Selecting Target Accounts for Sales

Stefano Iacono

It’s been just over a year since we started planning our first “proper” EMEA ABM playbook for our target accounts - the birth of Tap Dancer (see post on Driving Revenue from Target Accounts).

As we've just gone through an account refresh, I thought might be interesting to dig in a little to the first part of this process, which was of course account selection.

Select (and Segment) the Best Accounts 

Our EMEA Rev Ops star, Michelle, collaborated with EMEA sales leadership to select our target accounts. Leveraging 6sense and Salesforce data, they created territories for each rep using a mixture of:

1. Frontline Knowledge – including whether we had any old opportunities or existing relationships
2. Intent and Profile Fit Scores - to help us narrow in on the accounts with the highest likelihood to convert (see Account Profile Fit in the FAQ here for more).
3. Technographics and pre-intent - specifically whether the companies have a compatible tech-stack and/or are recently funded.

We also gave the AEs the opportunity to bring their own data and target accounts that fit the campaign. Here is an excerpt from our internal deck explaining in more detail.

And in terms of what else is good to know about this process:

• Each AE ended up with around 60 accounts, tiered into Tier 1 (20) and Tier 2 (40) by the AE themselves.
• We do one major overhaul every financial year which is effectively a renew of most accounts.
• At the end of every quarter the AEs can select a few accounts to swap in or/out based on learnings e.g. if it's not a fit.

End result…. we had a hugely successful year - and that can only happen after picking the best accounts!

Will share more about how we help sales with their prospecting and the types of campaigns we run in the coming weeks, thanks all!

Justine Eads

Really interested to hear how ABM and Marketing stepped in and supported.