How to Get Started with Account-based Selling

Account-based selling isn’t any new concept. But with the advent of the internet and inbound marketing strategies, the strategy has been put to its best use.

It has been proven as a highly effective strategy for B2B marketers. Since B2B businesses have longer sales cycles, they cannot afford to waste time on low-quality prospects. Account-based selling is the most effective way to reach targeted customers and effectively engage them.

What is Account-based Selling?

Account-based selling involves targeting companies – referred to as accounts – rather than individual leads. This involves highly-targeted sales strategies, focusing on engaging accounts across different platforms. It’s a cross-department function, where each team’s goals should be aligned to bring in the maximum sales for your company. Account-based selling is unique in the sense that it demands complete coordination between the marketing and sales team.

What are the Benefits of Account-based Selling?

There are various benefits of taking the account-based selling approach. Here are some of them.

1) Boost Engagement with Personalization

A large part of marketing and sales strategies focus on personalization and that’s why Account-based sales have gained so much popularity. Since you treat each company as your account, you know the unique problems they are facing as a company. You can connect with various stakeholders and personalize your message by solving their problems. This way you gain engagement from all the relevant people in the company.

2) Adapt Sales KPI’s for Modern Buyer Journey

B2B sales involve multiple decision-makers. Hence you’ll need to focus on different strategies. The usual open rates and no. of leads aren’t going to cut it. the KPIs in account-based selling is how well you’ve connected with individual decision-makers across the company. If you have a high engagement rate across different stakeholders, you’ll have a higher chance of success.

3) Build Trust with Decision-makers

Building trust is an essential part of any business process. Even with B2B, the decision is more logical, but still, they are looking for people behind the product. With ABS, you are trying to engage with individual stakeholders and eventually build trust. You’ll prove to your prospect that you’re really concerned with their problems and help them succeed.

Planning an Account-based Sales Strategy

Although is not a comprehensive guide, it’s enough to get you started.

1) Internal Team Alignment

Account-based selling is not just a part of sales strategy but involves planning from both the sales and marketing teams. If your sales and marketing team don’t align, don’t expect to see good results. Share reports, tools, strategies, KPIs with every member of the team. They should know how both teams are dependant on each other to achieve the desired goals.

2) Create an Ideal Customer Profile

Account-based selling success hinges on the quality of your targeted account. Since you are targeting a specific group of people, you need to know who you are engaging with. Create an ideal customer profile that best describes your customer. The more specific your customer, the better you can target them. Determine which relevant traits your current best customers have, and build the ideal profile from there.

3) Develop your Account-targeting Strategy

Apart from researching your ideal prospect, you need to develop an account-based selling strategy. Internally, you should plan the number of people involved in the activity, their KPIs, the duration of the project, and what success looks like exactly. You need to know the number of accounts you need to engage to bring the desired revenue, the average sales cycle, and the possible objections your customers might have. Create a scoring system where the accounts with the most probability of converting will be given priority and the least one will be sent for lead nurturing.

4) Build a Targeted Outreach Strategy

With customer research, you need to find out where your ideal prospect hangs around on the internet. With accounts, you need to know what their job responsibility is, their purchase preference, and their role in the organization. The content strategy you create must be tailored to the platform’s needs and should be focused on solving each account’s specific problems. Next, you need to find out the way you want to reach your target customers. Is it email? Linkedin? paid ads or webinars?

5) Analysis and Testing

Data drives every aspect of your account-based selling strategy. The research, strategy, outreach, and analysis are all driven by the data you gather. That’s the boon of the digital world, you can keep track of results and based on the data, optimize the strategy. So keep an eye on the metrics, the opportunities you create, close, and miss.

Conclusion

The Account-based selling strategy is worth it if you are planning to after high-value clients. However, it’s not an easy task. You need to spend a considerable amount of time to make the strategy a success.

Account-based selling helps you focus on high-value clients that matter. If you looking to scale your account-based selling efforts, you can always connect with us. Our comprehensive, go-to ABS strategy will help you achieve your sales goal.