Leveraging Account Based Sales for High-Value Conversions

Do you feel like you’re spinning your wheels with sales lately? The problem might be your approach. Traditional sales methods involve a large pool of leads, meaning your team expels a lot of time and effort to identify viable prospects. They probably waste too much time on low-quality buyers and miss out on high-value prospects. 

The traditional B2B sales environment worsens things with cumbersome processes and a lengthy sales cycle that’s difficult to track. It impacts your budget and prevents sustainable growth.

Selling in a digital environment further complicates things for many sales teams. It’s too easy to miss opportunities because you use too many different tools to try to manage your leads.

It’s time to adjust your sales approach to something more coordinated and easier to track. Account-based sales is the ideal solution for teams seeking to overcome the above challenges and close more deals. 

A Brief Overview of Account Based Sales

The account-based approach to sales is deeply rooted in cross-team coordination and focuses on targeting accounts identified as high-value prospects. Using buyer engagement data, your team can identify the most interested leads and focus their efforts on them instead of wasting time on low-quality targets.

Further, sales teams use a multi-channel approach to reach priority prospects from various angles. Your sales team takes point, but you would also include marketing, finance, and legal to create a comprehensive approach. 

Account-based sales development helps your team create a customised experience for your buyers, something the B2B market desires. It’s the ideal option for meeting each prospect’s needs. 

Benefits of Account-Based Sales 

Account based selling addresses many of the shortcomings you encounter with traditional models. 

• Coordination between departments for a comprehensive sales approach.
• Creates a cohesive approach to sales that begins with the first interaction and continues through onboarding and beyond.
• Streamlines the sales pipeline. 
• Deliver a consistent and personalised buyer journey.
• Set sales teams up for successful upselling and cross-selling.
• It ensures that B2B sales teams attend to every one of the buyer’s decision-makers. 
• Reduce time and money spent on customer acquisition.
• Boost conversion rates and deal values.

Why You Need an Account Based Sales Strategy

Adopting an account based sales strategy fits overall company goals because it’s a comprehensive yet targeted approach. Teams shift their focus to provide more targeted efforts to target accounts that yield higher conversion rates.

Forward helps teams adopt an account-based sales strategy by providing a platform to organise everything. Start with cross-team collaboration through shared drives and real-time interactions to align your teams. Identify high-quality prospects with real-time buyer insights and craft personalised campaigns with dedicated workspaces for each.

3 Steps to Account Based Sales Development

Shifting to an account-based sales strategy might sound time-consuming and complicated, but it’s easier than you think.

Build an Ideal Customer Profile

The ideal customer profile (ICP) is the foundation of any account-based sales strategy. It’s all about being highly selective about which accounts you focus on and targeting the most viable leads. Without the ICP, your team will end up spinning their wheels and wasting resources.

Since B2B sales typically involve multiple decision-makers, identifying your ICP requires input from all team members and departments. Data is the other critical factor in crafting an ideal customer profile. 

• Pull from internal data on your existing customers. Your customer relationship management (CRM) should provide a wealth of information.
• Consider your competition and the details of who’s closing deals.
• Behavioural data is valuable, like following buyer engagement analytics.
• Predictive analytics might be the most accurate option for identifying trends and your most viable leads.

Forward offers detailed buyer engagement analytics, offering your sales team valuable insights for creating a targeted ICP. With real-time data, you can identify the most interested prospects faster and prioritise your responses accordingly.

Define Buyer Personas for Key Stakeholders

It’s no secret that modern B2B sales involve several decision-makers for each lead. Sales teams need to be able to speak to each decision-maker involved at pain points in the process if they hope to convert.

Delivering a tailored sales experience is necessary to ensure every decision-maker feels represented and understood in the sales process. You need to be able to answer every concern from each involved party.

Forward provides sales and marketing teams with options for personalisation and segmentation to address each decision-maker on their level. You can encourage cross-team collaboration to ensure each stakeholder gets the information they need to decide.

Track Results

In many ways, account-based sales strategy begins and ends with data. Continuously tracking metrics allows you to monitor your successes and make adjustments as needed. Monitoring your progress allows your sales team to identify opportunities for improvement.

Forward makes it easy to adjust your sales materials to meet current buyer demands. By coordinating all materials in centralised workspaces, your team can add relevant materials as needed or adjust dialogue to deliver a tailored experience.

Account-Based Sales Content Strategies

Account-based sales development is a continuous process that leverages multiple platforms to deliver messaging. The system creates opportunities to meet each decision-maker where they like to operate while maintaining consistent messaging across the board.

Social Media 

Social media remains a powerful ally for B2B sales teams, especially platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.

At the simplest level, you can engage with prospects through social media platforms to build relationships. You can also run paid campaigns to get your messaging and brand in front of desirable leads. Digging deeper and monitoring chatter on social media provides valuable insights into what clients like, don’t like, and need. 

Interactive Content

Developing interactive content is crucial for account-based sales because it gives prospects something to do, which holds their attention longer. It’s a way to boost buyer engagement while providing more metrics and deeper insights.

SaaS firms can benefit from developing interactive presentations with polls and questions to engage prospects while educating them on your product. Similarly, interactive trials can work wonders with buyers because they get to see for themselves how your product can help them.

Forward’s digital sales room supports teams with delivering interactive content through personalised micro-sites and mutual action plans that make a lasting impression.

Email

Email campaigns remain a staple in B2B sales, and they can be exceptionally effective when targeted to the right audience. 

Did you know? Over 60% of B2B sales teams report email marketing as being effective. With an average open rate of 15%, it’s hard to argue with email’s efficacy.

The thing about email campaigns is that you can automate a lot of the process without losing that personal touch. Create templates with key components, like a call to action, snappy subject lines, and personal greetings. Then, use an email marketing platform to segment your audience and automate the campaigns. You should easily be able to track results through the platform to gauge the effectiveness.

Forward makes this strategy simple by providing integrations with top email marketing platforms to create a seamless experience for sales teams.

Webinars and Workshops

Though time-consuming, developing webinars and workshops can deliver where other strategies can’t. They combine the interactive experience with customization, and information to speak to different decision makers. 

Forward simplifies things for both sales and marketing teams by offering a platform to create and share presentations that resonate with your separate audiences within a company.

Best Practices for Account Based Sales

As you develop an account-based sales strategy, consider some of the best practices for success in account targeting.

Structure Your Sales Team Accordingly

Successful account-based sales development involves input from several teams. Your sales team should collaborate with marketing, customer support, product management, and an account executive at the minimum.

It might seem complicated to pull all of these teams together, but Forward makes cross-team collaboration possible with shared workspaces and real-time communication, like chat and commenting features.

Track Key Metrics

It’s important to track the important metrics to get insight into buyer engagement. What do they interact with, what do they avoid, how much time do they spend on various pieces of content? You also want to know about the average contract value and lifetime value of existing and potential customers to support predictive analytics.

These metrics provide the insight you need to identify those high-quality prospects. They also help you develop irresistible offers to draw people in, like white papers, webinars, and live demos.

Develop an Account-Based Selling Strategy

Crafting a successful account based sales strategy should be a long-term effort rather than an instant shift. Instead of moving all of your teams immediately to the new system, break them into sections. Try moving 15 to 20 percent of each team to account-based sales simultaneously. 

A gradual shift to the new system allows you to track metrics, identify problem areas, and adjust to increase the overall customer success here.

Elevate Account-Based Sales with Forward

The account based selling model is not a new strategy, but it is gaining popularity in the digital sales environment. This account based marketing strategy gained traction due to its effectiveness in building sustainable growth while increasing buyer engagement.

Forward's digital sales room supports teams with the transition to an account-based sales strategy by streamlining the sales processes. Teams can easily collaborate in real time to ensure a seamless experience for buyers. 

Plus, you get access to buyer engagement analytics to support building an ideal customer profile and personalising content for all prospects. Forward makes it easy for sales and marketing teams everywhere to deliver interactive, personalised content to every buyer.

‍Leverage the power of Forward’s digital sales room to craft your account-based sales strategy. Try it for free today!