Laying the groundwork for an Account Based Acquisition approach

If you’re in the United States I hope you celebrated a warm and welcoming Thanksgiving with friends and/or family. I took the liberty of booking some cheap rooms in Las Vegas and made a lovely work-cation out of it. I’m not much of a gambler (I get squeamish when I lose even a dollar) but I did have the opportunity to take my daughter out to the Mandalay Bay Shark Reef. She’s a huge fan of sharks.

If you had a fun trip feel free to comment on the article. Would love to know what my readers were up to!

Alright so back to business.

Today' I’d like to talk about how to set up an Account Based Revenue engine. Some may call it Account Based Marketing, Account Based Selling… but I’m going to call it Account Based Acquisition since that’s what it is really is.

In my mind, marketing and selling is simple. It has to be. If I tried to explain to my parents what marketing and selling is with complicated language they would just be confused. So instead I boil it down to this…

Marketing helps customers become aware and interested.

Sales helps customers make a buying decision

That’s it

Combined… that’s the acquisition engine.

If you’re not a subscriber…

Let’s revisit the Prospect Lifecycle quickly before talking about accounts

In earlier articles I covered lead routing, lead attribution, and the lead lifecycle. Revisiting this topic VERY quickly.

• Lead - any inquiry

• Marketing Qualified Lead - passes our lead score. "This is a lead that Marketing deems sales ready"

• Sales Accepted Lead - this is an MQL that has been moved into a sequence or called by an SDR. "This is a lead that Sales Development AGREES with Marketing that is sales ready"

• Sales Qualified Lead - this is a lead that the SDR has successfully talked to, passes your qualification criteria, and has set a meeting with your Account Executive

• Sales Accepted Opportunity - this is a meeting that was held between the AE and the prospect and that the AE agrees with the SDR it is qualified AND agrees there is an opportunity here with a realistic timeline.

Now if you convert leads to contacts, treat all contacts the same as leads

Aim for creating feedback loops. So make sure you build in the following fields:

• Disqualified reason (contact, lead)

• Closed Lost reason

Each time the next team member rejects you want to capture that information and host a post mortem in the form of a Loss Review.

Operating Cadence: Loss Review

But if you really wanted a definition of Account Based Sales

Account-based sales is a sales approach that targets companies. The key term to hone in on is that this approach focuses on the company/account as opposed to individuals/leads/contacts. From a general outreach perspective you’re messaging to specific individuals. But what if you could change your perspective and target the organization itself.

• Target #1: manager level

• Target #2: director level

• Target #3: VP level

Each of these personas would have different types of messaging targeted at them by the marketing team. Also, the type of messaging you use would go one step further. You bring in messaging tailored to their segment (Enterprise or Mid Market) or to their industry. Now you’re getting really granular. Your goal is to focus on high-value engagements instead of short-term call-to-actions (CTAs). Instead of just going for the qualification call or demo you instead focus on a series of touchpoints that add value to the prospect:

• Intro videos

• Case Studies

• Invitations to a webinar

• Teaser demos

• Invitation to visit your booth at an event you’ll be at

• Tailored executive outreach

• Demo request

This works well for B2B and less so for B2C. The thesis here is that account-based sales requires your entire company to buy into the process. That means that sales, marketing, CS, finance and product come together to develop a uniquely integrated experience for the prospect throughout their journey with you.

One way to do this is to create an Account Lifecycle. Let’s dig in.

Let’s say for example you have a field called Account Lifecycle. And you fill it in with the following values:

• No engagement

• Intent

• Marketing engaged

• Marketing qualified

• Sales engaged

• Opportunity

• Customer

• Customer - opportunity

• Recycle - cool off

• Disqualified

This would allow you to build a quick report of any rep’s territory to see the status of their accounts. It will also serve as a basis for Operation to review the Disqualified data for future planning purposes.

Here’s how this looks from an activity diagram POV: