Sales development leaders are always looking for fresh, new approaches with prospecting to help their teams reach breakthrough performance levels, as well as deliver higher quality opportunities. Account Based Sales Development (ABSD) is a hot new topic in the sales development movement, which has changed the way both large and small companies generate opportunities.
With TOPO Sales Summit right around the corner, our team is on a jet plane headed towards Silicon Valley. In light of the conference, we have TOPO Co-Founder Craig Rosenberg here — to talk you through his best sales tips to help you understand your buyer by using the Account Based Everything model. Watch the video below to get his insights on the ideal customer profile, and how “The Funneholic” is revolutionizing sales development.
Video Transcription:
Say I’m going to be account-based marketing. I’m going to go buy applications, but that’s not the right idea. Step number one is to define your ideal customer profile. That’s often a story that people don’t really look at. They often think of their target market from their investor thesis, or they think way too big on that, when in reality, we’ve got to figure out who’s going to actually buy from us. And once we understand that, we can make really good decisions about who should communicate what and when.
So, the first step is to define your ICP. That’s something that, believe it or not, a lot of companies don’t do first, and that’s the first thing you should do in any business you run. So, when you think in the terms of people, marketing could go out and get 6,000 people in the persona, but if only 100 of them are in the ideal customer profile, the account, then it makes no difference what persona they are.
I think marketing should lead the charge with the CEO’s sign off. I have not seen once a CEO back off of this. If they’re good business people — they get it — and they understand it. The VP of Sales is going to buy into it. The problem is, they’re not good at project managing big-change management initiatives, right? They’re good at yelling about it and making it happen, but the person who has got to be able to make it happen is marketing.
They should project manage this thing, but it’s got to have buyout from the VP of Sales, CEO, Marketing, Product — whoever that is. You should be looking at data. You should be looking at qualitative feedback. You should be looking at the product. You should talk to CS. You should take all this data in before you make those decisions, and try to quantify it if you can, and that makes everyone feel better. Then,if the CEO is bought off, then that’s account-based everything, but I haven’t found a problem with CEO’s. Imean, good business people, if you make that business case, they get it.
Craig’s Tips for Account Based Everything:
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Want more insights on how to know if an Account Based Sales Development approach is right for your organization? Download our free eBook on The What And Why Of Account-Based Sales Development and explore the methods behind the new sales development trend.