Account-based selling focuses on targeting specific accounts instead of mass marketing to a wide array of potential customers. Learn all about account-based selling in this blog post!
Account-based selling is not new, but it’s become common practice. The account-based framework has proven to be a highly effective strategy.
From getting executive buy-in to evaluating your customer data, learn more about account based sales.
We're going to walk through exactly what account based selling is and how you can use account base sales to generate engagement and close more B2B deals.
Account-based selling targets specific accounts, versus single contacts or leads, by leveraging multiple, highly customized touchpoints that funnel prospects through the sales process.
Account based sales brings together all of your marketing, account and product data to help you identify which accounts are the best fit for your solution. It’s time to ask yourself some questions:
What is my ideal customer profile (ICP)? Where should I look? Who should be responsible for account-based marketing? Are there any red flags that I should look out for when evaluating my accounts list?
Let’s walk through each of these questions one by one. Start with your account manager(s) and discuss the ideal customer profile (ICP).
Your account managers are going to be responsible for selling, which means they’re going to need all of your account data that is relevant to their territory.
With the ICP in mind, review each account on your list and determine if it matches up with how you define an ideal customer profile.
Account-based marketing helps you identify which accounts should be targeted.
Conducting account-based marketing allows you to better identify which accounts are the best fit for your solution, and account base sales helps you focus on those specific account.
Once companies have identified their ideal customer profile (ICP), they can use account based marketing to create personalized account lists that will help qualify leads before they’re handed off to sales.
Account-based selling is a strategy that should be conducted by account managers. Account based selling focuses on specific account and uses multiple, highly customized touchpoints to funnel prospects through the sales process.
You can create personalized account lists using account-based marketing combined with your CRM data.
Once you have identified which accounts are the best fit for your solution, account based selling helps you further qualify those accounts before handing them off to sales.
1. Internal Alignment- Get Buy-in from Executives
One of the first, and most important steps to account based selling is getting executive buy-in.
You will need your CEO or VP(s) of sales on board with account base selling before you even start thinking about executing account-based marketing campaigns.
A lack of support at this level could ultimately derail efforts.
Executives will want to know how account-based sales can drive revenue and which metrics you’ll be using to track account base sales success.
They also need an understanding of your ideal customer profile, so they can understand the types of accounts you are trying to target.
It's important that account based marketing aligns with account-based selling to help increase the efficiency of your sales pipeline.
This is where account based marketing comes into play, helping you focus on specific accounts while targeting contacts within those accounts that are most likely to convert.
Account based marketing allows you to create personalized account lists so account managers can spend time qualifying leads before handing them off to sales.
These suggestions can help you coordinate your sales and marketing efforts:
If your sales and marketing teams are working toward different goals, they are less likely to be engaged with one another, which leads to competing initiatives.
A shared aim motivates the two departments to collaborate.
Shared reporting: There will be a significant split between the two departments if each team has access to separate dashboards, metrics, or worse—no analytics at all. Use shared dashboards and reports to keep everyone on the same page.
Although sales and marketing automation tools are a must-have in today's business world, it's critical that you don't rely on technology to help you coordinate your teams.
Open communication and personal interaction are more important than anything else when it comes to sales and marketing alignment.
2. Create an Ideal Customer Profile success is determined by the quality and quantity of accounts you target, so choosing the proper firms is critical.
Take a look at your Ideal Customer Profile.
A fictional profile incorporating firmographic and behavioural qualities that characterise your most valuable customers is known as an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
You can identify critical accounts and design messaging to entice and convert them into purchasers with a well-defined ICP.
To develop your ICP, you'll need to look at a mix of qualitative and quantitative data about your top customers—specifically, the firms where they work—and look for similar threads. Do they come from a specific size of business?
Are they all in the same business? Do they make use of any other significant technologies that work in conjunction with your product or service?
You can make your ICP as extensive or as simple as you want, but the more precise it is, the better. Determine whatever relevant characteristics your top consumers share. Then, using this information, steer your account targeting.
3. Create Specific Buyer Personas
Now that you have an idea of what types of accounts to target, you need to know how to engage with the important contacts within those accounts.
That’s where buyer personas come into play and—often times work hand-in-hand with your ICP.
Just as account-based selling is different from account base marketing, your ideal customer profile and buyer personas will be different.
Using a list of relevant BANT (budget, authority, need, time) criteria for each persona can help you focus on the right contacts that are most likely to purchase based on their position in the account.
You can then map them to the accounts your efforts are targeting.
This will allow you to be more efficient with account engagement and provide an enhanced customer experience. It also reduces wasteful, repetitive activity that leads nothing of value for either party.
You'll want to maintain a consistent message throughout all touchpoints so each account executive is speaking with the account in a way that is familiar and appealing.
4. Create a strategy for account targeting.
We've spent a lot of time talking about the attributes of your top clients so far—and with good cause!
To be successful at account-based selling, you must identify and engage accounts that are a good fit for your product.
Aside from selecting accounts that fit your ICP, account coverage and account quality are two more important factors to consider during the account targeting process.
Account coverage refers to the number of target accounts you identify as well as the number of important stakeholders with whom you interact from each account.
You'll close deals– but not many of them– if you have high engagement but a small number of accounts.
On the other hand, if you reach a large number of target accounts but have little engagement, you'll have a hard time turning them into purchasers. So you want to aim for a large number of accounts and a high level of account engagement.
Quality of the account: Great account coverage is useless if you're pursuing the incorrect accounts.
Compare accounts to your Ideal Customer Profile to determine account quality. If you're acquainted with lead scoring, apply the same logic to this situation. Assign a score to each aspect of your ICP, from industry to revenue to personnel count.
5. Build a Targeted Outreach Strategy
Now that you have account targeting down, it's time to execute your strategy. The first step is building a targeted outreach plan for each account.
To determine which accounts are best suited for account-based selling, consider the following questions:
Instead of sending your one-size-fits-all outreach email to the HR director, you develop and send emails to the following people:
Although marketers are normally in charge of content production, it is your role as a sales representative to express your needs to the marketing department.
What kind of collateral are you going to need to convert more customers?
Are you missing items that relate to the needs or pain points of a specific industry?
What is the preferred tone and language among your customers?
To be successful, all of these issues must be stated explicitly.
Here's an illustration: You sell human resources software that helps companies manage their hiring and onboarding processes. You recently secured a significant account in the healthcare business.
Director of Human Resources:
You send the director an email outlining how your technology enables high-level HR professionals to oversee vast departments and various HR responsibilities within the healthcare business, all from a single consolidated dashboard.
You include a case study based on one of their industry's biggest competitors.
Human Resource Managers:
This email will be sent to all of the company's HR managers. You're aware that these individuals are in charge of reporting to higher-level employees and that they don't have a lot of time for administrative tasks.
So you concentrate on your platform's reporting capabilities and automated workflows that automate time-consuming activities. You add a product demonstration video.
HR Assistants:
Finally, you send an email to all HR assistants outlining how your platform allows them to spend more time on significant HR activities, which you know is a major pain issue for this position.
You provide a calculator that demonstrates how much time the prospect spends on menial tasks against how much time your product saves them.
The following are the results of this outreach sequence: It introduces your brand and goods to each member of the purchasing committee.
It focuses solely on the issues that each individual is concerned about. It also makes it easier for people to talk about your platform on all levels.
So, whomever is in charge of acquiring this type of software already knows about your product and has a personal stake in the version you're selling. All because you were able to explain how it meets their specific needs.
6. Campaign Testing and Analysis
The growth of data, which fuels marketing and sales intelligence technology, is credited with the success.
Every component of an account-based selling approach is driven by data. As a result, it's critical that you prioritise the information in your sales contact database and examine your performance.
We've already spoken about how to track account coverage and quality, but there are a few other metrics to keep an eye on. These factors include the quantity of chances you create, account interaction, and your overall progress.
As you can see, account-based selling isn't a simple task. It's a strategy that necessitates forethought and teamwork across your entire company. But don't be concerned.
No one embarks on a new approach without encountering some difficulties.
You can make the move to selling with strong alignment, comprehension, and data access. You'll wonder why you didn't make the switch sooner once you see the results!
