In the latest episode taken from B2BSMX, Seleste Lunsford, Chief Research Officer at Emissary.io, speaks about the 4 most successful account-based strategies for sales and marketing.
- Identify the accounts with the most potential
For future investment, you want to get the most out of your dollars, so you need to identify the accounts with the most potential.
That means any account that is likely to actually adopt your product or service much broader or wider than you expect from them.
Identifying these accounts is key for finding opportunities that lead to a reduction in acquisition costs — or preserve priority relationships you’ve already established — and means you will use your resources more effectively going forward.
One way to identify these accounts is through thorough research, like intelligence reports.
“Quantitative research is what our sellers are really looking for.”
These intelligence reports should give you insight into business policies, competitive landscape, buying behavior, and even the culture traits of a given account.
- Expand your existing accounts
The same research that you use to identify high potential accounts will help you when it comes to this step.
If you have the actionable intelligence from thorough research, you’ll be able to find new avenues to serve these accounts.
There is one consideration to keep in mind, however: You still want your sellers to be selling.
Which means it might be helpful to outsource engagement to advisors who can engage these accounts and find their needs, providing actionable insights to your sellers.
“This is the year of the existing customer in the sense that, since a lot of organizations are more risk averse, they’re more likely to look to their incumbents.”
- Take a bottom-up approach
Everything you do should be geared towards helping your customers become more successful.
This helps build trust, and they will perpetuate the use of your service.
Instead of selling a product, you should be solving problems that allow your users to succeed.
To do that, you need to find key decision makers to target, but also key users to gain insight from.
How are users succeeding with your product?
Finding this out not only gives you the key info you need to help others succeed, it also lets you find those users most likely to champion your product or service.
- Get executive access
This is trickier in the post-pandemic world, but in order to most effectively get word out about how you can solve problems — and organizational buy-in to let you solve them — you, of course, need to target the people who can make it happen.
This means using business-level messaging, figuring out the best way to formulate a deal for a particular account, and actually understanding the best communication channels to leverage.
Measuring success
As with any successful ABM approach, you’re not going to get an instant win, but if you use these strategies effectively, you should see some long-term success.
Of course, as with anything, you need a clear understanding of what success looks like to get there.
So, it’s important to map pipeline-generation to the sales organization and actually tying the impact you are having to a revenue number.
After all, how do you know you’re succeeding if you can’t measure it?
This is a #FlipMyFunnel podcast. Check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or here.
