Working through a long queue of sales leads is hard work. It can feel like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Traditional demand generation and inbound sales don’t always achieve adequate returns. Your team has to spend a lot of time sifting through contacts and reaching out to prospects who might not be the type you’re looking for.
Account-based sales (ABS) offers a more precise way to find high-value customers and reap the rewards—but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s easier to do. How can you make such a big change? Where do you start?
If you’re ready to rebalance your marketing efforts and implement an account-based sales strategy, these tips will help you overcome obstacles and develop your new plan.
Why account-based sales is so powerful
Account-based sales takes a more targeted approach to customer acquisition by identifying specific accounts that align closely with your ideal customer profile and pursuing them with tailored outreach strategies. With ABS, your sales team can focus their efforts on personalized communication and precise messaging designed specifically for a small number of high-value accounts, rather than casting a wide net.
In fact, account-based selling goes beyond just the sales team. Marketing, account management, and customer support teams must align with sales and work together to decide which accounts to target and what strategies to use to win them over.
Alignment necessitates healthy feedback loops in a couple of key areas:
Branding and features: Your sales team must understand the features of your product or service in-depth, and remain aligned with the marketing team about on-brand messaging, new feature releases, and product limitations to specifically address the needs and challenges of account decision-makers.
Balanced expectations: Customer support teams must efficiently field concerns or questions and regularly report customer frustrations so that the sales team can fully educate their prospects and preempt common sales objections. This also serves account and onboarding managers who prepare new customers for tool adoption and continually educate existing clients.
These communication streams optimize the customer experience within your sales pipeline, boost existing customer retention, and fuel your product development roadmap.
For many companies, team alignment alone presents a challenge to account-based selling, considering only 35% of marketers say their sales and marketing teams are strongly aligned. But the results are worth the effort.
Gartner found that organizations running account-based marketing (ABM) programs saw lifts across multiple areas:
28% saw lifts in overall account engagement
17% saw lifts in SAL to opportunity conversions
13% saw lifts in average deal size
12% saw lifts in win rate
Only 2% of organizations claimed there was no additional lift from ABM programs, which intersect with ABS programs.
Developing your ABS sales strategy
Before you can get the ball rolling on an account-based sales strategy, you need to get a few things in order.
Orchestrate teams for alignment
If your company doesn’t already have a high level of cross-functional collaboration among teams, then you’ll need to create a team organization plan as part of your ABS strategy.
Don’t try to make huge, sweeping changes all at once. Start by putting together small, tactical account teams designed to go after at least one target account each.
You’ll need to assign a leader to each account team, such as a sales manager. Ideally these small teams should include key stakeholders from every affected department, especially marketing and customer success. Some experts refer to these as “tiger teams.”
Unify data and integrate your tech stack
You’ll need reliable, comprehensive data for several key decision-making processes in your selling strategy. First and foremost, you’ll need deep data on the key accounts you want to pursue. You’ll also need historical data on company sales to compare past wins and losses with your current target accounts and try to foresee any upcoming obstacles.
If your company doesn’t already use a tool that unifies data pulled from multiple sources, then you might need to include a fully integrated CRM or other sales tools into your tech stack.
Develop playbooks for prospecting and outreach
Your target accounts likely won’t say yes right away. You’ll need long-term, omnichannel outreach plans to engage customers through multiple formats and across multiple teams. This includes marketing outreach like emails, videos, and social media, as well as sales outreach like direct messages, webinars, demonstrations, and proposals.
Screen recording tools like Loom can help here. Your marketing and sales staff can create custom prospecting videos and embed them across multiple channels, including email and LinkedIn. Loom also sends notifications when customers view videos, so your sales teams can quickly follow up with the most promising prospects. Plus, stakeholders can track progress and assess engagement through Loom’s video analytics and tech stack integrations.
Implementing your account-based sales strategy
Once you’ve aligned your teams, unified your tech stack, and assessed your existing prospecting resources, it’s time to work through the five major steps involved in account-based sales:
1. Design your ideal customer profile (ICP)
Consider the ICP your guiding light for which companies should make it onto your target list of accounts. Sales managers, marketing leadership, and the executive team should all have input on the ICP design process to ensure alignment on the criteria you’ll use to choose prospects.
An effective ICP also guides future decisions on which accounts to target without having to assemble every stakeholder in the building.
2. Create a target list of accounts
Compiling your list of target accounts is arguably the most important step in the account-based sales process. Your finished list will serve as the source of truth for both sales and marketing teams on where to direct their efforts.
Take your time to get this list right, and don’t automatically focus on the easiest conversions. Nora Conklin, principal analyst at Forrester warns, “Those who invest heavily in active buying signals or ‘quick wins’ could find themselves with a thrilling win rate but a persistent, pernicious churn.”
Group prospective customers into tiers based on their estimated contract and lifetime value (LTV). Your top tier should include customers with both high estimated impact and strong conversion potential.
3. Contact and convert decision-makers
Depending on who you ask, the average B2B sale involves between 6.8 and 8.2 stakeholders. Either way, that’s a lot of people to convince, so you’ll want to take a strategic approach to outreach.
Track down all affected decision-makers within your target accounts. Once you know who they are, you can determine their buyer type and which factors might motivate them to convert. Finally, construct a sales prospecting plan based on your findings.
Assessing buyer personas will help you during the research phase of this step. McKinsey has identified three B2B buyer archetypes:
Adapters: This is the most common buyer archetype. They’re open to change, but most likely to stick with what they’ve done in the past.
Innovators: These buyers are early adopters of new technology (such as generative AI). They prefer digital channels for communication.
Seekers: This archetype is the most impulsive buyer persona. Seekers are willing to make big purchases, but they’re prone to bailing if they face communication obstacles.
Identify which buyer archetypes match your target prospects and structure your outreach efforts around their motivations, pain points, and communication styles.
4. Onboard and engage customers
When your outreach plan works and you successfully convert a target account, you’ll want to keep them satisfied and engaged for long-term retention. Personalization is a critical component of account engagement. This can include tailoring communication to reflect your customer’s unique needs and preferences, offering customized product recommendations and support, or even providing proactive solutions to their challenges.
One personalization method is creating custom videos. Your sales and customer support teams can use Loom to create onboarding videos, product demonstrations, training videos, and more.
Loom captures both your screen and your webcam simultaneously, so customers can see your face. Plus, you don’t have to make multiple videos in order to add personal details. Loom’s Variables feature can automatically adjust people’s names, titles, and company names in your videos, so each customer gets an individualized version—without hours of editing on your end.
5. Track and report on key metrics of success
You should be collecting data on key performance indicators (KPIs) for every customer and at every point in the sales cycle. Results and insights from the collected data will guide your decision-making and help you successfully report results to other stakeholders.
You’ll need buy-in from sales managers and executive leadership on which KPIs to use, but ABS experts commonly recommend starting with these two:
Average contract value (ACV)
Lifetime value (LTV)
Keep in mind: If you include customer acquisition cost (CAC) as a KPI, it will likely go up when you introduce an account-based approach. But this isn’t necessarily a bad sign. As long as the ratio of CAC to LTV is lower than it was before you implemented ABS, you’re headed in the right direction.
Refining your ABS techniques across channels
Customers these days have high expectations for multichannel communication. McKinsey’s B2B Pulse survey found that people use an average of 10 interaction channels throughout their buying journey.
Buyers also follow the “rule of thirds,” which dictates that one-third of customers want each of these three channels at various points in the buying process:
Traditional face-to-face communication
Remote or virtual interactions
Digital self-serve options
Remote and virtual interactions include everything from Zoom meetings to custom sales videos, while digital self-serve options cover channels like websites and ecommerce tools.
For an effective account-based sales strategy, you need to present engaging information in a variety of formats to all stakeholders within your target accounts.
Seamless omnichannel engagement
Presenting consistent information across multiple formats is no easy feat, and customers are sensitive to omnichannel friction. More than half of respondents to McKinsey’s B2B Pulse survey want a seamless omnichannel experience, where interactions can easily move across channels.
The Seeker buyer archetype is especially vulnerable to omnichannel friction. This buyer type will likely opt for a different product or service if they have issues interacting with your business across multiple channels.
Customers also expect content to be personalized. Hubspot reports that 96% of marketers say personalization leads to repeat business, and 94% say it increases sales.
Successful account-based sales take time, and you’ll generally need to contact prospective customers more than once to close a deal. Considering you’re playing the long game, your teams need to present personalized, friction-free interactions every time they contact target accounts.
3 account-based sales personalization tips
Here are a few more tips for personalizing your outreach content to boost engagement across every channel:
1. Collect first-party customer data
The demise of third-party cookies has been in the works for a while, and only 65% of marketers say they have high-quality audience data. If you want to get insights into your target prospects, you might need to collect first-party data from them directly.
Email is one of the easiest ways to collect first-party data on account-based sales targets. If you can get a prospective customer to engage with an email and fill out a form, then you can request specific details to address information gaps in your existing data.
Other forms of first-party data include social media handles and purchase history.
2. Integrate generative AI tools
Gen AI tools can make it easier to personalize content for prospective customers. Your sales and marketing teams can use gen AI to quickly craft prospect emails, product landing pages, and other customer-facing communications designed for a specific target.
AI tools can also support both virtual and face-to-face client engagement. Summarize meetings and automatically create transcripts that can be sent to customers within follow-up communication.
As AI tools continue to improve, look for automation opportunities that can free up time for your human team.
3. Create custom videos
Videos are an easy way to add a human element to digital interactions. Your sales team can use Loom to create personalized video messaging tailored to specific high-value accounts to encourage engagement and enhance communication.
Sales reps can use Loom to make asynchronous videos for everything from product demonstrations to custom pitches. The Loom AI add-on can automatically remove filler words and silences, write captions, and create documents, so your outreach is polished and professional, with a personal touch.
Use Loom for successful ABS outreach
Personalized videos can take your sales and marketing outreach to the next level as you implement your ABS sales strategy.
Loom’s free screen recorder tool captures your screen, audio, and webcam—so your tone of voice and body language can bring your value proposition to life. Innovative AI features like Variables streamline your team’s workflow, so targeting those high-value accounts achieves an even greater ROI.
Businesses of all sizes use Loom to create fast, personalized videos, edit them with professional quality tools, and share them quickly and easily to any device or channel. Capture the attention of your account-based sales leads with Loom.
