Cody Bernard
The art of sales isn’t about finding people to sell to.
It’s about finding the right people who are ready to buy. Most B2B vendors today will simply source a list of companies using data like revenue and employee size to give their sales teams in hopes they can somehow gain a foothold inside these organizations.
Not saying that looking at a businesses revenue or employee size is wrong, but these are just proxies about the accounts’ ability to spend. But how can you tell the difference between companies that will buy now, buy soon, or never buy at all? The goal is to figure out ahead of time that an account is looking to make an investment in solving a problem that you can provide the right solution for.
For companies looking to scale their go-to-market motion and get the most out of their sales team, this type of insight into their accounts – along with how they should be prioritized – is the key.
But back to the point of this post. What should you be doing when building the right list of target accounts for your team? Let’s dive in
Sales is all about timing. The best way to gauge timing is through certain events that are taking place in an organization. Some examples of this that you should be on the look out for are:
New initiatives like digital transformation
New leaders in a relevant role being recruited or joining the business
New projects like a migration to the cloud
Shift in business models like the launch of a new subscription service.
All of those are leading indicators of investment which signal they may be in the market for a new solution. Finding accounts that have these types of initiatives is critical since initiatives typically have urgency, budget, and need. This way, you can now get to your buyers first.
If the product you sell displaces existing technology or relies on the presence of other technologies in your buyer’s stack, the accounts in your list should reflect that. In addition to that, it should be able to tell you which accounts are perfect for an augmentation or rip and replace play.
For example, let’s say the product you’re selling requires your buyers to have existing cloud technology. You need to weed out the organizations that are not mature or developed enough in their cloud strategy. Or let’s say your company sells a product relevant to cloud or data migrations. You want to prioritize the accounts that don’t have (the right) tools to help with this today.
Sizing up account potential is a good way to strategize on your land and expand angle. And by account potential, we mean how big of a deal you can sell into this account over the time period that they’re your customer. A good way to gauge account potential is by looking at the size of teams your product solves a problem for.
For example, let’s say you sell into mobile app development teams. You want to know what the size of their engineering team – and more specifically their mobile team – is because it gives you a sense of potential revenue opportunity. Now while this sounds easy in theory, it’s incredibly difficult and time-consuming to figure out manually. That’s because in this case, software development teams have a multitude of different names. A few that come to mind are R&D, Engineering, Application Development, DevOps, and Application Delivery. This gets even more complex when you take into account those target personas that have a vast array of titles.
Today, sales teams are working lists filled with accounts that just aren’t a good fit or aren’t ready to buy, leading to wasted sales cycles and missed quota. Why? Because until now, the data they’ve been using to build their account lists hasn’t been nearly good enough – not to mention incredibly difficult and manual to find.
But that’s where we come in
With CloseFactor, you can get the perfect target account list so that your reps work the right deals, every time. We help sales teams focus on the right accounts by identifying what makes a good customer using your own data (specifically what we covered above), pulling a list of accounts that match those attributes, and then prioritizing that list by most ready to buy. Want to see how we do it? Get a demo today of CloseFactor today.
