What is Account Based Selling

What is Account Based Selling

So John, what is Account-Based Selling (ABS)?

(a following blog from “Selling Disruptive Technology”)… 

First, let me tell you that ABS is not for everyone.

#1. Know when not to do ABS

It is clear that ABS requires more work on the seller’s part, including a high degree of personalization, and takes longer.

ABS works best for strategic/complex sales that require multiple levels of buy-in.

ABS is not beneficial for low value/high transaction sales.

If you’re selling into enterprises, where more buy-in is required to purchase your product or services, this model works well.

#2. Research target accounts

For ABS to work – do your home-work, select the target markets your solutions would fit best.

• Talk to your sales stars. What customer profile spends the most? What customer profile is happiest with your product or services? What customer size buys your solution most frequently?
• Use your CRM and reports on past win by industry. Uncover the top 2-3 top industries/markets that buy your solution.
• Talk with your CEO and executives. What is their vision for the company? What problems do we fix and who would benefit?

List the markets and the companies within these markets - be sure to add in revenue, employee size, and location to your target list and whittle down to 10 to 20 accounts to maintain focus and make it easy to measure execution.

#3. Identify target persona and define messages

In large companies, it is nearly impossible to deal with only one contact.

Sellers must engage at different levels and within different departments. This can mean that they could engage with 10 people in a single account.

• Select the type of persona you need to contact and define:
• What do they do? what problems do they have? what success looks like for them?
• Where do they prefer to get market information from?
• For each persona (for example CISO, CIO, DevOps director etc…) – define the specific benefits that your solutions would bring to these important people.
• Create a specific value proposition for each persona. For example, a CISO could be more interested in saving cost, when a DevOp director could prefer to reduce dev time. Whatever the benefits make sure they are clearly defined and test them with your colleagues and existing customers.
• Now it is time to create a specific elevator speech for each persona that you and your SDR will use when reaching people within your target companies.
• If you are a senior professional, you will probably also design battle cards which include specific answers to specific objections.

#4. Engage continuously 

Now that you have your targets accounts and persona – you know their pains – you have defined the benefits your solution brings and you have developed a specific value proposition for each of them – it is time to reach out.

Enter “value Acceleration”

CRM organizes the sales process, it doesn't necessarily accelerate the sales process. 

A proper sales acceleration increases the velocity of the sales process.

-        It is about responding quickly to online leads

-        It is about cold calling the right way – the warm way!

-        It is about automating customised email campaigns

-        It is about information sharing with the community

-        It is about nurturing prospects and keep them informed

Value acceleration is a mix of software solution, a strong understanding of customers needs, accurate marketing cadence, aggressive but knowledgeable outreach campaigns.

#5. Monitor and measure activities

Nowadays with tools such as Hubspot and Outreach, it is easier to detect the more effective messages, and analyse which communications channel get the best result.

With engagement occurring across multiple contacts, someone within a target account will surface as your champion and this is where the sale process moves from Sales Development to Qualified account.

Clearly, we are still at the beginning of the sales process but nonetheless we reached an important stage where we finally speak directly to a targeted individual and this is where the fun starts.

This is where you want to use the best sales methodology for the early stage of the sales cycle – Challenger sales or SPIN for example….

This modest blog only scratches the surface but I hope it gives you a good introduction to the power of ABS.

John… good hunt

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Selling Disruptive Technology - Is there a better way to sell?

Selling Disruptive Technology

I would like to thank John (I hope life is great in San Diego) for asking me to write a few lines on provocative-based selling…

There is nothing new about the debate on sales methodology and what’s right for your company, however, there has been an uptake in the belief that disruptive technology start-ups need to adopt Challenger Sales methodology.

Even though I have sold disruptive techno most of my life and used the Challenger Sales with great effectiveness, I still love the “solution-selling” methodology and its principles can be very useful at the back end of the sales process.

In fact, I am a great believer that you can even be more successful when picking appropriate bits from different methodologies and applying them at the right stage of your sales process.

Provocative at the front-end of the sales process

Under the conventional solution-selling method that has prevailed since the 1980s, salespeople are trained to align a solution with an acknowledged customer needs and demonstrate why it is better than the competitions. 

When selling disruptive technology, customers might not know they have a need for your solution and, therefore, the vendor has nothing to align it with.

Introducing the “Challenger Sales” methodology; the vendor identified a process that is critical for its customers, develop a compelling point of view on how it is broken and what that meant in terms of cost, and then connected the problem to a solution that the vendor is offering.

Once you have identified a high-impact issue, one of the most difficult aspect of this methodology is to develop a provocation stance to help your customers recognize the issue.

In my experience, not many salespeople are capable of doing it on their own, therefore the marketing, sales and development teams must work together to put a strong business case behind our provocative stance.

Once we have the provocation stance, the proof for it and the solution to fix the issue – then we can present it to the right ears.  Start by convincing your customer’s internal sponsor, agree on the business case figures and move up the ladder.

Consultative at the back-end of the sales process

Now that you have displaced the traditional players, the “solution selling” principles can be useful at this stage.

Once you create the business case with your sponsor, educate the relevant stakeholders of the benefits, savings and ROI, then you enter the closing stage where your negotiations skills will be put to the test.

If you want to sharpen your negotiations skills – have a look at the books written by Roger Dawson.

https://www.rdawson.com/

Conclusion

Should every sales call your company pays from now on be a provocative one? 

Probably not, unless you are a start-up focused on one offering and one target market. 

Provocation-based sales cycles—though much quicker than solution sales cycles—are resource-intensive, so only a few can be run in parallel;

In fact, in my experience, provocative-based sales work very well when you follow an account-based selling strategy.

What??? (John added) An account-based selling strategy? What is this?

Well… I guess, John, this will be the subject of my next blog post.

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