3 Reasons Why You Need an Account-Based Selling Strategy

Shifting to an Account-Based Selling (ABS) strategy causes an organization-wide shift in all customer-facing roles – sales and marketing to customer success and renewals. It can be an intimidating task, but when implemented correctly, can yield significant sales opportunities. In fact, ~85% of marketers who measure return on investment (ROI) describe account-based marketing (ABM) as delivering higher returns than any other marketing approach (ITSMA).

Still need some convincing? We’ve compiled three chief reasons for an ABS strategy:

Purchasing groups are larger than ever.

B2B sales, today, involve an average purchasing group of 5.4 people. Adding in that second decision maker decreases the success rate by 67% (Forbes).

While in the past, you may have sold (and only engaged) to the primary user (“Champion”), you are now likely selling to the champion plus the CEO, CMO, IT Director, and Sales Manager. With the number of vendors vying for the attention of these Heads of State, successful closes require targeted, personal messaging

Landing and expanding is more challenging than you think.

The land-and-expand strategy is nothing new, and fundamentally has the same principle as ABS: a sale is bigger than the relationship between an individual and a product. It’s between the account, or company, with the product.

ABS inherently enables and in some cases accelerates this process, because of expanded, targeted engagement. When you’re involving more people in the buying process from the beginning, capitalizing on the introductions makes expansion into other functional groups more natural.

You need a specific strategy to be successful – and ABS provides that structure.

Because ABS involves many functional groups (on both your side and that of your prospect’s), it requires a unified plan. Without strategically looking at your potential accounts, the data surrounding them and the key players and messaging involved, ABS will inevitably fail. And while other sales and marketing methodologies may get the job done without this level of attention to detail, ABS forces this structure and collaboration.

Sending a barrage of emails is not an effective sales strategy. B2B email-only strategies are the most unsuccessful of any industry with only 24% being opened. Of that, only 12% are clicked through (Sign-Up.to). While ABS requires a major cultural shift, the potential growth in ROI greatly outweighs the effort needed to make this shift. In some ways, it’s also a required evolution.

Ready to start implementing your ABS strategy but not sure where to start? Read our recent blog post, How to Implement Your ABS Strategy or learn how SalesWise can provide greater visibility to your sales leaders and drive additional incremental revenue when shifting to an Account-Based Sales strategy (see how it works). Schedule a quick demo with one of our representatives to see how SalesWise enables ABS teams.