As salespeople look for better ways to reach out to prospects and close more deals, account-based prospecting is becoming increasingly popular. While the concept has been around for decades, more companies have recognized that the account-based approach is one of the best ways to stand out from the competition and engage potential customers in crowded markets.
However, account-based strategies are often seen as resource-heavy, requiring teams of people working day and night to close one sale. As a result, many businesses think that an account-based approach is impossible in their circumstances.
The truth is that, while account-based selling does require more thought than the traditional approach, it’s still possible to use technology and automation to make things easier.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at what is account-based selling (and account-based prospecting specifically), how it can be automated, and ways to make it more effective than ever.
What is account-based prospecting and why is it so effective?
Account-based prospecting (ABP) is a B2B sales strategy based on identifying, contacting and engaging prospects at your best-fit accounts.
As with other similarly named approaches – such as account-based marketing (ABM) and account-based selling (ABS) – the concept is based on highly targeted campaigns, treating each account as a prospect of one.
Sales has been traditionally seen as a numbers game. Not making enough sales? Just hit the phone, send more emails, and talk to more people.
While this can be a viable strategy, particularly for B2C, it doesn’t consider how larger B2B companies operate. For these businesses, simply trying to reach out to as many of them as possible can lead to weak sales messages that blends in with the rest of the noise in their inbox.
Account-based prospecting takes the completely opposite approach. Rather than thinking about the number of accounts you’re reaching out to, ABP encourages you to focus on reaching out to the right accounts.
As covered in our Beginner’s Guide to Account-Based Fundamentals, concentrating on the quality of your outreach leads to better engagement, more qualified leads, and stronger customer relationships. This is especially important when selling expensive or complex products, or dealing with larger B2B companies. If you expect your prospect to take the time to read your message, then that message must be worth their time.
A prospecting strategy that looks at accounts as a whole is especially important in B2B sales today. Gartner reports that there are typically six to 10 decision-makers in each account for a complex B2B product. Rather than only thinking about an individual buyer, ABP encourages you to think of all of these decision-makers in your outreach.
Automating your account-based prospecting
High-quality, personalized messaging is a vital part of account-based prospecting. With that in mind, it may seem that automation is the last thing you should be thinking about. However, when done correctly, automation can help your account-based prospecting become even more effective.
First of all, it’s important to understand that there are different levels of account-based prospecting. ITSMA, the company that originally came up with the term account-based marketing, talk about three different types of ABM:
- Strategic ABM (one-to-one)
- ABM Lite (one-to-few)
- Programmatic ABM (one-to-many)
It is exactly the same in account-based prospecting.
The level you choose will depend on your customers, your resources, and your goals. At the highest level, where all your efforts are focused on one high-value dream account, you’ll likely spend more time creating 100% unique messaging and sales collateral for their buying committee. You might also use methods that make a big impact but don’t scale easily, such as dedicated events or mailing personalized items.
However, for a one-to-many campaign, it may be a better use of your time to create templates with a core message that speaks to your target accounts’ general pain points, then use automation to personalize the rest of the message to the individual recipients (more on how to do this later).
One of the first steps in any account-based sales development strategy is to identify which accounts you’ll be targeting. At this point, it’s a good idea to divide those accounts into different tiers, depending on how closely they match your ideal customer profile (ICP):
- Tier 1 represents your dream customers, those customers who completely match every last detail of your ICP.
- Tier 2 customers tick most (if not all) of the right boxes, but have a lower lifetime value than tier 1.
- Tier 3 customers meet some of your ICP criteria and, while worth pursuing, are unlikely to offer longtime value as a customer.
Depending on the number of accounts in each category and your available resources, you might decide to use a one-to-one approach for your tier one accounts, one-to-few for tier two, and one-to-many for tier three. Either way, automation allows you to reach out to your tier three prospects in a cost-effective and productive manner.
Also bear in mind that account-based prospecting is a strategy with multiple steps. Broadly speaking, these can be broken down into three stages:
- Identification (deciding which accounts you’ll target)
- Activation (reaching out to different individuals at the accounts)
- Measurement (tracking the campaign performance)
Even if you’re running a one-to-one campaign with tier one prospects, sending handwritten letters to each individual on the buying committee, you can still use technology to automate the other parts of the process (i.e., identification and measurement).
The rest of the article will look at five specific ways you can make the most of automation in your account-based prospecting campaigns.