With Rainmaker 2017 only a few days away and Revenue Summit 2017 the following week, the account-based sales and marketing conference season is in full force. Targeting specific accounts as a sales strategy has been around for decades. With more focus on high quality customers (larger deal size, shorter sales cycle, better lifetime value), increased pressure on sales and marketing to grow revenue faster, and the advent of high quality sales engagement platforms, account-based marketing platforms, and account-based intelligence platforms, account-based sales has become more top-of-mind. In fact, when you look at the most common sales rep job title — account executive — the word “account” is front and center.
MatterMark recently published Introducing Account-Based Sales Into Your Process – The Four-Step Framework to help companies get started with account-based sales. Here are the four steps:
- Research your current customers – Analyze the existing customers to find patterns like industry, size, geography, tech stack, social presence, and more.
- Build your target list – Using the signals from your current customers, build a list of lookalike/net-new accounts that match the most important attributes.
- Identify prospects – With the target accounts, use LinkedIn to find the right people in the accounts based on department and seniority level.
- Reach out – Run a process to engage via email, phone, social, and more (too many sales people give up after three or four tries — go deep and be pleasantly persistent).
Think accounts, not individual contacts. Build an account-based sales program for a more predictable sales engine.
What else? What are some more ideas around account-based sales?
David Cummings on Startups 