What is Account-Based Selling?
Account-based selling is a B2B sales strategy that targets high-value accounts, rather than individual buyers within those accounts. It combines sales engagement and account-based marketing, and involves personalized and highly targeted outreach to decision-makers within the account to build relationships and close deals.
This approach requires close collaboration between sales and marketing teams and a deep understanding of the account’s needs and pain points.
How to Develop an Account-Based Selling Strategy
Here are the steps companies can take to make the shift from pursuing leads to selling to accounts:
- Identify high-value accounts: Start by identifying the accounts that are the best fit for your product or service and have the potential to become high-value customers. You can find this information by comparing accounts to your Ideal Customer Profile, or ICP, analyzing past sales performance data, conducting market research, or looking into industry trends.
- Develop buyer personas: Once you’ve identified your target accounts, develop buyer personas that outline the key characteristics of the decision-makers and influencers within those organizations. This will help you understand their pain points, motivations, and goals based on characteristics like their industry, job title, and responsibilities.
- Gather data: Collect data on your target accounts and buyer personas. This can include firmographics, or information such as company size, industry, revenue, and growth rate, and technographics, which is information on what tools and platforms make up their technology ecosystem. This is all relevant information that can help you tailor your messaging and approach.
- Develop personalized messaging: Use the data you’ve gathered to develop customized messaging for each demographic segmentation, target account and buyer persona. This messaging should speak to their specific pain points and needs, and position your product or service as the solution they’ve been looking for.
- Engage with decision-makers: Use a variety of channels to engage with decision-makers within your target accounts, such as email, social media, phone calls, and in-person meetings. Lean on gathered data to build meaningful relationships with these individuals and nurture them over time.
- Offer personalized solutions: Once you’ve engaged with decision-makers, work with them to understand their specific needs and pain points. Then, offer personalized solutions that address these issues and demonstrate the value of your product or service.
- Use account-based marketing tactics: Use account-based marketing tactics to support your sales efforts, such as targeted advertising, personalized content, and even online events such as webinars tailored to the needs and interests of your target accounts.
- Measure and iterate: Track your results and adjust your approach as needed. Measure the success of your account-based selling strategy, paying careful attention to the impact on account engagement, pipeline velocity, and most importantly, revenue. Shifting your messaging and tactics can help you achieve the desired results.
Account-Based Selling Best Practices
Developing an account-based selling strategy takes time, and patience and persistence are key. Keeping these best practices top of mind will help your revenue team stay focused on the core components of account-based selling.
- Collaboratation between marketing and sales teams: It can’t be overstated that account-based selling requires a collaborative effort between marketing and sales. Both teams should be working with the same data and metrics and working toward the same goals. Alignment is also needed to provide consistent messaging and personalization, which keeps the customer experience smooth and engaging.
- Leverage data and insights: Using data to understand your target accounts’ behaviors, interests, and challenges makes for more targeted and effective campaigns. Insights can also help you identify new opportunities for cross-selling or upselling, and if you use an industry-leading revenue intelligence platform, it can tell you which accounts to prioritize because they’re ready to buy right now.
- Personalize outreach: Personalization is key in creating account-based experiences. By tailoring your messaging and outreach to the specific needs and pain points of each account, you can demonstrate that you understand their unique challenges and offer solutions that address them.
- Engage in multi-channel outreach: Leveraging multiple channels such as email, social media, and phone increases your chances of reaching key decision-makers and creating touchpoints that build trust and credibility.
- Build strong relationships with key stakeholders: Customer satisfaction is the primary contributor to predictable revenue growth, and it starts during the sales process. Relationship-building requires personalized communication, regular check-ins, and providing value through insights and resources to build trust and credibility.
Want more inspiration? This guide to ABM has more best practices for unlocking account-based experiences.
The Best Software for Account-Based Selling
There are a lot of tools that a revenue team can use for account-based selling, but there’s one that stands out above the rest. 6sense Revenue AI™ for Sales is the ultimate tool for account-based selling because it:
- Finds the right accounts, fast, giving sales reps deeper insight into accounts and buyers to reveal the best, most efficient, path to generating more revenue
- Uses AI-powered analysis to reach entire buying teams with tailored content and messaging
- Arms your teams with a dossier on every account and buyer, unlocking opportunities for increasing deal size and account expansion
- Synchronizes marketing and sales efforts based on the activity of target accounts and buying team members
- Provides visibility into all accounts with high-intent buying signals — even those unknown to your CRM
- Increases sales productivity by suggesting what sales reps should do next using Hot Account, contact prioritization, and Next Best Actions dashboards
Book a demo to see how you can start account-based selling with 6sense’s audience targeting, industry-leading account identification, intent data, and predictive models.
