Jarrod Johnson, Chief Customer Officer at TaskUs talks about DemandFarm’s Account Planner
Jarrod Johnson Chief Customer Officer at TaskUs stopped by to chat with Kevin Gaither, Jamie Carney and Pete Jansons at SaasHoles to talk about DemandFarm’s Account Planner. Jarrod shares his experience of using DemandFarm’s Key Account Management Software and goes ahead saying “DemandFarm is the most robust, integrated strategic account planning tool I’ve ever seen.”
Envisaging the Future of Account Planning and the Role of Analytics and AI
Every account or customer is like a fingerprint – unique and having a distinct persona and behavior. Developing an account-centric culture is among the top mandates for every company, but not every company has an effective way to track its progress. Initially, companies relied on CRM for opportunity management, but still lacked in processes to handle large account management. Account Planning Tools were created to help firms provide the required intelligence into their key accounts. As the environment has changed, account planning tools also have had to evolve to handle new opportunities and help enterprises resolve their existing challenges. Enterprises must carefully create shorter, bite-sized data and content in appropriate formats for 30/45/60-minute virtual meetings to ensure comprehension and respect time commitments. It is also important to prioritize information that is critical to educate customers and provide buying help and requires stakeholder inputs and/or approval to move conversations forward. Learn More: The Future of Key Account Management Report – A Global CSO study by DemandFarm Leveraging Analytics for Key Account Planning Analytics is another powerful arsenal in account planning tools. Analytics can play a precise role in account centricity. Armed with detailed insights, you could prepare detailed proposals/quotes depending on each key account requirement. Enterprises can review target achievements and create reports which facilitate the creation of apprised account management decision-making and strategy formulation. This will help to prepare pricing documentation for the business’s products/services prior to sending financial proposals to key accounts. Analytics can also help in identifying the future trends and opportunities in the industry as enterprises can not only understand what their customers are trying to tell them but also their future plans and concerns. Most importantly, analytics can help in throwing insights on the non-captured value of a customer such as referrals and learning and innovation benefits, which may add to the economic value derived from Customer Profitability Analysis and Customer Lifetime Value. Watch Now: The Shifting Landscape of Strategic Account Management / Key Account Management (featuring SAMA) Leveraging AI for Key Account Planning AI is definitely going to impact almost every field, and it’s only a matter of time before it starts impacting the account planning process too. Currently, most of the key processes in the account planning or management space involve a level of cognitive ability and thinking to create a unique value proposition for specific clients. Though these are early days, AI can and will probably evolve to a stage where AI tools embedded within the account planning tools are able to guide which parts of a client’s engagement can grow further in engagement and which are the ones at risk. Watch Now: The Changing Role of Technology in Key Account Management (featuring Forrester) By 2025, Gartner expects 80% of B2B sales interactions between buyers and suppliers to happen in digital channels. The future of account planning will hence see a huge transformation in strategy, processes, and resource allocation that moves the process from being seller-centric to buyer-centric and from analog to hyper-automated, digital-first engagement with customers. Account Planning Tools will also have features where it will be possible for enterprises to collaborate in real-time with their clients. It will increasingly be common to co-create solutions by inviting clients to collaborate using whiteboarding tools. Increasingly, decision-making will be based on data, analytics, and AI, not on intuition and experience. Organizations must be ready to engage the “everywhere customer”. A shift to buyer-oriented, not product-oriented integrated commercial channels will be hence critical to meet customers’ changing expectations and preferences for digital and self-service channels.
Sales Playbooks for Key Account Management – Everything You Need to Know
All salespeople dream of rolling out strategies that run high on the ‘leads’ factor. But sales is not just about sustainable leads – it is about engaging with your audience and translating the brand’s offerings into tangible solutions to convert them into ideal customers. But how can you do that effectively without resorting to trial-and-error for every customer? This is where a sales playbook comes in. A sales playbook is a how-to guide that puts the correct strategy and tools at salespeople’s fingertips to maneuver every sales cycle stage skillfully. It walks your sales personnel through commonly-encountered scenarios, including prospecting and nurturing leads, when to sell what product or service, dealing with different types of audiences, and more. If understanding what a sales playbook comprises can be a head-scratcher at times, what with its many elements, knowing how to make it work for Key Accounts is doubly tough. Nevertheless, employing a playbook polished by their sales experts unsurprisingly gives companies an edge. However, rote observance of processes that may have gone out of date can stall, if not seriously impede, this growth. Unfortunately, even as fledgling digital applications gained traction within most business departments in the 2000s, many companies failed to leverage technologies to their full extent for sales. Adapting Sales Playbooks for the Digital Selling Age Two recent phenomena have turned this attitude on its head. First, ubiquitous digital interactions — that have reshaped the customer journey and, subsequently, the sales process. Second, the onset of the pandemic and the massive shift to remote work, which has forced sales personnel to navigate their business relationships online and, often, individually. This makes the sales process a bit tricky, especially when you consider the high customer expectations most key account leads harbor. Today, every employee reflects the company, and salespeople more so, for being the company’s first representatives. A consistent and uniform approach while mostly working separately can be difficult to accomplish if mishandled. This is where the digitization of processes can help. If incorporated smartly and appropriately, it can help companies capture and retain strategic accounts. For example, DemandFarm’s Org Chart digitizes an organization’s existing internal hierarchy, relationships, influence, and decision power (read more on this in the next section). All this and more deliver the following key benefits: Ease of Transfer: It is important for sales reps to have a connected view of data, and digitization enables the entire sales pipeline to be transparent to all team members. This means that if a salesperson is unable to entertain their prospective key client, anyone else from the team can take over with ease. Analytics Management: With every piece of information online, monitoring performance indicators, generating reports, and analyzing customer data to improve pitch and process is effortless. Better Process Efficiency: Complex internal processes increase the burden on sales reps. Digitization can mitigate this by facilitating sales teams to use less time and effort and fewer resources to do the same work, equipping them with more efficient processes. While the advantages of digitizing your sales playbook to manage your key accounts are clear, is it possible to do so without disrupting operations? Cue in sales tools for the digital world. Role of Digital Tools to Make This Easy To circumvent possible rejection of your transformed sales playbook, you must ensure two things before zeroing in on any tool. Understand the needs of your business: With more than a thousand vendors in the sales tech arena, there is no dearth of tools. However, it is important to understand which of these tools is ideal for your business requirements lest your investment goes to waste. Involve Your Team: Before deciding on the tool, talk to your team members about the issues they face and invite suggestions for possible solutions. Your sales team needs to be comfortable with your chosen tool to employ it efficiently. Components of an Ideal Sales Playbook in KAM Now that you’ve got a good idea of what to do before selecting your ideal tool, let’s go over the types of sales tools available to you for key account management. Sales Intelligence Sales intelligence involves analyzing data and using it to create insightful reports and estimate future performance. Whether it be sales performance reports or productivity logs or analytics on strategic account behavior, sales intelligence, as a function, takes charge of all data extraction and scrutinization. Relationship Intelligence is a crucial part of any Sales Intelligence process as it helps to map all the relationships and interactions among the teams of customers, both current and potential. It indicates the nature of each entity’s connections and influence on others. Relationship Mapping is important for any Sales Intelligence process because: It helps to gain insights into the relationship, no matter whether it be in terms of age, tenure, seniority, or any other factor. It is useful when trying to understand the growth rate of an organization, which can be achieved by examining the number and nature of relationships in the company. It is integral to any sales process, especially in business-to-business (B2B) companies. This is because the company’s growth is usually dependent on the growth of its relationships and how its team locks down key deals. Sales Enablement As the name suggests, sales enablement empowers salespersons with the resources they need to prospect, close, and nurture leads. This is facilitated by analyzing the data from the marketing, content, and sales departments and drawing on it to align the three cycles, consequently enabling sales personnel to close deals. Benefits of Sales Enablement include: Salespersons can effectively capture key accounts by streamlining communication between departments and providing resources like content and information. The sales team can be better prepared and equipped for upcoming meetings and presentations. Advanced analytics helps companies to understand the current state of their sales cycle, allowing them to identify areas of improvement and highlight the highest-value opportunities. Sales playbooks are an effective way of organizing both your sales enablement and relationship intelligence data into one place. You can read
Stakeholder Mapping for Key Accounts- How Digital Account Planning Tools can make an Impact?
Stakeholder management is gaining more and more traction in recent years with ever-evolving customer needs and the advent of technological solutions for integrating relationship-building channels and capabilities. The expectations from both external and internal stakeholders are getting increasingly higher and pushing the envelope of stakeholder relationship management. Fred Reichheld, the Bain Fellow and Management Consultant at Bain & Company says that “For every customer that complains, there are 26 who don’t say anything. And instead of vocalizing their frustrations to your team, they simply stop buying from you and cancel their subscription.” This might not seem like much in traditional low-value sales where sellers have a large number of customers to cater to but it makes a massive difference in your bottom line when you are dealing with high-value key accounts. In fact, a study by Bain & Company states that by improving customer retention merely by 5%, the company’s profits can go up by as much as 95%. When you look at these two facts in tandem, it becomes critical to focus on the key stakeholder relationships not only for their sake but for yours as well. Who are the Stakeholders? Stakeholders in its general sense is a very broad term that can go on to include any individual or group whose decisions can either affect you and your business or be affected by the decisions you take for your business. These could be your customers, employees, partners, consultants, investors, and so on. In the context of key account management, the stakeholders are the people within your key accounts that have a say in the buying process, also known as external stakeholders, and the people within your organization that are overlooking and ensuring the buying process is not only a success but as smooth as possible are the internal stakeholders or the relationship owners. The unfolding of the modern B2B sales process has given rise to buying groups that consist of a group of people that increasingly possess more product knowledge and technical awareness that not only require their expectations to be met but need to be wowed too. This places the onus on your key account management team to step up their game and craft and execute an account-centric stakeholder relationship building and management strategy. Gartner Research reports that your customer is no longer relying on your sales and support team for attaining the information about your product or solution, they are conducting independent research and relying on both offline and online channels to make up their mind. A report by UserIQ states that 87% of respondents from SaaS organizations that have a churn rate of less than 1% report that, they are fully or somewhat aligned on key customer relationship management. To keep the churn rate at its minimum, you will need to keep your communication with your key accounts authentic, targeted, and relevant to keep your account engaged which is made possible by data-backed stakeholder mapping. What is Customer Stakeholder Mapping? 1. Definition of the Stakeholders’ Goals Stakeholder Mapping begins with defining the interests and goals of the buying centers in your key accounts. Knowing what they need and want can not only enable you to assess if the account is a good fit but will also help you provide a tailored offering that the stakeholders won’t be able to refuse. The key account buyer not only demands convenience in terms of accessing the information they might need but also want the communication and the expert consulting services to be authentic, targeted, relevant, and timely. 2. Segmentation of Stakeholders The next step in the stakeholder mapping process is to segment the individuals or buying groups with respect to their roles, attitude, influence, and the amount of budget they control. This Relationship attribution is the key to stakeholder analysis as it provides data-backed insights into understanding your stakeholders’ interests and goals. When analyzed properly it could also help you comprehend who is on your side and who is against, what pressure they are under with respect to meeting certain goals, and what are the internal dynamics of the organization so that you can strategize accordingly. Your key account managers need to know how to strategically map these individuals within accounts with respect to their role, their stances, and the amount of budget they control. All this stakeholder intelligence needs to be actioned upon and monetized to expand and grow that account. 3. Mapping of Stakeholder Relationships The next step in stakeholder mapping is to dissect the relationships that your internal stakeholder team has with the external team and also the ones that the individuals within their team have within themselves. This would help you learn who can positively or negatively influence who and to what extent? We all know that the account-based selling scenario can get very complex with multiple buying centers and buying committees that are responsible for these buying jobs. Individuals within these committees not only hold the power to influence the buying decisions (for example, by just delaying the purchase process and preventing it from progressing to the next stage) but can also influence other decision-makers within the committee to rule in their favor. Your key account managers need to know how to strategically map these individuals within accounts with respect to their role, their stances, and the amount of budget they control. 4. Nurturing the Stakeholder Relationships Stakeholder management does not end once the deal is closed but is an ongoing process that lasts throughout the customers’ lifetime which needs to be extended as long as the mutual business interests are sustained. Developing these long-lasting relationships turns recent adopters into loyal long-term customers. Once you have the above attributes of your stakeholders mapped out, you will have clarity on what communication needs to be directed at whom and when. Maintaining an Engagement cadence with the key contacts is as important as the level of engagement. Maintaining an Engagement cadence with the key contacts is as important as the level of engagement. e.g
Power of Relationship Intelligence for Key Accounts
Relationship Intelligence for Key / Strategic / Large Accounts Let’s face it- enterprise selling isn’t easy. There are dozens of similar products in the market, and figuring out what your customers want is a whole other challenge altogether. From days of yore, sales has always been about understanding your customers and their needs. A great salesperson goes beyond this, and leverages his relationships to solve problems clients face in their growth journey by cross-selling and up-selling. Hence it goes without saying that customer data is a crucial element to crack the enterprise selling puzzle. This comprises everything from your business experience with your clients- from who your champions are to who could be blocking possible deals. With the advent of digital selling, global organizations have to ensure that they are able to capture, track, analyze and act on this relationship data. They can no longer afford to ignore tribal information across their sales organization, and risk missing out on potential opportunities to grow their key accounts. Strategic account planning process would be rendered ineffective and slow without these facets. A strategic account will have many many contacts we will have to manage, communicate & build relationships. The questions are Who are those right people? Who is on your side- your biggest supporters and detractors? What is the formal hierarchy of those people? What are the formal or informal influences between those people? Who has the highest decision making power- what are the buying roles? With whom and when have we won or lost opportunities in the past? Who are pursuing active opportunities today? Who is that champion who can introduce me to that ‘unaware’ contact with a big budget? What is your level of interaction and cadence of engagement? Most of the above answers are what we sometimes call ‘tribal knowledge’, and are in the heads of multiple people in our company. Consolidating all this knowledge into a meaningful algorithm and insights that can lead to action is called Relationship Intelligence. Enter relationship intelligence! At a basic level, key account relationship intelligence is just all the information you have about your contacts, stored in CRMs like Salesforce and MS Dynamics. This consists of how many interactions you have had with your clients, their timeline and budgets, the service/product they are interested in, etc. In a nutshell, it is everything you have about a single potential client! Good relationship intelligence goes one step further and tries to gauge sentiment to give you the true picture of your business relationships. It is critical to understand if your outreach is actually effective, where you should prioritize your efforts to meet your sales targets. So now we know that relationship intelligence is the key to this- let’s take a closer look at how relationship mapping tools can aid global clients in their digital transformation journey! Relationship Mapping Tools – the future is today! Sales Prioritization Sales teams are always on the lookout for strategic intelligence which would help identify gaps, can save time, help them advise contacts, close deals faster, and generate more revenue. A salesperson has hundreds of leads to follow up at any time and the ability to prioritize is critical to meeting his targets. Relationships Mapping Tools help make life easier by leveraging sales data to give you clear and relevant insights about your contacts, giving you visibility in the client organization, and helping identify where to focus your efforts. CRM Enhancement & User Adoption A recent LinkedIn survey pointed out how ‘top performers are more likely to say that sales intelligence tools are “extremely critical” in closing deals by a margin of 49% to 29%’. However, parallelly Salesforce points out that 91% of CRM data is actually incomplete. Therefore, there is a clear gap in user adoption and CRM data integrity, which is leading to salespersons missing out on deals. True Relationship Intelligence tools bridge this by having two-way sync with CRM. This ensures that you don’t spend your resources on manual data entry, and focus on what you do best- selling! Data Visualization & Insights Sure, you have all your sales data inside your CRM but it is of no use if you can’t make sense of it. Sales organizations need to always have a clear picture of what’s happening with their networks, and churn of relevant stakeholders, etc. Data Visualization helps break down sales data in an accessible way, helping identify patterns and trends. It is also great for leadership to understand the status of engagement with clients, tracking communication flow between relevant stakeholders, mapping power and influence of client contacts, and identifying revenue at risk- a 360° view of the entire strategic account management process. We at DemandFarm recognized very early on the importance of relationship intelligence in the digital sales journey. In fact, we have worked with over 250 customers & 25,000+ Account Managers to become a leader in the Digital Key Account Planning space today! The Org Chart by DemandFarm helps you visualize relationship intelligence and enables you to keep track of all your major account relationships. Our product guarantees that you break past top-line targets and adds a dimension to your sales planning process by forging wider, deeper, and richer relationships.
Account Management 101 – A Complete Guide for Key Account Managers
Account Management: A Comprehensive Guide Account management is the process of building and nurturing strong relationships with key customers to drive growth and revenue for a business. It’s all about understanding your clients’ needs, providing exceptional service, and creating value that keeps them returning. Account Management is all about identifying and focusing on your top 20% of accounts, which have the potential to drive 80% of your revenue while being a trusted partner/advisor to them. As a trusted partner or advisor, you’re not just there to sell them your products or services; you’re there to help them achieve their business goals and overcome their challenges. Hence, getting to know your clients and their businesses is crucial to anticipating their needs and proactively offering solutions that make their lives easier. A study by Global Partners Training found that 61% of companies reported that strategic account management or key account management programs helped them increase their revenue and customer satisfaction. Account management is about being a trusted partner who helps your clients succeed. This comprehensive ‘Account Management 101’ guide explores the fundamentals of account management, the importance and key responsibilities of account managers, and account management best practices. Continue reading. Download: White Space Analysis Template to Unlock Key Account Growth Definition: What is Account Management? Account management is all about nurturing strong, long-lasting relationships with your key customer accounts. It’s not just a one-time transaction; it’s a continuous process of managing and strengthening those crucial client partnerships throughout their journey with your business. The role of an account manager is like being a trusted advisor to your most valuable accounts. They oversee the sales process, making sure things run smoothly from start to finish. But it’s not just about closing the deal. To understand Account Management better, here is an example of Jane. Jane is an account manager at an organization that offers a CRM solution. Her first task is guiding her customer – a retail chain smoothly through the sales process – coordinating meetings, demos, negotiations, and everything required to close the deal successfully. But her work doesn’t stop there. Once the contract is signed, Jane starts planning for the long term. She develops a strategy to ensure a seamless rollout and implementation of the new CRM across all the client’s store locations. She coordinates training sessions for the end users and schedules regular check-ins to gather feedback. Account managers are also responsible for planning and ensuring there’s a solid strategy in place to maintain business continuity with your customer base. Part of their job description is being on the lookout for opportunities to offer additional products or services that could benefit the customer – that’s what we call cross-selling and up-selling. As the partnership progresses, Jane is always on the lookout for opportunities to offer additional solutions. Maybe the client could benefit from an advanced analytics module to better understand their retail customer behavior. Or perhaps they need a custom integration to sync the CRM with their inventory management system or other tools in stack. Jane suggests these cross-sell and up-sell options when appropriate. The goal here is to maximize client retention and growth by really catering to customers’ needs. But account management isn’t just about keeping your best clients. The ones who have been with you from the start and played a role in your company’s success story? Those clients are invaluable assets to your organization. Developing a winning relationship with them is the secret ingredient for businesses of all kinds. Evaluate Now: Key Account Management Maturity Modelling Guide What is the importance and the role of account management? The key thing to understand about account management is that it’s all about the long game. As expert Olivier Riviere put it, true strategic accounts aren’t just big spenders – they have special meaning for growing your business over time. You need to know which accounts have that lasting potential. Account management is a continuous process of nurturing relationships, not a one-off sales transaction. It takes consistent time, effort, and investment to manage those accounts well. But make no mistake – even long-term clients could leave anytime for a competitor if you don’t give them the service they deserve. It is a long and cyclic process that takes time, effort, and money. However, those key accounts are likely to churn anytime or be snatched by your competitors. The client who has been with you for years would be a vital lead for your competitors. Hence, the chance of losing them can be detrimental for your business. A good account management strategy can prevent it. Must Watch: Liangbi David Shen, Head of Revenue Operations at Cambridge Mobile Telematics sharing their experience around building processes & strategies for Account Management. Account Management vs Sales – What’s the difference? In simple words, Sales focuses on winning new customers and net-new revenue, whereas account management recognizes existing key customers and nurtures long-term relationships with them while expanding revenue. Say you run a consumer electronics business. Your sales team focuses on promotions and discounts to offload inventory – they’re all about meeting this month’s numbers. In and out transactions. An account manager, on the other hand, might cultivate a partnership with a major retailer for years. They’d coordinate product launches, train retail assistants, and provide reporting tools – whatever that key account needs to keep doing business with you long-term and grow over time. It comes down to sales accelerating immediate numbers versus account management planning future growth by adding value to key accounts. And make no mistake – landing and retaining those high-lifetime-value accounts takes strategy and resources. Likewise, account management finds the scope for future benefits rather than the benefit of a one-time deal. Not surprisingly, the art of account management and identifying key accounts is a complex process. You have to carry out a broad business prospect to afford and manage such accounts because they are going to benefit from your time and effort in the long
Fireside Chat: Driving Strategic Account Growth With Digital Account Planning
DemandFarm is challenging global market leaders with its unique Digital Account Planning solution. Watch Milind Katti and Abhijit Gangoli live as they share with Express Computer, The Indian Express Group, their perspectives on Driving Strategic Account growth with Digital Account Planning.
Account-Based Selling – The Beginner’s Guide to B2B Account-Based Sales
Account-Based Sales Is account-based sales or account-based selling a part of your go-to-market strategy for B2B sales? Why? Why not? An account-based selling approach to growth could stem from the following reasons. Your offering caters to a specific segment of a larger market, e.g., B2B outsourcing companies in the IT services space. Your product-led growth is tapering off because of competing products. The existing inbound marketing funnel is providing marginal growth. When you sell to enterprises and check one or more points off the list above, the lead-based approach becomes futile. Through our failures and triumphs of losing and closing deals, we have now learned that it makes more sense to customize our account-based selling approach and strategy to convert rather than going through the entire range in a sales funnel. The Pareto Principle indicates that, in a B2B sales set-up, about 80% of revenue comes from only 20% of customers. In such a scenario, becoming strategic about the accounts that bring in the most revenue and investing more time, revenue and manpower in engaging and growing them has become imperative. In the mid-2010s, account-based sales or hyper-segmented selling emerged from the concept of account-based strategy. Even though the idea is comparatively recent, it holds the potential to alter the reality of how organizations buy and sell. In fact, a report by Gartner, 2020 predicts that Account-Based Selling (ABS) will be the basis of sales for most technology vendors, and the volume of this market will exceed $5 billion per year. Enterprise B2B Sales demands a shift of focus from ‘quantity’ to ‘quality.’ What is Account-Based Selling? Account-based selling is a strategic ‘hyper-segmented’ sales process that has been developed to pursue a few but high-value accounts rather than several individual leads. It focuses on enterprise selling in the B2B sales context to target larger accounts with large deal sizes and non-linear buying journeys. In such purchase processes, an average of 11 stakeholders are involved in the decision-making and account-based selling or ABS through stakeholder mapping tries to incorporate all the key people in the transaction, taking into account their business interests and offering them a consultative, customized solution. Account-Based Selling takes a holistic view and relies on cross-organizational alignment. It involves coming together of the various departments such as Sales, Customer Success, Marketing, Finance, Product, Engineering, and the C-suite within an organization to align on the same goal and strategy. It requires the teams to work together to generate high-value engagements with the people in these accounts across a number of platforms with an approach that is tailored to that account’s need. It is no longer a numbers game, but a value game with account-based selling. KAM Glossary: Crucial Account Management Terms Explained Account-Based Selling KPIs While transitioning to the account-based methodology from a traditional B2B sales approach, updating and tracking relevant KPIs becomes crucial. Following are some you can start with: 1. Account Conversion Rate Conversions are the estimation of the success of your account-based selling strategy. Following are some parameters that you can compare conversion rates with for better comprehension of the impact ABS is having on your organization. CAC: Customer Acquisition Costs LTV: Customer Lifetime Value ACV: Average Contract Value and Length of the Average Deal 2. Engagement Account-based selling improves engagement with your accounts. Despite a long nurturing process, you can quantify development by tracking how keenly the right people at an account are engaging with you. Engagement could be anything from if they talk to your sales team, if they are using your products, if they are interacting with you on your socials to if they respond to your marketing efforts. You can also track success in engagements by channels and figure out what the people in a particular account positively respond to. 3. Data Quality Rich, scientific data is one of the most important investments you will make in your account-based strategy. Data quality is built through exhaustive research of your target accounts. You need to understand divisions within your target account and identify the key stakeholders within them. Your data should include their roles and contact information and a built-in mechanism to update this information as and when it changes. 4. Sales Cycle Length The B2B sales cycle length is the number of days it takes for a deal to close. It becomes important to measure this in an effort to optimize the process through focus on the needs of the account. In ABS, personalization is the key identifier in achieving that. 5. White Space White space analysis helps you identify the gap between the information you have about the account you are targeting and the information you need to close the deal. Efforts should be made to keep this space as narrow as possible to increase the overall account-based selling effectiveness. Reduced white space opportunity will help you tailor content and communication that is more accurate and relevant for your accounts. While tracking account-based selling metrics, the focus should be on quality and long-term insight driven customer relationship building and revenue would follow. Is Account-Based Selling for You? Now that you know what KPIs you will need to track, let’s dive into if ABS is for you. Transitioning to an account-based strategy requires significant time, manpower, and investments. You need to pit the following factors against the metrics that are discussed in the above section to evaluate what is best for your organization. The ABS strategy lets you allocate resources towards targeting larger B2B accounts and close fewer deals but expand your revenue and deal size. Jon Miller from Engagio talks about the WHO, the WHAT, and the WHERE of account-based sales development to evaluate if it’s worth dipping your feet into. The WHO of Account-Based Selling The WHO describes the accounts you need to go after and the people in those accounts. The more accurately you can understand your buyer, the better- as it may give you a clear understanding of who you are marketing and selling to. Buyer Personas
Leveraging Smart Tools to Manage Key Accounts – Live Webinar
Achieving a deeper understanding of Key accounts is really critical for an account manager to grow revenue. This is only possible through improved data visualization and qualitative analysis of key account data. See how DemandFarm’s Account Planner (Enterprise) can help you scale and standardize your account plans with data-driven account planning!
No Org Chart, No Key Account Management!
See and Listen – How Veracode built thriving strategic relationships with their key accounts using the humble Org Chart from DemandFarm? Learn More: How Org Chart helped Slalom manage over 50,000 key contacts