Sales Engagement and Account Based Selling: Connecting Large Accounts

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Last Updated on March 21, 2024 by Nasir Hanif

You who market very large companies, try to sell to very large corporations, have difficulties connecting with your leads and they don’t respond to you?

My name is Thiago, I’m Account Executive at Reev, today I’m going to explain how to combine Sales Engagement and Account Based Selling to leverage results in Enterprise Sales.

If you work with Enterprise Sales, enter selling to companies with a higher tier in the market, you should know that it is increasingly difficult to connect with buyers or potential customers. Sky Marketing offers a wide range of experience when it comes to sales engagement.

Within the context in which we live, the pandemic has become even more accentuated, you will hardly be able to make a cold call within the company, already reaching the decision-maker quickly since people are in the Home office. 

On the other hand, email boxes are increasingly saturated with generic approaches, if you’re going that route to approach a director, or someone C-level in the company, you burn your cartridge.

Not offering an experience that brings value to your potential buyer within your touchpoints, whether in prospecting or during a follow-up of a sale, you tend to burn this lead or lose it, so we’ll have to wait at least 3 to 6 months for a new contact attempt.

Sales Engagement and Account-Based Selling

In the context where your market is already naturally smaller, this becomes even more serious, a great solution I found within my process was to start adopting Sales Engagement. 

Before I started doing Sales Engagement within the enterprise context, I wasted a lot of time on operational tasks.

Approximately 18% of a salesperson’s time today is spent completing activities in CRM. 

As you are in a strategic area of ​​the company and will sell to enterprise accounts, your manager and/or director will naturally demand more visibility to better understand what is happening there with that strategy.

The only solution for this is to create a process focused on: Creating value for the potential buyer, with speed, visibility and efficiency.

So I’m going to bring a little bit of how I used to do it here and I got a little more customization throughout this journey.

Introduction to ABS (Account-Based Selling) 

It assumes that some accounts are more important to your company than others, either because you are sometimes looking for a more recognized brand in the market, or a larger company, with a larger number of users on the platform.

This can bring greater revenue to your company and so on. 

The important thing is to understand that, within ABS, you no longer treat your prospects only as leads that are not necessarily linked to a concrete strategy within the company they are part of.

ABS came as a way to unite the various teams that work within a company’s revenue department, such as the marketing team, the sales team, the Sales Development team, ensuring that the approaches and communication with these strategies are as personalized and coordinated as possible.

It is a concept that is already very strong in the United States according to Gartner and used for companies with revenues above 5 million dollars. 

It’s the approach, the revenue-generating style that will become standard in a while, but it’s something that still needs to be better applied in Brazil.

Introduction to Sales Engagement

Sales Engagement is nothing more than the interactions you have, with your lead, with your prospect throughout the sales cycle, so it’s a way for you to engage both the buyer and the seller throughout the sales process. shopping journey.

Typically, Sales Engagement is facilitated by the use of a Sales Engagement Platform , which helps the salesperson to coordinate their actions and have everything very well organized, without going through the pain of having to complete each activity in a CRM, or not understanding very well what he does there that works.

As there has been a rise in sales in blue world city islamabad it is important to know how well a salesperson can create sales engagement. You can see that being two strategies that rely heavily on customization and relevant approaches, Sales Engagement and ABS have absolutely everything to do.

How We Apply ABS with Sales Engagement (Our Use Case)

Now that you know what ABS is and what Sales Engagement is, let me tell you how we apply ABS strategies here in Reev.

#1- Study the base

Basically, the first step for you to work on a strategy in which you are looking for strategic accounts is to understand which accounts generate the most value for your company.

You have to study your base:

  1. Understand which companies usually derive more value from your product; 
  2. Which ones have the greatest revenue potential;
  3. How big are these markets; 
  4. What is the possible branding of a new large company; or that having brand recognition will bring to you in terms of marketing when you have closed with that lead.

#2- Definition and Division of Accounts

The next step is to define exactly which accounts you will work with, taking into account the criteria above, revenue potential, market entered, and so on.

Also pay attention to whether you already have experience in this market, how easy it will be to get in touch with these decision makers, and engage them throughout the process based on your own experience as a salesperson or as a company.

#3- Communication Structure Division

Having defined which accounts you will seek, within the markets you have selected, it is also necessary to define what your communication structure will be, so there are essentially two ways to approach ABS.

  1. 1 for few;
  2. 1 for very few;

ABS – 1 for a few: 

you will work with more or less than 100 companies, in a quarter or a semester, the idea is that you have personalized communications throughout the entire journey of your account.

But that you mainly look for people who are in management positions, important influencers, potential users of your product, and who have a stronger decision-making power in the target company.

ABS – 1 for very few:

when you are going to work one for very few, you will have to talk to basically everyone in the company, it’s working with less than 10 companies over a quarter.

Within this context you have to ensure that these accounts you have selected have a very high revenue potential, and that you will really need to do a very personalized project for them, that is, you will have to involve a lot of people throughout your entire buying journey, or your selling journey in this case.

#4- Approach Workflows: 

Defining your communication structure, the next step is to define how you will structure it in terms of Workflow.

As we’ve been talking about for a long time at al noor orchard housing scheme , the ideal is for you to have cadence flows that behave in each journey of your funnel, from prospecting to a follow-up to closing.

Even when you close with this lead and want to present it to your CS team, it’s important to ensure it’s aligned and follows your process.

If this is the case within an ABS context, the first step is to understand your communication structure, how much you will customize these workflows and how much they will be geared towards the company you are looking for.

I understood that working with companies that were larger in my market, I was looking for strategic accounts, I had to work a greater number of touchpoints, both in prospecting, in follow ups, in resumption, and especially I had to customize my communications.

While I was working with a little smaller companies, I used some snippets, some customization points within the process, but it was only in an email, just in a communication, it wasn’t much focused on the lead.

In ABS it is essential that you are very clear what the assumptions will be, about why you have to be contacting the lead within the account at each moment of the purchase journey.

It’s no use sending a follow-up email that is too basic or that doesn’t generate value, you always need to pay close attention to information you’ve collected, whether from the company itself, it can be on their website, or on news about the company, reports you have collected, or even on the lead’s LinkedIn, which is a strategy that tends to work even better.

If, for example, you sell to sales leaders, it’s interesting to look at the person’s LinkedIn, what posts they like, what are the trends they are observing within the market, what exactly they are looking for.

Therefore, I recommend approaching the lead, prospect, in a way that is relevant to him, if he is enjoying several posts on social media on a certain topic, you need to direct all your communication to the possible problems he is facing focused on that theme.

This way you will be able to increase conversion rates, and ensure that the process is not only efficient, and generates results for your company, but that it is also the best possible shopping experience and generates a lot of value for the lead.

If it’s a strategic account, don’t just sell to it too, you want to start a relationship and make it a success story for your company.

Conclusion

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