that focuses an organization’s sales efforts on a select number of accounts that are most likely to buy your products and solutions. Organizations can set up an account-based selling strategy in three steps; one – identifying the companies that would be ideal targets, two – identifying the people that work at those accounts, and three – giving those accounts reasons to evaluate your solution.
The first step is to identifying ideal prospects is to look in the current customer base by firmagraphic details. Most companies will look for customer accounts by similar size, location, industry, revenue, and tech stack. Stated otherwise, if your best customers are in a specific industry, have a certain number of employees, and deploy a competitive or complimentary technology – then companies that also fit that profile will be your best prospects.
The trick to identifying these accounts is by “cleaning” them inside of Salesforce.com. A cleaning will update or complete key fields such as Industry, Revenue, Employee Size, Tech Stack, and Location. After cleaning Salesforce.com, run a report of your current customers including these new fields. With these results, look for the fields that have the largest representation to begin your target account selection process for prospects.
The second step is identifying the people that are making decisions at your targeted accounts. While it might seem intuitive, a great exercise is to reverse engineer your sales process to uncover all the stakeholders.
These titles and the people that own them should exist inside of Salesforce.com. After all, companies don’t buy anything, people do. If it has been a while since you have “cleaned” your contact records then it would also be a good idea to identify the old records of people that don’t work at your target accounts any longer. B2B data expires at a 2-3% clip per month per Hubspot after all.
The third step is to have something to say to your targeted accounts. A good idea is to tell them why they are targeted accounts in the first place and sharing some use cases by similar industries, sizes, or locations. If a piece of their tech stack competes with the technology your company sells, then a quick blurb on the benefits of your differentiation will help.
Referencing recent events about the targeted account also helps. These events can be new personnel, new products, awards, corporate expansion, or funding. Companies will promote these events on the news wire or the social media pages like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter. The idea behind referencing events is taking the concept and sharing how you have helped other companies in similar positions. As example, if there is a merger, explaining how you have helped other companies with mergers of duplicate systems and processes. Simply referencing the event and congratulating the stakeholder is not enough.
In closing, these three steps can give you the directional path for setting up Account Based selling in your organization. RampedUp can help as well as we have automated much of this inside of Salesforce.com.