Secrets for account-based success

Guest post by Conor Lee, Founder and CEO at HipLead

If you're in B2B sales or marketing, you've likely heard the buzz about Account-Based Sales (ABS). But what exactly is ABS and how does Outreach help support an ABS strategy?

In a three part series we’ll share what we’ve learned after implementing dozens of successful ABS programs with Outreach. We've seen great success pairing Account-Based Sales Development practices with Outreach’s technology. For our leading customers, we’ve seen increases in Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) by 300-500% in just a few months.

In this first “Secrets for Account-Based Success” post, we’ll introduce key concepts and best practices for an ABS strategy. In the following posts, we’ll cover how we leverage Outreach to target accounts and achieve success.

What is Account-Based Sales Development?

Account-Based Sales (ABS) development is a modern sales framework where the key unit of engagement between a sales team and target organization is at the Account level, instead of at the Lead or Contact level.

At HipLead, we work with leading SaaS companies to help them scale their outbound sales with customized lead generation and outbound sales consulting (companies like Zenefits, Lyft, Import.io, and many more). Here are some of the key ABS concepts we share with our new clients.

Key Account-Based Sales Concepts

1. Identify Target Accounts. Pre-qualify Accounts in advance of outbound sales and marketing efforts.
2. Assign Ownership. Each Account gets an owner, whose job is to become familiar with that organization and the various personas within the organization. They own all contacts at that Account.
3. Become Account Experts. Outbound efforts are then more focused, using the knowledge of the target Account and the various personas to make the pitches more relevant.
4. Engage Strategically. Instead of focusing on a single Contact and then going to another if attempts to reach them fail, the Account owner attempts multiple entry-points to an organization, all the while accumulating relevant knowledge about the organization.
5. Stay Consistent. Inbound leads that are identified to belong to ABS company are routed directly to the appropriate Account owner.

But Why Make the Switch to Account-Based Sales?

The reason why so many great SaaS teams have made the move to ABS is simple: ABS works.

It works because Account owners become experts on their Accounts. With every interaction, the salesperson accumulates more knowledge about the target organization as they map out the various personas. Each of these additional interactions become more personalized and relevant than a “spray and pray” approach with multiple reps contacting the same Account.

Using Outreach for ABS campaigns

In addition to applying best practices, a successful ABS program needs to be supported by world class technology. This means the right workflow to manage campaigns and the right analytics to know it’s working. Everything we do at HipLead for our clients is backed up by actual data. This means lots of A/B tests, lots of iterations on lead sourcing and lots of copy changes until we get great results.

Here are some of the key features that make Outreach well-suited for ABS:

• Account-level aggregation of all activities
• Personas baked into Sequences
• Manual Emails and Tasks for prospecting

What has worked best for you with account-based sales?