The role of the SDR has changed and progressed drastically over the years. We now avoid the “spray and pray” method in favor of a personalized outreach approach to our Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP). Account Based Selling started as in industry-buzzword but now has transitioned into a feasible, successful sales strategy. If you have heard of Account Based Marketing you have probably heard of Account Based Selling once before. Companies have seen as much as 75% increase in deal size and a 150% increase in lifetime customer value after implementing an account based selling strategy. (source)
What is Account Based Selling?
Before we jump into the Account Based Selling Strategy let’s take a closer look at what Account Based selling is.
Account based selling is recognizing vital accounts that you want to get in front of and communicating with key stakeholders in those accounts with the correct message.
That means you are concentrating on specializing messages that resonate with key personas and with more people sending marketing automation style emails. If you just rapidly send out emails as an SDR without any identification or research about your prospect, you are setting yourself up for complete failure.
The great thing about Account Based Selling is having more of a tailored message for those key personas. Nothing chops through the noise and clutter like a message tailored to one buyer’s particular needs and wants. This is exactly what Account Based Selling does for you.
What are 3 key factors of an Account Based Selling Strategy? (how to implement this in your SDR role)
Recognize and Build your Ideal Customer Profile
The first most vital aspect in your account based sales process is identifying and building your ICP:
- Which key stakeholders are you looking to get in front of?
- What industry is the best suited for your solution?
- Which accounts are you trying to get your message to?
- What type of messaging resonates with your top customers?
- What are your best customers’ buying motivations?
- How are where do your top customers prefer to be engaged
An ICP can inform your total business strategy from sales outreach to content creating from these questions. It is important to distinguish and understand your TAM from your ICP. Try to figure out what you are targeting and how you are getting in front of them. The end goal here is to inspect your top customers and find common threads between them. Ideally, you want to engage accounts who also have these characteristics. The first step to remember in ABS is understanding the buyers and what industry they are in.
Pinpoint the right stakeholders
Once you have identified the well-suited accounts, the following step is targeting the key stakeholders you want to reach.
For instance, let’s say you are selling to enterprise marketing companies. You would want to target B2B marketers, but more specifically, VPs of Marketing, Directors of Digital Marketing, CMOs, and account-based marketers.
When you go in front of a company you want to know exactly who I’m targeting. Your not looking at the engineering team or the VP of finance, you are looking at specific marketers. You’re not just looking at just this one person and treating them as a lead your looking at the account as a whole. An average of 7 people is involved in most buying decisions, usually in a firm with 100-500 employees, according to Gartner research.
This is why it is very important to make sure you’re reaching those key people that would make the decision. Don’t get caught up with just focusing on one person.
Customizing the Right Message
A crucial factor in the account based selling process is making sure your message is customized to that specific account and key stakeholder.
You need to understand pain points. A plain message is going to be ignored because they are already receiving tons of those.
What you need to avoid
- Messaging is not tailored to what they need
- If you didn’t properly align your value prop to their exact pain points
- You have no clue what their KPIs are
You are not going to secure the meeting if you can’t get in front of the key stakeholders.
Personalized Messaging
How you go about personalizing your message?
Look closely at their Twitter and Linkedin. See what they are talking about. Maybe they have a favorite TV show they watch, which you can relate to in your call and email.
Maybe someone recently achieved an accomplishment for something. There is a lot you can do that just take a couple minutes of research.
You want to tailor that message so that you can get that demo. Show people that you see them as an individual and that you care about their business.
As the great Theodore Roosevelt once said
“Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.”
Account Based Selling is essential for SDR’s because there’s more automation, blasting and a shortage of personalization than ever before. If you can master building an Account Based Selling Strategy with these essential steps and build a sales team, an organization with an account-based mentality, and a technology stack that aid your initiatives, you’ll secure the benefits of an account based selling strategy.
Utilize Inside Sales Solutions SDR’s for your B2B company.
