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  Old Inbound Accounts/Contacts

  These are companies or contacts that requested information from your company in the past. There are a few reasons why they might be in your list. The other rep who was chasing the account when it first came in might not have been able to connect with the decision maker. Another possible reason is that it slipped through the cracks and no one reached out to the contact. No matter what the reason, this is a good account because we know that at some point the prospect had some interest in the product or service your company provides. It’s your job to discover if that’s still the case.

  Inbound Contacts

  When a contact requests information from your company, it is considered an inbound contact. The main difference between inbound contacts and “old inbound accounts” is temperature. An inbound contact that just came in is just about as hot as a contact can get. You have a specific person at an account that is showing interest—awesome! Sometimes the inbound contact will be at an account you’ve been trying to schedule a meeting with for a while. Other times it will be a contact from an account that wasn’t on your radar. These are considered win, win contacts.

  Inbound accounts and contacts are great for helping you hit quota, but don’t rely on them entirely. Your quota is there during months with a ton of marketing qualified leads (MQL). That quota is also there when there is a slow month and fewer MQLs.

  Your marketing team is most likely focused on driving inbound interest in your product or service. This is fantastic and can really bolster your efforts. That being said, you are held to a quota. Remember, you are the salesperson; you need to generate your own opportunities to hit your quota, make more money, and progress in your career. If you rely solely on marketing, you put yourself at risk of failing to hit your quota at some point.

  What Else Is Important?

  Company Type

  Other than the different account lists that you will receive, it’s also important to consider the type of companies you’re reaching out to. You want to make sure that when you’re searching for accounts and contacts you’re finding ones that match the kinds of businesses that can benefit from your product or service. There are three main categories that businesses fall into.

  Small and Medium-Sized Business (SMB)

  Mid-Market

  Enterprise

  Your sales workflow is determined by which of those categories your target customer falls into. For example, if you are targeting local businesses, it will be much easier to connect with the business owner than it would be with the CEO of Google. That doesn’t mean SMB is better than enterprise at all. What this does mean is that enterprise takes more steps to win and often comes with a higher price tag. Let me give you a quick overview of each of the categories.

  Small and Medium-Sized Business (SMB)

  Small and medium-sized businesses usually have an owner/operator that manages the day to day and makes all financial decisions. They are smaller companies with smaller budgets and typically less than 50 employees. There is one big advantage of going after SMB—they answer their phones! Thats a big one. As a general rule, SMB decision makers are a lot easier to contact.

  Mid-Market

  Mid-Market companies can be a challenge to define. Some use number of employees to determine this, typically between 100-1000. Others look at the entire market and find criteria that they use to select the companies that fall in the middle of that market. The reasons why you would want to tackle this market is because they have a larger budget than the SMB, a simpler organizational structure than enterprise businesses, and typically have problems they are aware of and open to solving. The challenge, most likely, is that you’re dealing with more than one stakeholder. It won’t be nice and easy like SMB. Typically, there will be more than one person involved in the decision making process.

  Enterprise

  Enterprise businesses are the large companies, the big players in your target market. Think Google, Amazon, Salesforce, and Linkedin. Not every enterprise company will be a household name, but there is one thing that will be true for each—you will need to talk to a lot of decision makers and stakeholders to get their business. As a general rule...the larger the company, the more people involved in the decision process. These companies have over 1000 employees. Managing multiple stakeholders will require a more organized plan, but that is only one aspect that makes enterprise challenging. They also take a long time to win as a customer. The stakeholders involved evaluate multiple solutions and may have to go through several departments to get a purchase approved. The benefit of the additional work you need to get this account outweigh the negatives, because these are usually very high ticket sales. The additional upfront work will pay off.

  When reading the overview of each of these categories are you able to identify which one is your primary market? This often isn’t as easy as just looking at the business size and asking yourself “which one makes me the most money?” A better question to ask is “which one of these company categories does my product or service help the most?” Your product or service may solve all the problems for SMB but falls short on some features or expertise to benefit enterprise. If that’s the case, winning enterprise level deals will be challenging to near impossible and not worth the time. Think about where your product or service has the most impact and start there.

  Qualifications

  Now that you’ve determined which type of company you should target, ie: SMB, mid-market, or enterprise, you need to understand what the qualifications are to be a good fit for your product or service. Your company most likely will have a list of qualifications that they’ve identified, but if you have to do this yourself you should take a look at your current customers. Ask yourself, “What do these companies all have in common?” For example, a large portion of your company’s customers might be a certain type or industry, such as ecommerce, software, or the restaurant businesses. If your company provides services for software organizations, target your account search towards software organizations. If your service benefits restaurants, search for restaurants. Pretty simple, right?

  There is more to qualification than just what industry the company is in. Let’s say you are selling software that helps restaurants manage staff. Would you want to find a list of all restaurants? No way! You will spend a lot of time calling small, family-run restaurants who don’t have a problem managing their employees. This is why you need to add some qualifications so you don’t waste your time calling accounts that won’t benefit from your product or service, or worse, booking a meeting with them.

  Here are some examples of qualifications you may want to consider if your company doesn’t have a list for you.

  How many employees?

  How much revenue?

  Funding round

  Technology already being used

  Industry

  Current workflow

  They already spend money on an area that your solution helps with

  The company has a specific department

  Location

  Who is the best contact?

  Location Makes a Difference

  An important part of your qualification is location. It narrows your account search and helps make your list more focused. In some cases your company may have you assigned to a territory. You may be restricted to Manhattan or all of New York, for example. If you have a territory make sure you know your exact boundaries, often identified by area codes. If you don’t have a territory, then you’ll need to find a place to focus your initial work.

  Here are some criteria to use when choosing your own location (if you have a territory feel free to skip this part):

  Where are your products and services most popular?

  The first thing that you need to determine is where your products and services are needed/wanted the most. Many times this will be near the main location of the company,
but that’s not always true. Think of what parts of the country have a lot of businesses that use your product or service. If you are selling to tech companies, for example, you might consider San Francisco, California, Austin, Texas, or Seattle, Washington. If you’re selling a product to help farmers you might want to contact a different location.

  Where are most of your current clients located?

  Another way to narrow down your location is to find a city where you have a large clientele already using your product or service. Write a list of the 3 places in the country that most of your customers are located. They might serve as a reference or a case study to use with prospects local to them. For example, if you are talking to the owner of an auto dealership in Chicago and are able to use one of their competitors as an example of how effective your product or service is, you may have a higher chance of getting that meeting.

  Where are you located?

  Sometimes the best place to prospect is in your own backyard. Are there groups you can join? An association? Club? How about networking events in your industry that can give you access to decision makers? Don’t discount the power of meeting someone at a bar who happens to work at a company that you’ve been trying to connect with. They might be the missing piece to getting the decision maker on the phone and ultimately booking the meeting.

  Who is the best contact?

  When qualifying an account, the contacts you want to meet with are a very important qualification. There is a chain of decision-making authority in every company. The problem is that the title of the person doesn’t always tell you what their role is. For example, if you are selling call-center software, you may be looking for the Director of Customer Support. This might be the best point of contact for most of the companies you call. In some situations, however, it might turn out that the director of customer support only deals with the day to day of his department, not the technology that they use. That would make him a stakeholder, not the decision maker.

  The difference between a stakeholder and a decision maker is one of authority. Stakeholders are people at the company you are trying to book a meeting with who have influence in the decision, but do not make the final say. The decision maker is the person who has the final say. That being said, it’s no uncommon for the decision maker to require the involvement of stakeholders before making a decision.

  Let me give you an example that should make this easier to understand.

  

  Bill is the CEO of ABC company. You are trying to book a meeting with ABC company, but Bill is very busy and doesn’t reply to your emails. Sarah is the Director of Customer Support and much easier to connect with. You call and find out from Sarah that she has some frustrations with their current call-center software. She tells you that Bill will also need to take a look at your solution because he has the final say. You ask if Sarah and Bill would both like to be on the first call you’re scheduling, but Sarah and Bill’s calendars don’t line up. You end up booking a meeting with Sarah.

  

  Your question…Is booking a meeting with Sarah the right thing to do?

  You probably got the answer right—Yes it is. Here’s a follow up question…Why is it the right thing to do? This can be a little harder to answer, so, I’ll help. Sarah is a stakeholder who has a problem with their current setup, a problem that you happen to have a solution for. You can’t get in touch with Bill—you’ve already tried. Getting Sarah to endorse your solution is necessary to get a meeting on Bills calendar. It is definitely worth your time to show Sarah your product.

  Top to Bottom

  When you are trying to figure out the best contacts for your product or services, work top to bottom. Who is most likely the ultimate decision maker? Once you have the title of that person, work down and figure out all the people who are possibly involved in the decision—the stakeholders. You should have a list like this (let’s stick to the call-center software example):

  CEO

  Director of customer service

  VP of sales

  Customer service manager

  Sales manager

  Once you have your list you’re going to make another one. What are the aspects of someone’s job that makes them a decision maker or a stakeholder? That list should look something like this:

  Controls budget spending

  Is an administrator of the current call center software

  Leads a team that uses the call center software

  Works with the main decision maker

  Once you understand the titles and the criteria that makes up your decision makers and stakeholders, you won’t spend your time prospecting contacts who aren’t involved in the decision making process.

  ACCOUNT GRADING

  Now that you understand what makes an account qualified, it’s time to talk about how to prioritize. It is very important that you give your accounts a grade so that you focus more of your efforts on the accounts with the highest probability of yielding results. Just to clarify…this is not necessarily a “lead score” or “account score” that you already have associated with your accounts. If you have a marketing team that scores your accounts you may not have to grade them yourself, lucky you! Often times marketing will use multiple criteria to give every account a score. The better the score, the more likely it is for that account to convert into a meeting and ultimately a customer. Without this to help you prioritize accounts it’s going to be important that you give them a grade yourself.

  I use is a simple ABC grading scale (real academic of me I know). In order for you to grade accounts you need to have a clear definition of what each letter represents. The main reason why this is so important is that, based on the criteria, some accounts will get more of your attention than others, possibly even different forms of outreach.

  The criteria that you use to determine which letter grade an account gets will be based on your own unique situation. You may want to use data quality, i.e. did you find a contact with an email and phone number? Does this account have a website? You might even use qualifications that we spoke about earlier in this chapter—the more qualified the higher the grade. Here’s a breakdown of accounts that fit each particular grade. It will be your job to identify criteria that you will be using.

  A Accounts

  “A” accounts are companies that you feel are the best fit for your product or service. You have a contact with a phone number and email. You believe that if you spoke to the decision maker of the account, you would feel confident in demonstrating the value of your product or service and book a meeting easily. These are the accounts you should spend the most strategic time on. Working an “A” account requires more careful planning, so be very selective when assigning an “A.”

  B Accounts

  You will quickly learn to love these! “B” accounts are the companies that you feel are “just ok” and the ones you will work the most. On the surface they look good, but you don’t have the information that you need to comfortably put them in the “A” category. Maybe you have a contact at that company, but don’t know if they are a stakeholder or not. You may not have the time to spend customizing every letter of every email to them like you would for your “A” accounts. That being said, this is where you will find more accounts worthy of the “A” grade.

  C Accounts

  “C” accounts are those that you have limited information on or that you haven’t been able to qualify yet. You might only have the company name and website, but no contacts or any really helpful information. These accounts are good for testing your outreach. You can cold call them and test a new pitch, or try sending a new email campaign to see how the email analytics are. With more research you may get enough information to up their grade to a “B.” Think of these accounts as needing research.

  You don’t want to scour the internet during peak call hours to see if you can find
a contact at a “C” account, but don’t count them out completely. They may surprise you. One day you will get a phone call from a business owner who received one of your email campaign emails and they want to take a look at your product or service.

  Remember: “C” accounts aren’t junk. They are just the accounts that you don’t have enough information on to know if they are likely to convert. Your goal in calling and researching these accounts is to bump their grade up to a “B” or to “A.” A typical workflow might look like this:

  Find accounts

  Grade them all “C”

  Call your “C” accounts and do some research

  Move their grade to “B” or “A” accordingly

  Whale Hunter? A SHOCKING TWIST!

  There is actually one more letter I recommend assigning to accounts—”W”. W is short for whale hunting (please don’t actually hunt whales—they are peaceful creatures!). These are the companies that would make your quarter look superb if you could book a meeting with them. They are businesses with big names, with great logos, and might be considered a booking “pipe dream.” You should not spend much time on these accounts, but consider them an exciting side project.

  The probability of winning the business of a “W” account is so low it isn’t worth spending too much energy on them. That being said, chasing these is a blast and gives you the opportunity to be creative. Happy hunting!

  Conclusion/Overview

  There it is folks—account qualification and grading. There are a few things that you need to answer to ensure that you got the most out of this chapter.

  What type of account list do you have today?

  What kind of company are you prospecting?

  What makes an account qualified?

  What are your top locations?

  What are some of the best contacts to speak with about your product or service?