Account-Based Sales – InsideSales

Stop Sitting on Leads—Speed Matters

Aaron Janmohamed — Wed, 17 Feb 2021 04:39:17 +0000

Your first and most important priority in the sales cycle, after marketing does its thing, is to connect reps to buyers. It’s not to rack up an impressive list of random activities, nor is it to enroll people into generic email nurture.

The problem is that the default strategy for business development and sales teams to get better results is more often than not just an exercise in “doing more”—because more activity is easy to measure. When you get more done you feel good about it. “Yesterday I completed 50 tasks. Today, I did 60. That’s progress.”

The thing is, doing more is only progress if it’s more of the right things—things that lead to more quality conversations.

Don’t make the mistake of doubling down on more of what doesn’t work. That just creates more black holes in your funnel. Sure, you’ll see some marginal benefit as a by-product of increased effort. But there’s no leverage in untargeted activity.

And no amount of optimistic forecasting, soft skills training, or increased productivity can compensate for reps failing to actually connect with interested buyers in meaningful first conversations.

What should you focus on? It’s your job to figure out which tasks get you to intersect buyers at the precise time they show interest.

ENGAGE LEADS IN MINUTES, NOT DAYS

Let’s zero in on that last part: time. Teams used to pound the notion of speed-to-lead—the idea that to influence a buyer, you have to get to them fast and first—into our reps’ heads.

Is it still important? Of course! If anything, it’s more important today than it was 3 years ago. Even more important than it was last year.

Buyers now complete 60-70% of their criteria before they ever engage with a rep. Buyers have access to more information than your reps. They’re harder to reach. Your reps’ window to influence buying decisions is shrinking.

But teams are still thinking in terms of days and weeks before the first attempt. Just this month, a report from one of our competitors suggests the ideal time frame within which to make that first attempt is 2 days. 2 days!!!

We did some research. On 5.7 million marketing leads. And 55 million sales tasks. Across 400 companies. Conversion rates were 8X higher when the rep attempted to make contact within 5 minutes vs waiting 6 minutes or more. A far cry away from 2 days.

But what’s amazing is that of all the leads worked (and not many were; more on that below), less than 1% were attempted within that ideal 0-5 minute range and fewer than 15% were attempted within the first day.

Instead of starting with more activity, focus on making your reps 8X more effective. Would that translate to more deals closed for you?

NOT ALL LEADS ARE CREATED EQUAL—DON’T TREAT THEM THE SAME

Our research showed another interesting trend: of the 5.7 million leads we reviewed above, only 23% of them ever received even a single contact attempt from a rep, which means 77% of leads never get touched, except by your marketing automation tool.

First, this suggests teams have embraced a counterproductive behavior of enrolling most, sometimes all, leads into email nurture campaigns, even though marketing automation is supposed to warm people up, not replace meaningful sales engagement from a rep. Sales-ready leads don’t need to be warmed up!

Second, we audited a few million closed-deals from several thousand companies to see if rep efforts were aligned to deals that actually closed. Reps were spending 297% more time chasing deals that never close vs deals that do. That means only about ⅓ of the deals we pursue are actually good. The same math applies to leads.

So if you only chase 23% of all available marketing leads, just ⅓ of that, or 7.6% of the total, are in the sweet spot. Taking it one step further, of the 77% of all available leads your reps ignore, ⅓ of that, or 25.6% of the total, is actually worth your time.

Lastly, even though it’s 8X better to engage within 5 minutes, an astonishing 57.1% of all attempts occur outside of a week.

The takeaways here are:

Teams leave way too much on the table
There’s still too much guessing in sales
Guide reps to engage sales-ready leads quickly, then let marketing automation nurture the rest until they’re ready to talk

BE PERSISTENT—YOU’RE IN SALES AFTER ALL

But how soon should sellers give up? It’s true you won’t connect with and convert every marketing lead within that optimal 5-minute window. But is one attempt really adequate? How about two, or three?

The reality is, after the first attempt to engage an inbound marketing lead, your efforts begin to mirror outbound engagement. Why not follow similar engagement best practices?

Generally speaking, reps think they’re a lot more persistent than they really are. The average number follow up attempts for outbound motions is around 1-2. With inbound motions, we’re a little better, but still 80% of our follow up activities on inbound marketing leads fall below 5 attempts; most sit around 2-3. And let’s not forget that 57.1% of first attempts don’t begin until after more than a week.

If you’re willing to strike early and you stick it out with 7 or more attempts, your connection rates will go up conservatively by 15%.

DON’T WAIT TO REFOCUS

Getting to buyers first has always been important. But it’s not just about getting there first anymore; it’s about getting there earlier enough to influence decisions. It’s about taking advantage of what marketing is doing to generate interested leads, and not allowing that interest to sizzle away.

COVID only made it more urgent. B2B buying and selling were already evolving when 2020 accelerated the transformation, but most teams were not ready. They were forced to adjust in ways that adversely affected marketing lead performance at each stage in the sales funnel. There has never been a more urgent time to align strategies to data.

What does this mean? Doing more isn’t the answer. And while speed-to-lead should be a tactical priority, it really comes down to aligning your strategies to data so that you’re able to do more of the right things and less of the wrong things. Playbooks can help you do it now.

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Data for this research came from an analysis of over 55 million sales interactions at 400+ companies across 5.7 million inbound marketing leads over a 3-year period, and from user outbound activity and outcome data on Playbooks over a 2.5-year period.

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10 Benefits of Account-Based Marketing

InsideSales Team — Wed, 22 Apr 2020 08:00:53 +0000

With account-based marketing, your marketing message is created using specific qualities and requirements of the account you’re pursuing. This provides numerous benefits for your business.

In this article:

- Final Note

Account-Based Marketing Explained

What is Account-Based Marketing?

B2B marketers often run campaigns that reach far and wide in an attempt to appeal to as many organizations as possible.

Account-based marketing (ABM), which is also referred to as key account marketing, has a more strategic approach that concentrates sales, based on account awareness or marketing resources. Businesses are targeted within a market using distinctly defined marketing data, for example, personalized promotions designed to resonate with each prospect.

Who Uses Account-Based Marketing?

No onboarding process should be complete without new sales team members listening to a variety of model sales calls to learn and practice from. Scripts or call monologues can be used alongside calls.

Benefits of ABM

More Cost-Effective

Because account-based marketing needs more account-level personalization than conventional marketing, it usually costs more to execute. Nevertheless, developments in marketing technology have allowed marketers to utilize ABM for much less than before and at a much larger scale.

Less Waste

ABM helps marketers focus on the important needs of their most valuable clients and stops basic sales pitches. The nature of account-based marketing means that marketers can target market programs explicitly enhanced for targeted accounts allowing them to focus their resources more effectively and reducing resource waste.

Personalized Communication

Communications and messages are bespoke, personalized, and account-specific, meaning campaigns reach targeted clients more meaningfully. If the content is specifically aimed at them and applies to their business needs, prospective customers are more likely to connect with you.

Better Return on Investment

The 2014 Information Technology Services Marketing Association (ITSMA) Account-Based Marketing Survey discovered that “ABM delivers the highest Return on Investment of any B2B marketing strategy or tactic.” Successful account-based marketing drives clear business results in relation to other marketing initiatives.

Team Development

Account-based marketing also enables salespeople to develop and track best practices and guides strategy and planning. This, in turn, improves teams even more to support ongoing programs.

Goal Specific

When you’re evaluating the success of campaigns, whether web, ads, email, or events, it’s simpler to make clear decisions, because you look at a reduced set of focused accounts instead of a sizable collection of metrics.

Better Marketing and Sales Coordination

Account-based marketing will align your sales and marketing strategies and teams because the mindset of the marketer will be like that of the salesperson.

For example, the ABM marketer will need to think about prospective accounts, how to target clients, how to create appointments, and mostly how to generate revenue.

Quicker Sales

Using account-based marketing techniques to eliminate wasted prospects early in the game, businesses can enjoy a shorter sales cycle. Marketing and sales teams can concentrate their energy exclusively on the accounts which are most likely to produce revenue.

Greater Expertise

Account-based marketing pushes you to know your target audience better rather than the broader market understanding you had before. Thinking on a more personal level and increasing familiarization and intent, build higher expertise.

Stand Out More

Account-based marketing will differentiate your efforts from competitors and offer services that exclude the rest of the selling competition. Reputation is an essential factor in B2B, and this customization approach will make your business stand out from the rest.

Key Principles

- Tailored campaigns
- Client-centric and relationship building
- Outside-in problem solving
- Integrated sales and marketing collaboration
- Business growth

If your marketing isn’t working, or if you feel like your sales department is always complaining about a lack of affiliation with marketing, maybe it’s time to try something new. ABM can help you correctly measure marketing ROI, improve inter-business efficiency, and reduce the size of the sales force you need.

Has your business switched to account-based marketing tactics yet? If so, what difference has it made to your organization? Please share your comments below.

Up Next:

Secrets Of Account Based Marketing (ABM) Tactics w/Shari Johnston @Winning By Design

InsideSales Team — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 14:00:23 +0000

Learn the three elements you’ll need to succeed in account-based marketing tactics from Shari Johnston of Winning by Design. Read on to find out more.

In this article:

Why You Should Consider Implementing an Account-Based Marketing Strategy
What Is Account-Based Strategy?
Three Elements You Need to Succeed in Account-Based Marketing Tactics
Where The Struggle Lies in Account-Based Marketing Tactics

What You Need to Know About Account-Based Marketing Tactics

Account-Based Marketing Definition: Also called ABM, it’s a strategic approach to marketing where you target specific business accounts instead of applying the one-to-many approach. This works by identifying accounts and prospects with high value and employing personalized marketing to the key decision-makers within those accounts.

Shari Johnston is a partner for account-based strategy practice lead at Winning by Design. She is also the founder and a board member of Women in Revenue, an organization that empowers young women through mentorship by industry leaders.

She joined Winning by Design after taking on marketing leadership roles in five B2B SaaS startups. Johnston described her previous experience as a passion, since she wanted to help scale startups using an account-based strategy.

Now, she is Winning by Design’s partner in scaling their account-based practice.

Why You Should Consider Implementing an Account-Based Marketing Strategy

Johnston revealed two major pain points that influence businesses to switch to an account-based marketing strategy.

The age-old habit of wasting marketing budget on companies that never convert to customers.
Marketing and sales speak different languages.

Johnston shared that she’s always been passionate about how she can drive revenue closer. She found that going account-based helped her do just that.

Implementing the ABM strategy aligns sales and marketing and helps them get accounts across the line together. It also helps build a good dynamic between these teams.

ABM strategy also allows companies to focus their resources on prospects who really have the potential to be their next best customer.

We asked Johnston if there are situations where account-based marketing tactics aren’t the best solution. According to her, this practice would most likely not fit in with a company that sells to the masses.

This is because with ABM, having a larger deal size and selling to a specific market are better.

What Is Account-Based Strategy?

Account-based marketing certainly goes by many names, but all of them pertain to the same practice. Johnston said that she personally refers to it as “account-based strategy.”

Yet what does it mean? Johnston shared Winning by Design’s definition:

“An account-based strategy aligns your entire go-to-market team around winning and growing accounts that will be your next best customer.”

Go-To-Market Definition: This refers to the organization’s plan to utilize their resources so they can deliver their value proposition to their customers. The end goal is to achieve an advantage over competitors.

Three Elements You Need to Succeed in Account-Based Marketing Tactics

Applying account-based marketing tactics entails a go-to-market transformation. Johnston shared with us the three elements that organizations need to put in place to succeed in this.

1. Target Account List Selection

Optimizing your target list for account-based marketing

The first element is your target account list selection. Your whole go-to-market team must have a target list that’s operationalizing your organization.

Johnston said that in an ideal scenario, you should have the following qualifiers to identify a target account:

Fit
Intent
Engagement Data

In coming up with your target account list selection, you’d have to:

Analyze your current customer base data.
Examine where your organization lands and expands the most.
Figure out which customers currently have the best lifetime value for you.
Overlay intent data.
Figure out who’s in the market for your product.
Check prospect and customers’ recent engagements to see if they recently purchased a solution like yours.

Johnston also shared that a lot of her customers start off with baby steps by gathering firmographic data. They then build up their target account list as time goes on.

Firmographic Data Definition: This refers to the information you can use to segment organizations into categories. It includes data like industry, geographic area, number of clients, and technologies used by the organization.

Who Spearheads the Target Account List Selection?

Johnston admitted this is where a lot of companies get confused, as there isn’t clear ownership in the target account list selection.

She sees it as 50% owned by Sales Ops since historically, they own named account and territory lists. Yet much of the momentum to implement the account-based strategy is coming from marketing.

This is why Johnston sees marketing as an equal owner of the data set and insights that allow companies to roll out this approach.

She revealed, though, that the key is for sales and marketing leadership teams to both buy into this. You need to convince them that this is the right approach for the organization, as both teams add incredible value.

Street-smart sales leaders have great insights they can contribute to the process. Johnston refers to it as the “art and science of target account list selection,” because you should use data-driven insights but you can still apply some art into it.

How to Gather All the Data You Need to Create Your Target Account List Selection

To gather all the data you need for the target account list qualifiers, you need several technology providers. Johnston admits it’s not an easy match.

Yet she assures that there are account-based marketing technology vendors who can help you operationalize this and make the process quicker. Picking the right provider may be a complex process, but there is a growing list of vendors to choose from.

One consideration Johnston shared is that certain industries and target types have better data sets than others. After all, each provider has nuances.

In terms of a platform providing the dashboard, insight, and overview all in one place, Johnston recommends Engagio and Demandbase. Each one has unique strengths.

Demandbase is strong on the data side — they can actually provide the account data to help feed your strategy, while Engagio excels on understanding engagement data so your team can see their performance across accounts early on.

2. Operationalize Your Team to an Account-Based Structure

Most of Johnston’s clients who shift into account team structure have the sales dev reps and marketers supporting the account executives. They all work as a team to get those accounts across the line.

In some cases, especially in larger organizations, the reporting structure of the marketer, business dev rep, SDR, and AE changes. Johnston shared that with her clients, she typically doesn’t recommend a full-reporting structure.

What she does is take her clients’ target account list and segment it through what they call “market maps.” Here, she determines the predominant segments within her client’s market map and target account list.

Johnston went on to share that there are account teams who have empathy for that market and help hone in on them. They really understand the customer stories that feed into that market, as well as where the feeding holes are at.

As Johnston said, riding that focus and the ability to align is so powerful. Often, it’s not around a reporting structure as much as the KPI.

That’s why you need to make sure you focus your team’s success metrics on engaging accounts, acquiring contacts, and generating opportunities. You should concentrate on these instead of the volume.

When it comes to contact coverage, you shouldn’t be single-threaded when selling into accounts, especially enterprise ones. Also, engagement may be something you need to define as an organization.

Johnston observed that, at the end of the day, sales reps would rather have their accounts engage and educate themselves on the solutions they offer. They would prefer this over having massive amounts of marketing qualified leads (MQLs), many of which aren’t the right fit for their organization.

Johnston also recommended aligning the marketing team because of its power.

3. Measure the Team by KPIs That Focus on an Account-Based Structure

Measuring KPI’s to improve account-based marketing

Johnston suggests shifting the KPI focus away from the lead volume of MQLs. Instead, have an account-based marketing metrics.

Do this by building your KPIs around the partnership to get these accounts across the line.

Where The Struggle Lies in Account-Based Marketing Tactics

As Johnston said, marketing and sales alignment is the biggest challenge. Account-based marketing tactics don’t have a clear owner.

It requires a partnership between the go-to-market strategy team. Johnston sees success where that partnership is present, and when people buy into and agree that this strategy is the right fit for their organization.

On the other hand, the company faces challenges when there’s skepticism and when only one side is leading.

As Johnston said, applying account-based marketing tactics is an evolving process. She’s personally seen its impact in organizations, and that’s why she advocates it.

She also recommends that businesses try a 30-, 60-, and 90-day strategy so the process won’t become overwhelming.

If you want to get in touch with Shari Johnston, you can send her an email at shari@winningbydesign.com.

Implementing account-based marketing tactics in your business requires a go-to-market transformation. You need to make the necessary changes so you can succeed in this endeavor.

Start off by applying the three elements we discussed, and enjoy the benefits of account-based marketing.

How has account-based marketing helped your business grow? We’d love to hear from you in the comments section below.

Up Next:

Skip The Goat Rodeo: How NOT To Do Account-Based Sales

InsideSales Team — Tue, 16 Oct 2018 14:00:48 +0000

I recently visited a fast-growing technology company with a chaotic sales process. Here’s what happened when I observed their account-based selling model and my insights from that experience.

In this article:

Case Study: Account-Based Selling Model Gone Wrong
The Goat Rodeo Sales
Unstructured Cadence
Summary of this Account-Based Sales Experience
Want to Know More?

Account-Based Selling: Bad Practices and How to Avoid Them

Case Study: Account-Based Selling Model Gone Wrong

John (not his real name), who runs the sales team, has been there less than one year. He has a team of nearly 100 sales reps. When John first joined the company, he was dismayed by the lack of process and the unnecessary technology spend.

One of his first actions was to focus the team on an account-based sales model with a set of 200 targeted accounts per account executive. John had engaged a vendor to help identify these target accounts, but the project had not yet been completed and would not be completed for months.

In the meantime, John allowed his reps to choose their target accounts for each of their territories and then choose which contacts they pursued. Although well intentioned, things were starting to feel out of control, so John brought us in to see if we could help him build a holistic account-based strategy.

The Goat Rodeo Sales

I sat down with a number of reps and managers to figure out how this company’s sales process actually looked. John was right to be worried. It was a cowboy town and this rodeo sales environment should change.

This wasn’t my first goat rodeo. I had seen many of the same struggles at other companies. In fact, this particular example serves as an excellent case study in the challenges and pain points that often crop up in an account-based model.

Randomly Selecting Accounts

Reps told me about their process for picking their accounts. It consisted of having a weekly meeting that paired an account executive with a sales development rep. The two individuals would discuss their territory and randomly choose which accounts to focus on for the week or month. Sales development reps generally just let the account executives pick the target accounts, and account executives admitted most accounts were chosen based on random criteria, such as, “I drove past this business recently.”

Arbitrarily Choosing Target Contacts

When it came to finding contacts, reps looked in their CRM, went to Data.com, Discover.org, LinkedIn, RainKing and ZoomInfo. Believe it or not, these reps had access to each one of these providers and most reps spent significant time digging through each one to find optimal contacts. Because buyer personas had only been loosely identified, some sales reps believed they should be focusing on IT while others had realized that IT may not be best so they had begun to focus on operations and appeared to be having a decent amount of success.

Wasting Time Finding Contact Information

Once reps identified the contacts they would like to pursue, they needed to find updated contact information so they could email or call them. Reps honestly didn’t know where to go to get this information. Through the school of hard knocks and tribal knowledge passed from reps who had come before them, most reps found themselves again chasing information around the Internet using free tools like Email Hunter and paid tools like Sellhack.com. (A handful of reps had purchased Sellhack.com as the company had not offered to foot the bill.)

Organized Chaos

Assuming they now had up-to-date information, the reps then needed a place to store these contacts. The “go to” place was Google Docs. Yeah, the CRM was available, but reps had a hard time using it and they didn’t know the best way to find and visualize the information they needed.

Unnecessary Amount of Excel Docs

It didn’t end with Google Docs. The management team had not been sufficiently trained on the CRM either, but they saw the need for more organization so they created a planning document in Excel that reps were supposed to keep up-to-date. The document was well thought out and contained information on target accounts, focus campaigns, and follow-up strategies. Although well-intentioned, this tool sparked the use of random Excel sheets and people began passing around Excel docs like hot potatoes.

Now that …

The target accounts had been (subjectively) chosen
The (wrong) target contacts discovered
(Unnecessary) time had been spent finding contact information
Information had been stored (25% in the CRM, 45% in a shared Google Doc, and 30% in the Excel template)

…they were finally ready to begin their outreach strategy.

It’s worth noting that multiple reps told me 75% of their time was spent on these tasks.

Unstructured Cadence

With everything in place, it was time to reach out to prospects. The reps had five contact methods available to them:

phone
voicemail
email
Social
gifts

There was no best practice and there was no coaching so each rep shot from the hip and did what he or she felt was best.

Not Enough Voicemail

Voicemail was never utilized. Voicemail, I was told, was dead. One rep said she never called. She only used LinkedIn InMails. Another rep said he made 50 calls a day and couldn’t understand why others didn’t make more phone calls.

Another rep said the company wasn’t very tight on its budget so the account executive did “donut drops” on all his accounts. He had his sales development rep follow up with email, and he felt this was the only method that actually worked.

Too Many Tools

The company had three different tools available to make an automated phone call and reps could send email from Outlook, Salesforce, or another email vendor.

Follow-up was difficult and inconsistent because reps were told they needed to log activities manually in the CRM so managers could see activity history. But, because nobody really used the CRM, most reps were duplicating this data entry by also trying to use a red, yellow and green color-coding system in their Google Docs “CRM.” The colors helped reps know who to focus on and follow up with.

We ran an audit of their cadence strategy and we found, on average, each contact received one phone call and one email over a three-week period.

Summary of this Account-Based Sales Experience

This is a real company and these are real problems. If you’re honest about your own account-based sales motion, I’d bet good money your team is facing some of the same challenges.

This is the issue with account-based sales and it leads to an inefficient target account selling methodology. I get it. The millennial generation is pushing for less accountability and more empowerment, but this is not empowerment. This is complete chaos.

As a sales leader, you must take control and align around best practices to help your teams achieve maximum results.

Want to Know More?

Want to learn more about account-based sales? Check out our podcast. We’ve had some killer episodes on this topic, like this:

What’s All This Talk About Account-Based Sales?

Do you have questions about setting up an efficient strategy for account-based sales? Mention them in the comments section below!

Up Next: The How And When Of Sales Training For Sales Management

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on September 27, 2016, and has been updated for quality and relevancy.

The Coffee Campaign: A Must Try Account-Based Sales Approach

InsideSales Team — Fri, 23 Jun 2017 15:00:14 +0000

I don’t care about account-based marketing, I care about account-based sales. The problem with account-based sales is it’s an idea most people have heard about but nobody knows what to do with it. For this reason, effective account-based sales requires reps to be playmakers. What are playmakers? They make sales happen, they are the CEO of their territory, and they have a ‘whatever-it-takes’ attitude to hit their number. That doesn’t mean they have to go at everything alone but it does mean that they call the shots.

This is how we do it at XANT. If you have a good idea, let’s get’er done and that’s exactly what Joey Wood, one of XANT’s top sales reps, did. Rather than simply use LinkedIn or call his prospects, Joey and team brainstormed an account-based sales campaign that utilized a variety of communication methods to drive some big time results in a short amount of time. Do I have your attention yet?

The Results

The Coffee Campaign

It’s always great to get positive responses from prospects but it’s another thing to bring in the bacon. With this campaign Joey and team did both. Here are some of the statistics that were achieved in under three months.

18 scheduled meetings
$700,000 in sales pipeline
$147,000 in sales

If you don’t think those are good numbers you’re wrong. This is one sales rep and one campaign.

The How

Step One: Bring the Growth Team

First things first, we don’t have have sales, marketing, and sales development at XANT. We have what we call the “growth team.” That’s one team with one purpose and different roles. We plan, we break down silos, and we talk about how we can run a campaign together brining all of our unique differences and strengths.

Step Two: Find the Swag

What’s cool? Coffee is cool. Coffee is for closers. But, we thought coffee wasn’t enough. We wanted something that was local to our prospects in Texas so we found Yeti mugs. Yeti mugs with coffee is cool and it has a high perceived value. All we needed now was to get the XANT logo on it and we were set.

Step Three: Identify the Targets

When the team sat down it wasn’t about “spraying and praying” it was about identifying 18 accounts and 3-5 contacts at each account. Each contact was one of our ideal buyers. This list wasn’t subjectively thrown together. We used art and science. We looked at which accounts we thought would be best and then we ran that against the XANT predictive account scoring model called Neuralytics and we came up with a really tight list.

The problem was the addresses. We didn’t want to go through all this trouble and not have the person receive the gift. We couldn’t find a better answer so we had our sales development team make calls to verify the address.

Step Four: Execute the Cadence

Now comes the magic and this is where a lot of account-based marketing ideas fail. Marketing brainstorms these great ideas and then sales never follows up on them. In an account-based sales plan that doesn’t happen. It can’t happen.

To start, Joey and team sent the XANT branded gift with a hand-written note. In case you’re wondering, there is a big debate (between me, myself, and I) about branded versus non-branded gifts. Branded gifts always remind the prospects of your company but they decrease the personalization because it’s more about you then them. More to come on this topic later. The hand-written note is key. Joey and team personalized the first part of the message and then used the same message for the rest of the note. Hand-written notes are killer! The problem is they are hard to scale. Be watching for some really cool startups coming around the make this process much easier than it currently is.

When a gift is sent, a tracking number is received so the team knew when it landed. Once the prospect received the gift, the team placed their first phone call and if the prospect didn’t answer they left their first voicemail with an email. The team then waited one day and did call two, voicemail two, and text one. That’s right, we tried sending texts cold to prospects and this may have been one of the most powerful things we did. I still believe cold texting isn’t quite there but since the prospect had received a gift from us, we took the liberty to assume the relationship wasn’t completely cold.

If no contact was made, the team waited two days and then did call three and email two followed by waiting two more days to send email three. To end the cadence, the team waited two more days and sent a LinkedIn message.

Closing

Love this. Real results with out-of-the-box thinking. Welcome to the #playmaker club Mr Wood.

XANT Labs

Want to learn about how to build an optimal sales cadence? Take our cadence course and learn a research-based approach to contact and qualify your prospects.

What’s All This Talk About Account-Based Sales?

InsideSales Team — Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:46:56 +0000

There is a lot of buzz in sales around this idea of account-based sales. I’m not sure most people know what that means or what that is. The funny thing is, account-based sales isn’t new it’s old. Most people know it as value selling which is something that most tenured sales people have done for years. Account-based sales is a personalized sales model where sales reps focus more on target accounts than on a spray and pray model of sales. The question is, who is an account-based sales right for and how do you start?

In This Episode You’ll Learn:

What is account-based sales
Who should be doing account-based sales
How should you start thinking about running an account-based sales program

Links and Resources Related to This Episode:

Subscribe to the Playmaker podcast here: