Picture this: you sit down at your desk on a Monday morning and open up your sales pipeline. Instead of scrolling through leads to see who is qualified (and who's a total dud), every prospect on your list looks promising.
It sounds really promising. Each prospect is in your target industry, has a healthy budget, and is a stakeholder who can actually sign a check. Does this sound like a pipe dream?
It's not.
Good account-based sales reps face this reality every morning.
This strategy is cutthroat but effective. By eliminating bad (or even mediocre) leads before they reach your sales funnel, you get a full list of highly qualified leads to pursue.
However, account-based sales strategies require planning and time, which sales teams don't always have.
So, how do you make it work? In this guide, we’ll explain account-based sales, who is a good fit, and how to plan and execute an account-based sales strategy so you can close more high-value deals faster.
What is Account-Based Sales?
For example—say you sell self-sealing stem bolts. In traditional sales, you might have your marketing team put together a paper about the benefits of self-sealing stem bolts and then target the businesses that download them.
With account-based sales, you'd define your ideal customers, find them in the marketplace, and reach out directly to them to pitch your product.
This strategy helps sales teams sell to customers who need their products and services instead of just cold-pitching in bulk.
Take a company like Slack.
When it launched Enterprise Grid in 2017, it specifically targeted companies with between 500 and 500,000 users. The product was also built for organizations that had "teams within teams." Think of marketing strategy teams with separate content and SEO teams that work together.
This ideal customer profile helped the sales team avoid targeting small companies with under 500 staff. Instead, they targeted organizations with multiple departments that relied on cross-collaboration.
What's the Difference Between Account-based Marketing and Account-based Selling?
An ABM campaign might show targeted ads to people at a specific company, while an ABS campaign might involve sending cold email pitches inviting those people to a call or demo —essentially skipping the "marketing" part and going straight for the deal.
If you're a marketer looking for a new CRM platform, check out this article for a list of the best CRMs for marketers to help you make an informed decision.
Benefits of Account-based Selling: Why Should You Bother?
Account-based sales flips the traditional sales funnel on its head. It targets accounts individually instead of gathering leads and slowly moving them down the funnel. Although there aren't as many leads in the pipeline, each lead has a higher value.
This approach has three extremely valuable benefits.
1. Higher ROI
Sales reps constantly decide which leads deserve their time. A sales pipeline full of unvetted leads creates a ton of work and, of course, endless rejection.
An account-based approach creates higher conversation rates and ROI. Teams with account-based strategies see a 208 percent growth in marketing revenue. Additionally, when sales and marketing teams use an account-based approach, close rates can be improved by up to 67 percent! 😲
Less time spent on crappy leads means more time focused on prospects who are a good fit.
2. Personal Relationships
The more your sales team knows about a prospect, the better their chances of closing a deal. Going deeper with a smaller number of leads enables your team to address pain points directly and solve problems on a deeper level.
The more you can show your prospects that you understand their problems and how to solve them, the more likely they will buy from you.
3. Meaningful Metrics
Account-based selling isn't just shooting fish in a barrel and hoping you hit a target. You don't have to worry about metrics like the number of calls or cold emails your team makes, as they're already further into the sales journey.
Account-based sales measures end-of-pipeline metrics like meetings booked, proposals sent, and deals won. Check out Close's simple pipeline dashboard:
This snapshot is a quick and easy look at how your account-based strategy works. Every account is tracked, and only meaningful metrics (demos, proposals, and win rates) are shown.
How to Build Your Account-based Selling Model in 6 Steps
Are you sold on account-based sales and ready to kick some you-know-what? Then, let’s dive in! Use the following steps to build your account-based selling model and reap the benefits of a more personalized, meaningful, and (ideally) fruitful sales process.
1. Define Your Target Audience with ICPs and Buyer Personas
Think you know who your target accounts are? Think again.
How well you nail this first step of your account-based sales strategy will determine its success. Even if you think you know who your target customers are, that doesn't qualify them for the time and effort needed for a one-on-one engagement.
This is where an ideal customer profile (ICP) and buyer personas come into play. The difference between your ICP and buyer personas is that ICPs are your ideal target company (industry, number of employees, etc.). In contrast, buyer personas are your ideal target people (job title, seniority, etc.). You may want to focus on just ICPs, buyer personas, or a combination of both.
Better yet, look for buyer personas within your ICPs.
ICPs and buyer personas are profiles based on customers you would call a success. No, not just the people who spent money on your product. I'm talking about customers who would immediately answer yes if you called them and asked, "Is our product more valuable to you than what you’re paying for it?"
If you're struggling to find your crème de la crème customers, ask questions like:
- Which customers are our fastest closes? This means they immediately understood the value of your product or service.
- Which customers have stuck around the longest?
- Which customers generate the most revenue?
Look for similarities once you've got a list of 10 top customers. For example, are they operating in similar industries? Do they serve the same types of customers? Do they have similar funding status or employee numbers?
Join as many dots as possible and start sketching a rough outline of your ICP/buyer persona. Here's an example:
Next, narrow your ICP/persona to five or ten key attributes. These include company size, job title, seniority, location, and industry. This will help clarify which target accounts you should focus on (and which ones you shouldn't).
Finally, get your team on the same page by inputting the ICP/persona criteria to a central point, like your CRM. For example, in Close, sales teams can input this data using custom fields, so when a promising lead enters your pipeline, they are tagged with the right attributes.
2. Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams for an ABM Strategy
Account-based selling digs into every account, making it easier for B2B sales and marketing teams to target them.
Yet even account-based strategies will have several prospects to qualify and rank. Boston Consulting Group experts say this can be done by dividing target accounts into three groups based on importance: strategic, target, and remaining.
Here is how marketing and sales should work together to engage each of these three groups:
Strategic: Marketing and sales both play a significant role for the most important key decision makers. Marketing provides personalized targeting (e.g., tailored ads and email campaigns), while sales times their personalized outreach efforts in sync with marketing campaigns for a maximum of 1-2 punch.
Target: Target accounts—which are still important but not as important as strategic—rely more on automated marketing campaigns, then have sales teams get involved after a certain trigger or response. Marketing can track engagement with tailored ad and email campaigns; once they trigger a certain engagement score, sales can be automatically notified to provide a human touchpoint.
Remaining: For the remaining, who is the least important but still important enough to bother targeting, automation is critical. These prospects will be enrolled in social media and email campaigns, then segmented and qualified via your ABM tools, like Close CRM. Once a lead in this bucket is flagged via a certain level of engagement, they get moved up to the "target" bucket, where they are more likely to interact with a rep and turn into an opportunity.
The main takeaway is that account-based sales strategies need marketing support, whether with lead generation, buyer personas, or inbound leads.
However, both teams' goals are the same: to engage high-quality leads and spend more time doing it one-on-one.
3. Build a High-Powered Account-based Sales Team
With other sales strategies, teams are usually set up by geographical territory or industry vertical, but account-based sales require you to structure teams by (you guessed it!) accounts.
Considering how well you know the sales cycle, consider how many strategic, target, and remaining accounts each team should be assigned. Then, assign one account executive and one sales development representative (SDR) to each group of accounts. As always, try to be fair and give reps an equal chance to compete with each other.
You’ll want to make sure there is ample opportunity and enough time for each rep to build deep relationships with many key stakeholders within each account.
You can also assign marketing teams to provide support within each of these account groupings, which will encourage sales and marketing to work closer together than they probably ever have before. With motivated account-based marketing and sales teams working in sync, prospects will surely see that your company truly cares about them and their unique pain points.
4. Define How You’ll Use Content in Your ABM Strategy
The foundation of any successful account-based campaign is your content. I'm talking about emails, case studies, or anything your prospects will find valuable.
This Snowflake account-based campaign example shows what a full-throttled account-based assault looks like. Snowflake's teams created an ICP/persona around IT operations managers and business intelligence specialists. Messaging was focused on problems that would only affect them, like data leaks and cloud-based technology. Personalized content such as landing pages, targeted ads, and follow-up conversations were then created based on their ICP.
Once prospects were in Snowflake's net, salespeople chose 100 accounts to take ownership of and become paying customers. The strategy worked—Snowflake's average deal size increased by 300 percent.
Here’s what you can take away from Snowflake’s example to use in your ABM content:
- Make your ICPs and targeting as detailed as possible. The closer to their needs, the better. How well you identify a prospect's needs and pain points will determine how well you draw in leads through content and close the deal.
- Create strong messaging for your target personas and ICPs. The narrower you focus on a smaller group with similar pain points, the stronger your message will hit.
- All content should be delivered in a personalized fashion. Don’t serve any landing pages, ads, etc., without showing your target prospect that it was made just for them.
- Add personalized content to touchpoints like sales emails—throw in reports, webinars, or use cases the prospect may find valuable to get the conversation started.
5. Create an Account-based Selling Outreach Strategy
In the Snowflake example above, the salespeople chose 100 qualified accounts through ABM strategies to contact and try to convert. You will want to do the same with your strategic and qualified target prospects.
It’s important for the flow from marketing campaigns to sales outreach to flow seamlessly, so you should know what your marketing team has been sending and play off the content your prospect has received. This content will vary based on the ICP or buyer persona, so follow up correctly.
Perhaps, for a strategic account, you could reach out directly with more detailed content, like a report tailored especially for their business. Next, you can schedule a sales outreach cadence (phone calls and emails) that addresses the content you or your marketing team has sent and how it addresses their unique pain points.
In every message, clarify that you have researched and understand them and their company’s needs. If appropriate, you can incorporate LinkedIn or other social media platforms into your outreach efforts and use that as another channel to share personalized content.
6. Analyze the Right KPIs and Adjust Your Strategy
Account-based sales will undoubtedly have different results and metrics than traditional sales. Some may look better than others on the surface, but you need to measure for the long term to see the real value that account-based sales create.
At the beginning of the process are SDR metrics. These are the ratio of touchpoints (calls, emails, LinkedIn messages) to conversations and the ratio of conversations that turn into a meeting with an AE. Definitely track these metrics and adjust them for greater success, but don’t base your overall success on them.
The real success in account-based sales comes from increasing average contract value (ACV) and lifetime value (LTV). These go up based on the effort you put toward addressing and solving individual pain points. A Gartner report showed that account-based upsell campaigns created a 75 percent increase in ACV and a 150 percent increase in LTV. Track these metrics Within your targeted accounts for new customers and upsell opportunities over time.
The last metric to track (but not base everything on) is your customer acquisition cost (CAC). Your CAC can increase with account-based sales as you put more effort into a smaller pool. However, you’ll want to consider this against the increases in LTV. So watch your LTV: CAC ratio over a longer time horizon, and expect it to increase if you successfully implement account-based sales.
In summary, here are the KPIs to track:
- SDR touchpoints to conversation ratio
- SDR conversation to AE meeting ratio
- ACV increases
- LTV increases
- LTV: CAC increases over time
Ideally, you can track all of these metrics in your CRM system, like Close. Set up a custom report or dashboard to track your account-based sales performance and find actionable insights so you can adjust when needed.
Who Should Use Account-Based Selling?
Companies with dedicated sales teams usually use an ABS strategy targeting enterprise organizations or SMBs with bigger budgets.
Account-based sales make sense for 👇
Sales Teams with a Small (but Promising) Pool of Prospects
Have a handful of prospects you've spent hours researching?
This scenario is the sweet spot for using account-based sales. Instead of casting a wide net, send hyper-personalized emails, focus on 1-to-1 engagement, and use your knowledge of the prospect to book a meeting.
Sales Teams Targeting Enterprise/Large Businesses
Account-based selling is different from other sales techniques. You must invest time and energy researching prospects to understand their problems and needs. For it to pay off, your target needs to have a budget worth the investment.
But for companies like Starbucks? This selling strategy is probably a waste of time. Sales reps aren't going to spend hours figuring out if you would rather buy a pumpkin-spiced latte or a frappe and follow up with a personalized email strategy.
However, if your sales team is starting to target larger companies or enterprises, the investment is usually worth it because they've got the dollars to spend.
Sales Teams Whose Prospects Have Big Budgets
High-value accounts are also more effective targets for account-based selling.
Your sales reps can generate a significant amount of revenue from these prospects. But it also means the time they've spent researching and engaging with target accounts will likely end in a big reward.
With a small budget, spending 10 hours on the phone and in meetings with a warm lead doesn't make much sense. But with a prospect that could help you meet your quarterly sales goals? Yep, targeting these prospects is what account-based sales are all about.
Best Practices for a High-performing Account-based Sales Strategy
Ready to put this strategy to work and attract more high-value accounts? Before you do, check out these best practices that you can follow to ensure you’re getting the ROI you’re looking for.
1. Always Fully Qualify Your Target Accounts
You must decide which accounts are worth your time, as this is a more time-intensive sales effort.
Now, we have a ton of free tips and guides available to help you find prospects and bring them into your pipeline (like this prospecting guide). These will help you find prospects, but it takes a little more information to qualify a lead if you're using an account-based sales strategy.
When you find a potential key account, do the following to qualify them fully:
- Verify they match up with your ICP: Take a deeper look at the potential prospect's company. Do they have the budget or funding to buy your product? Does their company's firmographic data, like size and employee numbers, match your ICP? Are their financials in good shape, or would they be sweating even signing a monthly rolling contract? Before adding them to your target list, look at the prospect beyond their LinkedIn profile.
- Check their tech: When our SDRs pitch Close to new prospects, we want to know that they're already using (and paying) for some marketing and sales tools. Otherwise, we're probably wasting our time. So, take a look at their current tech stack. Would they be interested in a product like yours? If they're already using products that integrate with yours, that's always a positive sign. A tool like Slintel or Wappalyzer will list the software they're currently using.
- Check their needs: A growing company always looks for new ways to build momentum. Have they recently had a Series B funding round? Or are they talking about expanding on their social media channels? See if you can spot a genuine need for your product in its growth phase.
Even with targeted prospecting, hundreds of potential accounts will fit your ICP. Don't get ahead of yourself and add hundreds of accounts to a list at once—start with a number you can handle and qualify them.
Once you know what your target accounts should look like, it's time to find them.
2. Segment Your Target Account Lists
Most of the accounts you’re targeting will already check many boxes. Filter them even further by segmenting them into three groups:
🥊Prospects who fit like a glove. They match your ICP, work in the right target industry, and need your product. They may be with a competitor and looking to switch to a product with more features, or that can scale as they grow. Make sure enough boxes are ticked with this type of prospect before adding them to your list (so you don't waste time.)
💰Prospects with (big) budgets. This is an important consideration for account-based sales strategies since closing a deal is only worthwhile if the prospect is valuable. Prioritize prospects with recent funding or a history of paying for premium products (and with a high contract value!)
🤝Prospects who could bring in lifetime value. Finding a prospect that matches your ICP is one thing, but customers who stick with your product can add thousands of dollars in recurring revenue. Spend time searching for prospects looking for a long-term solution and, ideally, a partner to help them grow. These prospects are worth their weight in gold—if you play your cards right and build a strong relationship with them, you can turn them into lifetime customers.
Once you have a rough idea of which accounts belong in each segment, you can create a target list and start selling.
3. Stay on Top of the Follow-up
Don't waste all of your hard work if your first attempt to contact a prospect falls flat.
Ensure every account on your target list gets the attention it deserves. You've spent hours researching and qualifying these prospects, so giving up after one phone call or email will be a waste of time.
A CRM can help at this stage of your account-based sales strategy. For example, Close can create automated email sequences to help you stay on top of follow-ups so no target accounts fall through the cracks.
They're easy to make, thanks to template tags and custom fields. Inside a Close template, the ICP attributes you created in step 1 (like the prospect's company name, job title, and industry) will automatically fill in where custom fields are placed. Take a look at this example:
This standard demo follow-up template has been automatically personalized to the target account based on real-time data. The best part is that all you have to do is set up an automated sequence in Close, and the CRM will do the rest.
4. Use the Right Account-Based Sales Tech
The CRM is an account-based sales team’s best friend. Choosing one with the right tools to support account-based strategies is extremely important. At Close, our sales team uses the CRM it sells (obviously), and we also use it to support our account-based efforts.
For example, SDRs use Smart Views and Reports to filter target accounts based on ICPs, allowing them to get their creative juices flowing when they build a new list.
Sales reps can filter prospects inside Close to create a target account list.
The AE can then narrow the list to see if any trial users have been assigned to them as a target account. Nick Persico, Director of Sales for Close, describes how this works:
“So, the AE is left with a narrow list of 11 active trials that they’ve talked to this week, have added extra users, and are currently during business hours. Best of all, creating that list took less than 2 minutes."
Our AE can now move that filtered list straight into Close's Power Dialer or an email sequence to follow up with them 1-on-1. By maintaining detailed records for every lead, account-based sales allow us to slice and dice our data so that our sales team stays on top of (and engaged with) every prospect.
Additional tools that can help you with account-based sales include:
- 6sense: An AI-based revenue tool that uncovers buyer behavior patterns and prompts you to engage with the right people at the right time.
- Rollworks: An ABM-specific tool that can help you better identify your ICPs and personas, engage with them, and measure your program’s effectiveness.
- Marketo (acquired by Adobe): This and other sales intelligence tools provide insights that can help you target high-value leads, gain insights into buyer behavior, and engage leads more effectively.
- Folloze: This enables you to create personalized marketing campaigns based on the data, content, and messaging you already have set up, helping you create guided experiences at all stages of the buyer’s journey.
Account-Based Sales Increase High-value Deals
Account-based selling isn't for every sales team.
Researching prospects, creating target lists, and building a strategy that works require a ton of effort. But a big investment can result in huge rewards. Your sales team won't be wasting time on unqualified leads, and the prospects in your pipeline don't just need your product—they also have the budget.
The biggest roadblock is time. You need lots of it to build an account-based sales strategy from the ground up. But once you've created ICPs and built a promising target list, it's easier for your sales team to connect with each prospect and close high-value deals.
Ready to increase your sales? Try Close free for 14 days—no credit card required.
