In my opinion, top B2B salespeople are great at mapping out all stakeholders and variables within their target accounts. We can’t do this for all accounts due to the costs and time associated with this process, however we do for strategic accounts typically falling into the enterprise sales category.
The process used for this exercise is called account planning and has historically leveraged mostly firmographic data that allows you to map out organizational structures, geographies, departments, titles, etc.
With the advent of the cloud and browser-based products, we were able to get more visibility into technographic data such as other products that the company uses.
These data points were typically organized to define a B2B sales organization’s ideal customer profile or “ICP”.
As you figured out due to the title of this article, today I’m going to explain how to add product-led data and tools to your account planning models.
Here are the variables that your new product-led account plan might feature:
Company Name and Subsidiaries – Sometimes there are company name variations and subsidiaries that we want to be aware of when mastering our target accounts. How do these affect the way that an organization makes decisions and operates?
Technologies Used – Having a comprehensive understanding of all the technologies used by your target accounts, particularly the ones that are used by the departments you are selling into, is critical. Not only will it allow you to understand their current stage but will allow you to understand the possible integrations you’ll have to do. It will also help you establish yourself as the expert partner who understands their world.
Locations – This is less important in the era of inside sales, however does make it easier to know what geographies certain stakeholders reside in for strategic meetings, events, and who else could be connected to them.
Departments – Your solution might involve multiple stakeholders across different departments to get a deal done from a sales perfective. And because it’s an enterprise-sized organization that you are selling to, you’ll want to understand who on the finance, operations, and legal teams are involved in getting deals done.
Personas, Titles, User Types, Role (influencer, decision-makers, etc), and Reporting Structure – These are the people that work at the companies segmented by variables such as title, how they would use your solution, their role in your sales motion, and who they report to/work with.
Personalized Demos – You want to create personalized demos for each persona involved in your deal and interacting with your product. These in most cases would be what I call micro-demos, which are 2-3 clicks to value based on who the persona is. You’ll probably be required to create a more comprehensive proof-of-concept depending on the complexity of your product, what your competitors are doing to win the deal, and what the prospect’s requirements are.
Product-Led Engagement By Persona – You will want to define what product-led experiences you’ll guide prospects into and then define what meaningful engagement and usage looks like based on persona. These experiences might be free trials, freemium products, leave behind demos, app installs, etc.
Marketing-Led Engagement & Inbound Status – This is looking at whether anyone from the target account and their subsidiaries have ever engaged with any of your marketing channels and/or assets, and ultimately completed a web form submission.
Opportunity Status – Hopefully this is an easy report to pull from your CRM, however, you want to look at whether there were any sales qualified engagements with any stakeholder and department within the target account and their subsidiaries.
Social, Past Employer, Edu Connections – This looks at who in your company is connected on Linkedin and Twitter, worked with, and/or went to university with any of the stakeholders that are included in the account plan.
If you have any variables to add to this model or any overall feedback please contact me at jorge (at) getreprise.com.
