Driving Revenue from Target Accounts: Operation TAP DANCER

Hey everyone, Stef Iacono, EMEA Marketing Director here.

I wanted to share more about Operation TAP DANCER; an orchestrated play to sell to our EMEA target account list. Building on the strategy outlined by @Saima our SVP of Marketing, this program led to 80%+ of our revenue being generated from Target Accounts - so i'd consider that a huge success!

Intro to Tap Dancer

First up, as an FYI TAP DANCER stands for Target Account Penetration: Develop Accounts Now, Create Extra Revenue (sorry, not sorry!). I got a bit carried away with the analogy as you'll see…

This post outlines the basics of how we set it up and over the coming weeks I will share:

1. How we select target accounts for sales
2. How we set the sales team up to prospect into target accounts (sales engagement)
3. Marketing campaigns we delivered alongside sales (field marketing examples)

The general approach

By mapping our target accounts against a reach/intent matrix, we created tailored marketing and sales plays, based on where accounts were in their buying journey (intent) and how engaged our sales had been with the account (reach).

• Account Reach: This 6sense RevenueAI score predicts the likelihood of opening an opportunity based off how and when the account was contacted by your team. This includes various factors, including activity (the number of outreach activities), multithreading (the relevancy and number of different personas), type (e.g. phone call, meeting, email, LinkedIn), and recency of outreach. This score is weighted heavily to sales activities vs marketing touchpoints. (Reach score is available to all customers with predictive models.)

• Account Prioritisation: Once we had our account reach, we layered on intent scores to categorise accounts into four quadrants. 

Classifying and Targeting Accounts

Here’s how we segmented our disco-themed Tap Dancer Quadrants (in order of Account Executive priority), plus an overview of how we tailored engagement for the accounts in each segment.

• Known Ravers (high reach / high intent)
• Dancing Strangers (low reach / high intent)
• Silent Spectators (low reach / low intent)
• Reluctant Floorfillers (high reach / high intent)

Known Ravers : Our next Sales Meeting (aka Stage 0)

High Reach / High Intent Accounts

Importance: High intent so a prime target. These accounts have already been prospected to but have not converted (hence the high reach) so this is time to pull out the big guns!

Approach: We leveraged high-value CTAs and multi-threading, including notes from our exec team and proactive ABX campaigns.

Ownership: AEs played a pivotal role in owning this approach - the assumption is the BDR has already been prospecting the account for it to be high reach. The AE at this point should be looking at the quality of outreach and strategising how to get the account engaged.

Dancing Strangers: Future Sales Meetings

Low & Medium Reach / High Intent Accounts

Importance: These high-intent accounts, who have received minimal outreach from 6sense, are most likely to be wooed by a competitor if we didn’t get in front of the buying team.

Approach: Our approach centred on traditional multithreading, sharing relevant content, and engaging prospects through field marketing/ABX.

Ownership: AEs and BDRs collaborated closely to create opportunities - typically a BDR would lead the way on prospecting to new 6QAs (high intent accounts).

Silent Spectators: Our next 6QA

Low & Medium Reach / Low Intent Accounts

Importance: This is the pipeline for the pipeline! AKA - if we don't nurture these pre-6QA accounts now we'll end up lonely on the dancefloor later.

Approach: Build a value-driven relationship with the entire buying group. Ensure that every account knows their AE and that we have mapped the buying group correctly. Educational content, invites to webinars and community events were crucial here.

Ownership: AEs own this part supported heavily by marketing. BDRs sometimes support their AE for larger accounts but because the aim here is not to book a meeting (but to educate and build a relationship) we found the BDR's time was often better spent elsewhere.

Reluctant Shufflers: Not a Focus

High Reach / Low Intent Accounts

Importance: The risk here is annoying the account!

Approach: We don't focus heavily on them but include them in always-on activities.

Ownership: Marketing-only e.g. content-led nurture emails and invites to events.

Best-in-Class Campaign Methodology

As always, our campaigns followed our proven 5-step methodology: 

• Select the best accounts
• Know about them
• Engage the right way 
• Collaborate with sales
• …And track real results

Our No Spam principles were also central to engaging the right way. Rather than taking a blanket approach to accounts in each quadrant, this meant graduating accounts along their buying journey with relevant activities.

Doing this effectively relied on clear alignment with our sales team for each quadrant: who are we trying to engage, how should we be engaging them, and what are our desired outcomes?

Working with Sales

To engage the high-priority high-intent accounts (Strangers & Ravers), we wanted sales to focus on tailored, persona-specific outreach. But this was a joint effort, with marketing supplying content and messaging, as well as support to engage and educate lower-intent accounts (Shufflers & Spectators).

Campaign Content and Messaging: We supplied cheat sheets with persona- and stage-based content and messaging. 

Visibility and Insights: We provided sales teams with dedicated SFDC dashboards, showing accounts' quadrant placement, key info, account mapping, and contact activity post-6QA. This gave our AEs sales teams visibility and insights they needed to personalise messaging and use the supplied content appropriately.

Account mapping: AEs had to check whether the people within each account were accurately mapped. Accuracy was important as it played a pivotal role in delivering one of our most effective plays – the no-spam nurture. This nurture involved valuable advice shared between members of our teams and their peers in target accounts.

Campaign Inspiration: Our Greatest Hits

We’d already run a variety of campaigns in EMEA. Tap Dancer was an opportunity to refine and reuse the campaigns that had the biggest impact on our pipeline. 

We took our highest-performing campaigns and amplified them, making them multi-channel, cross-departmental, and fully integrated. These campaigns included: 

• Peer to Peer Nurture Emails (40% of won accounts) 
• Community Events (31% of won accounts)
• Tier 1 Expo/Tradeshow (13% of all won deals)

The Results…

When we started in Q3, Operation Tap Dancer played a central role in helping us hit our pipeline target, we saw AE created pipeline jump by 50% (and that continued into Q4) however the best results were mentioned at the top of this post… 80%+ of EMEA revenue in Q4 came from Target Accounts!