Tips and Tricks for Making the Most of Your ABS Strategy

Congrats! You’ve implemented your Account-Based Selling (ABS) Strategy. You have identified your target accounts, and defined the different functional groups that will influence the purchasing decision. Your team has begun reaching out to this group, and you’re sending out tailored messaging to each contact (“persona”). But what comes next? How do you take your ABS strategy from good to great?

We’ve compiled 3 tips to help you optimize your ABS Strategy, and get the most out of your sales and marketing efforts.

Personalize, personalize, personalize!

This first tip is something that you should already be doing, due to the individualized nature of ABS. The more you can personalize your communications to each individual, the more effective outreach will be. Save the email templates and CRM tags for later in your pipeline – every point of contact should be unique to the individual account and individual within the account. Make sure you talk to their specific challenges in their industry and in their job role. Offer helpful solutions, not just a sales pitch for your own solution. Providing accounts with valuable, but not annoying, content helps to establish trust and build the relationship. For more high-involvement communications further along your ABS process, you can even create custom reports providing ROI. This shows thoughtful consideration into their needs and goes deeper than just walking through an ROI calculator in a sales call.

Diversify your outreach.

Today’s marketing and sales professionals have an abundance of ways to reach out to their prospects. If you’re not capitalizing on them, you’re missing out. Breaking through the noise in today’s marketing environment can be challenging, especially if the primary forms of communication are just emails and voicemails. McKinsey found that, on average, a B2B customer will regularly use six different interaction channels throughout the decision journey. It’s important to provide dialogue through multiple channels to accommodate this.

Use a tool that provides greater visibility.

Whether you’re taking the lead on the account or you’re trying to pick back up a deal that has fallen through the cracks, having visibility into the activity on the account is crucial to the success of ABS. And while tools like Salesforce and other CRMs are essential to keeping your contacts organized, they rely on your representatives entering in the necessary information. Here at SalesWise, we have been able to uncover 2.5x more customer contacts in email and calendar data that have not made their way into Salesforce. Furthermore, ABS is more than just the initial sale transaction – it continues through to the hand off to the client success team, and eventually to the renewals representatives. “Whenever a process crosses teams, a ‘baton’ is passed. These handoffs are the cause of 80% of the problems and defects your processes,” says Aaron Ross of Predictable Revenue. Using a tool like SalesWise enables any member of your team to see the direct relation between your team and your prospect or client’s team.

ABS, when leveraged to its maximum potential, can provide phenomenal Return on Investment – in a study by BizBible, over half of those in the study report a revenue lift of 10% or more after a year of use. With the right techniques, like personalization and different interaction channels, and the right tools, like SalesWise for increased visibility, organizations using an ABS Strategy can grow revenue, increase opportunity for expansion and renewals, and develop valuable client relationships.