What is Account Based Selling?

Account based selling (ABS) is a hyper-focused, ultra-personalized sales strategy. This approach targets entire accounts rather than concentrating on a specific person within a company. With this strategy, we treat every account as a market of one.

This involves a multi-touch, multi-channel process that targets a variety of touchpoints within an organization. The usual sales strategy focuses on closing sales with individuals. In contrast, account-based selling targets the entire organization.

Source

ABS vs. Account Based Marketing

Account based selling and account-based marketing (ABM) go hand-in-hand. The overall goal of the process is to identify target accounts and inch them closer to a sale. Rather than having sales and marketing departments that “hand-off” duties to one another, this strategy blends the two.

Your sales and marketing teams need to work together more closely than in most organizations.

In a company-wide effort, these teams need to work together. They should focus on the right accounts and create a clear strategy. The process involves first identifying key decision-makers with a pain point, then targeting them with personalized sales outreach.

This strategy can work alongside marketing nurture campaigns to move key contacts closer to a sale.

Who Should Use Account Based Selling?

In a recent survey involving ten corporate leaders, seven leaders said they are investing more in account based strategies. However, this approach isn’t suitable for every organization.

As this methodology involves your entire business, you must have enough resources to implement account-based selling framework. Before changing your current business model to an account-based model, decide if this approach is right for you.

Ask yourself the following five questions before you're planning to leverage benefits of account-based selling.

1. Who is your average customer?

Understanding your potential customers can help you decide if ABS is the ideal approach. If you usually sell to small businesses, you may want to consider a different strategy. Since ABS requires a lot of manpower and resources from you, focusing on these businesses is usually not efficient.

Unfortunately, the picture is a little unclear for mid-market customers. Experts claim that any deal size less than $50,000 in lifetime value shouldn't utilize an account-based selling approach. If you’re a business that offers enterprise solutions, you may already have high-value accounts that are well-suited for account based sales.

2. How long does your sales cycle last?

A good account-based selling strategy takes time to develop. It can take months to create an effective selling model. That said, this approach is better suited for longer sales cycles. If your average sales journey lasts for at least three months, ABS may be right for you.

3. How much do you know about your ideal customers?

Account based selling involves hyper-focus on your audience. This laser-precision approach requires an in-depth understanding of your ideal customers. If you're unsure where you fit in the market or lack adequate data, you should consider a different strategy.

Source

4. How many stakeholders are involved in the average deal?

While the average sales approach targets one or two stakeholders, this can cause problems. For instance, this tactic could backfire if that contact quits the job, continues leave, gets sick, or takes a vacation.

By targeting multiple stakeholders, it's far less likely for a deal to fall through the cracks. The more eyes on your sales process, the higher the chance of closing the sale. The account-based selling model is a multi-threaded approach. This means that a wide variety of stakeholders participate.

5. What’s the nature of your offerings?

Account-based sales strategy is a detailed, precisely integrated process across multiple facets of your organization. Therefore, this approach is well suited to subscription-based products. If your messaging is clear and consistent, these customers are likely to stay with your product or service.

ABS marketing through subscription-based products also provides the opportunity for upselling and cross-selling. If your business offers multiple services, add-ons, and packages for important clients, consider using account-based selling.

How Content is Used in ABS

Similar to inbound marketing techniques, you can use content in account-based selling gear up a specific audience. Additionally, both inbound marketing and ABM use different content at different stages in the sales cycle.

As previously mentioned, account-based selling requires a company-wide approach. So all teams should collaborate to develop audience-focused content for the various accounts and personas.

Below, you will discover a variety of content types and tactics that you can use in an ABS strategy. We categorize these by the level of effort needed for execution.

Low-effort

• Blog posts, infographics, and short videos

• Social media engagement

• Email

• Mail

• Voicemail

• Reports/data research

Medium-effort

• Workshop

• Business case

• Webinars

• Custom report

High-effort

• Trials

• Company workshop

Source

Content Following the Sale

Targeting your customers with engaging content doesn’t stop when you close a sale. Content that focuses on ABS continues to perform long after the deal closes. After all, customer satisfaction is a core element of ABS marketing efforts.

If your customers aren’t satisfied, chances are they won’t renew, upgrade, or buy again in the future. After the sale is complete, you'll want to continue to provide valuable content to keep loyalty and engagement high.

This can be achieved with:

• Training sessions: These can help your customers understand more about your products.

• Executive check-ins: This involves meetings, preferably quarterly, to discuss what’s going on with the account. These discussions should involve both buyer and seller executives.

• User events: To boost exposure and excitement for your product and brand, facilitate events to bring your customers together.

Developing Your Target Account List

After you narrow down your target accounts, choose your contacts, and decide on the content, it's time to create an account list. To simplify the process, ABS experts encourage organizations to categorize target lists into different tiers.

Your company should then allocate a certain amount of resources and attentiveness for each level. The smallest tier should receive the highest amount of care, while the largest tier should receive fewer resources.

While it varies from one company to the next, your first tier will typically consist of 20 to 50 accounts. These customers should receive thorough research and one-on-one, personalized communication.

The next tier typically includes about 200 accounts. The specific industries and personas of these groups determine the amount of personalization and care they receive. Because of the many facets involved in the process, these campaigns can last for several weeks.

Sales rep and sales development teams must provide assistance in choosing target accounts. This is because these professionals play a key role in converting prospects through their selling approach. Therefore, excluding them from the sales model and decision-making process is an inefficient practice.

How to Implement an ABS Strategy

After reading this guide on account-based selling, you might still feel unsure about how to use this model in your organization. If that’s true, you are not alone.

Transitioning to ABS is one of the most common roadblocks for organizations across the country. Although people understand the value of changing processes, they still struggle with execution.

Because organizations have different processes and best practices, implementing ABS looks different for many companies. If you are using a high-volume, fast-paced method, switching to an account-based approach can be tricky. Instead make the switch over time in stages to use account-based selling.

Once you’ve developed your ideal customer profile and chosen suitable accounts, allocate 30% of your organization into tiger teams. Members of these specialized teams are skilled professionals tasked with a specific goal within an account.

Before getting started, you must choose which metrics to track. After starting the process and seeing a positive impact, you can then allocate 50% of your company. If you continue to gain traction, increase to 75%, then eventually 100%.

As for how long this transition should take, most companies notice improvements within 12 to 24 months. Those who find early success typically have close-knit marketing and sales departments.

Although account based selling can be a complicated topic to understand, we hope this ABS guide provides some clarity. While the transition may not be an easy one, this change could propel your business to new heights.

If you run a large company, account-based selling can boost your revenue and enhance customer satisfaction.