Account-Based Selling: Everything You Need to Know

Sales representatives often focus their efforts on bringing new value by trying to convert individual prospects. However, in B2B, the traditional sales approach of trying to sell a high-value solution that represents a significant investment for the target company, may not be the way forward. An account-based selling strategy presents an opportunity for businesses to shift to a new sales tactic and target medium-sized companies and enterprises effectively.

 

• • What is account-based sales?
  • Benefits of account-based selling
  • Key aspects of account-based sales
  • Account-based sales for your business
  • Managing an account-based selling model
  • Tips for improving your account-based selling
  • Important KPIs in account-based sales
  • Summary

 

What is account-based sales?

Account-based sales is a sales model targeting specific companies as individual accounts, treating them essentially as a market of one. In other words, instead of pursuing different prospects, the targeted company is managed like a single account and the sales team focuses on reaching out and engaging several key decision-makers. Account-based selling is a strategy primarily used in B2B sales, where larger contracts are the norm.

 

When it comes to account-based sales, the key is creating a unified experience for the main stakeholders. Combined with highly personalized messaging, the account based selling approach aims to deliver an integrated process through a joint collaborated effort between your different company departments. Mainly this involves the sales, marketing and customer success teams since the account-based sales process continues even after the contract is signed and the deal is closed.

 

Another key aspect of account based selling is making sure your product is the right fit for accounts with a high potential of converting. That means building and improving your product based on insights from their use cases and gathering feedback when developing new features. This is especially important if your product is an enterprise solution designed for a specific market segment.

 

Benefits of account-based selling

The main benefit of the account based selling model is the sole focus on a smaller number of high-value accounts. With this approach, sales reps do not waste time and resources going after companies that are not the right fit for your offering.

 

Although this does limit your sales efforts on a very specific market segment, it does present an opportunity to sharpen your expertise, mainly your targeting, messaging and value proposition toward selling to prospective customers in that particular segment.

 

Another important benefit of account-based sales is the decreased reliance on the number of new customers. In B2B sales contracts with larger companies concerning enterprise solutions, on average are signed for longer periods of time while also representing higher value.

 

Key aspects of account-based sales

When it comes to implementing an account-based sales strategy, there are several main aspects sales teams and businesses need to pay attention to.

 

• • Targeting specific accounts – Finding out which accounts your sales team should target, you can use buying signals from identified website visitors and combine them with firmographic and technographic data you can get from a sales intelligence platform.
  • Research, profiling and pain points – Discovering key pieces of information on potential prospects within the company, and creating a profile with potential pain points and product use case scenarios.
  • Identifying and reaching out to key decision-makers – Identifying the key decision-making individuals within the company that are part of the buying decision process and which the use case can be based on.

 

In addition, there are several other markers of an account based selling strategy such as cross-department alignment, joint goal settings and resource pooling. We’ll cover these as well further down.

 

Account-based sales for your business

Different factors can influence your sales strategy, such as your product and target audience. Due to the nature of the account-based selling model, if one or several of the following factors apply to your sales, then perhaps shifting to an account based sales strategy may not be the best option for your sales.

 

• • Your customers are predominantly SMBs
  • Your sales velocity is on average less than three months
  • Your average deal involves, only one or a small number of decision-makers

 

These selling traits help you to define your main sales strategy. For example, if small and medium-sized companies constitute a majority of your customer base, then the account based sales model is not worthwhile for your business.

 

In SMBs only one or a few people have decision-making authority and individual sales reps can engage and convert prospects on their own, without the need for allocating additional members of the sales team or further resources for closing this type of account. Furthermore, this also results in a shorter sales cycle in contrast to the prolonged selling period when it comes to a large stake deal involving complex solutions and large companies.

 

Managing an account-based selling model

As the account based sales model treats a company as a market of one, it requires the allocation of a lot of resources in an effort to convert them to a customer. For that reason account based selling is not a viable sales strategy for smaller companies in the B2B industry. However, if you are interested in implementing an account-based sales strategy, here’s what to expect.

 

Alignment between different teams within your company is crucial. Marketing, sales and customer success teams have to be on the same page to make account-based sales a viable strategy for your sales. However, this doesn’t necessarily include every member of those teams and team compartmentalization can be used to great effect.

 

Create task groups of sales reps, marketers and customer success managers to manage different key accounts. This also allows you to assign your remaining resources on accounts representing less potential revenue, but also a lower risk as well while enabling you to conserve resources. This is a mix of standard sales and an account-based approach in your sales which can effectively result in smaller short-term revenue and more profitable long-term contracts.

Tips for improving your account-based selling

For the proper implementation of an account-based sales strategy, here are some quick tips to help you out and ensure your account based selling process is a success.

 

1. Aligning your sales and marketing teams

As previously mentioned, cross-department coordination is vital. This includes getting the sales, marketing and customer success teams on the same level, combining their resources and aligning their goals.

 

The account based approach relies on unified account-based sales and an account-based marketing strategy. However as this type of sales doesn’t end after the deal is closed, the customer success team then takes over to maintain the value of the account.

 

Each team has to be aware and understand their own role and the role of the other teams. While the sales and marketing teams take care of approaching, engaging, nurturing and finally closing the deal, customer success ensures that the product provides the promised return of investment and ensures the account remains active.

 

Once your teams are aligned, the following step is to find the right account to focus your combined effort and resources on.

 

2. Targeting the right accounts

The concept of account-based selling requires a lot of effort and resources in an effort to convert high-value accounts. This is why making sure that you’re targeting the right accounts is paramount for success. This is done by defining your ideal customer profile.

 

Your ideal customer profile (ICP) is a semi-fictional representation of your desired customers and their characteristics based on firmographic and technographic data. By creating an ideal customer profile your sales team can easily identify key accounts and apply that information to establish contact and get the conversation going.

 

If some of your current customers fit your ideal customer profile, that gives you an opportunity to combine their behavioral data along with their use cases together with company information and technologies used by your desired customers to improve the accuracy of your account targeting.

 

Gathering feedback from your customers is also a good idea, as they provide unique insight into how and why they use your product as well as taking suggestions on what can make it stand out.

 

Account-based selling relies on targeting the right accounts that can bring the most value to your business so that your sales team doesn’t waste their effort and resources going after the wrong accounts.

 

3. Segmenting your target market

Segmenting your target account serves to better understand different uses cases for your product and to personalize your messaging. B2B segmentation is an effective way to divide your target account based on their pain points, challenges and different use case scenarios.

 

For example, if your product is a good fit for lead generation marketers and outbound sales reps, their needs might be similar regarding your product but their requirements and the way you approach will differ. This is also relevant when it comes to a single account. Automation tools that can be used by different teams for different purposes must be present and pitched in a different manner because the value they can provide companies varies.

 

Identify your key account segments and used that data to improve your product value proposition and messaging so you can market and sell it more effectively.

 

4. Hyper-personalizing the outreach

In account-based sales, the right message can make your sales pitch more appealing. The emphasis is put on engaging high-level contacts across different platforms, meaning that the messages have to be hyper-personalized and accompanied with tailor-made content.

 

The data provided by your ideal customer profile coupled with the segmentation data as well as the information you have gathered on the company and the key decision-makers is vital for a personalized approach.

 

The potential pain points they may be facing along with insights into their company activities can represent strong buying signals and your way in to begging the engagement and start the conversation.

 

Highly personalized messages are a crucial step in making your account-based selling process a worthwhile endeavor.

 

5. Using a sales platform for account-based selling

The account-based sales model is made possible with the rising use of sales automation. Sales intelligence and sales enablement tools allow sales teams to find, analyze and target potential high-value accounts more effectively. Automation tools, also play a vital role in creating and running a tailored sales strategy for specific accounts.

 

With the development for sales tools for different parts of the account based selling process, such as company and contact information databases, outreach automation services and sales analytics solutions, it is apparent that there is a growing need among companies in the B2B market.

 

Here are some examples of how sales automation tools like the Sales.Rocks platform, improve your sales teams’ efforts in vital parts of the account-based selling process:

 

• • Improved account targeting – readily available and up-to-date data on key contacts in target companies like their contact information as well as company revenue, size and number of employees lower the research time required for sales reps to identify potential accounts.
  • More accurate data segmentation – Granular high-level intent data that strongly correlates to buying readiness like investment rounds, new hirings as well as technographic data allow for a more targeted approach in vetting desirable accounts.
  • Shared dashboard and overview – Cross-team alignment is a vital part of account based selling and tools that provide a shared workspace and team managers a necessary oversight of the process and key success metrics are an essential investment.

 

Important KPIs in account-based sales

In standard outbound sales, sales reps measure their effectiveness based on different activities that are part of the B2B sales process. For instance, the number of email sents, demos schedules and prospects converted. The principle of measuring their performance in account based selling is similar with some key differences.

 

With the account-based method, the measurement of success revolves around the conversion rate, incoming revenue and new business value. The success rate of your account-based selling strategy is measured by several important key performance indicators that businesses have to regularly keep track of.

 

• • Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
  • Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
  • Average Contract Value (ACV)
  • Lifetime Value (LTV)

 

The main drawback of adopting an account-based sales strategy is the increased customer acquisition cost (CAC) which is the direct result of the allocation of additional resources per account. This is offset, however, by the increase of the average contract value (ACV) based on the Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) and the total estimated lifetime value (LTV) of the account. Make sure to maintain a positive balance between these three metrics.

 

If you are experiencing a shortage of available resources or you feel that your teams are stretched thin between several accounts, you can implement an account scoring system to measure the value of each account and commit resources to accounts that have a higher chance of converting to customers. You can score accounts based on specific characteristics such as potential value, level of interest and resource required to convert.

 

Try to maintain a balance between different accounts if you can’t afford to lose one of them. Some accounts may take longer to close than others. See if you’re able to quickly shuffle teams between accounts and divert resources on short notice. Monitor your sales process for an opportunity to better optimize it.

 

Summary

The Account-based selling methodology requires strong collaboration and alignment between different teams in your company as well as investing the necessary resources.

 

In terms of benefits, account-based sales provide companies with a way to close valuable accounts but it also has its drawbacks, with the main ones being, the need for more resources in contrast with traditional sales strategies and a longer sales cycle. Before you decide to commit to the account-based approach it is important to take note of these facts.

 

With the rise of account-based sales and account-based marketing strategies when it comes to attracting larger companies and enterprises in the B2B market, it is clear that this is the way forward. However, team alignment, resource availability and having access to accurate data and the right sales automation tools can ensure the success of the account-based selling strategy.