If you’re executing an account based strategy, which type of approach are you taking? Are you shotgunning it, working top down/bottom up or going for  referrals? Before you start any outreach strategy, you should ask yourself these critical questions:

• Who are the people in the account that we’re going to target?
• What do we know about those personas?
• How can we stereotype titles and roles across the group?
• What do we know about our target as a group?
• Can we build personas around the titles we typically target?
• Do we have a list of who they are?

Once you have a list of those people in your targeted accounts, you need to come up with a strategy to find an entry to start a conversation and introduce yourself. Pinpoint the marketing messages and content that you want to leverage – whether it’s outbound email campaigns, focused paid search campaigns, social media campaigns, or a combination of all of these, your outreach strategy should be built around your  ideal targets accounts and identified contacts.

When you have hundreds of accounts with 10-15 contacts each, you’re essentially running a campaign against potentially thousands of people. When you also consider that any given outreach effort typically  requires 10+ attempts to reach those contacts, you have to leverage automation.  Tools like the OppSource Sales Development Platform, enable you to orchestrate your messages and content to engage the your targeted contacts consistently. OppSource allows you to send personalized messaging at scale that is relevant to each contact across the targeted account.

Likewise, you need to have incredible content that’s self-paced. In today’s world, buyers don’t want to talk to a salesperson until they’re good and ready.  Your engagement typically starts by offering up compelling content and then intercepting them in those critical moments-of-interest.  With the simple opt-in on your landing pages, and email open or click-through, OppSource serves those digital events up as Moment-of-Interest Alerts on the SDRs dashboard.

With each of these messages, it’s critically important that you personalize your message – luckily, our software has the power to personalize a lot of different content at scale, while letting you see who is actually looking at the content and when. You’ll be alerted as soon as someone reads your content, giving you a huge advantage to reach out to that prospect at the moment  they show interest. This leads to a nine-times (9X) higher engagement rate and lets you have real conversations at the height of their interest.

When you’re conducting outreach, targeting people in these accounts, and  have them on the hook with a great piece of content, what steps will you take next that will lead to a sale?

The OppSource platform contains a unique feature that will help you with this, called the Sales Ready Opportunity report (SRO). This is a dossier of the entire life-of-a-lead that assimilates all the interactions, account intelligence, and information from each engagement and conversation with multiple contacts in the account.  The SRO is a time-sequenced story of how you developed the opportunity and provides the sales rep with the right context necessary to progress the opportunity into a sales. You won’t have to go into a CRM system to try and pick out all the historical tasks and notes to try and piece together the opportunity.  This orchestrated hand-off ensures that only high-quality opportunities are making it onto the pipeline, improves the close rates, and helps drive profitable revenue growth.

Every company has limited resources they have to maximize. If you start out with 100 targeted accounts, you don’t know what it’s going to take to capture their attention and have an engaging conversation. To help you understand how to allocate and optimize resources, you need the right set of activity, engagement, conversion reporting and analytics.  With the OppSource Platform, you have unique real time insights into what tactics are driving optimal engagement, conversion and lead quality. This will maximize your resources in the long term and ensure that you’re doing the right thing with the right contacts.

Drive Profitable Growth by Using these 5 Critical Keys of Account Based Sales

Pick the right accounts, know who the relevant contacts/roles are, and develop personalized outreach that provokes interest.  Engage your contacts in their moments-of-interest and don’t give up without a requisite level of pursuit.