Today I’d like to talk a bit about lower-tier accounts (as a part of your sales territory strategy) and what, if anything, you’re doing to target them.
A normal scenario is that you’re an enterprise outside rep or an inside sales person and you’re responsible for a certain number of accounts. You have your top accounts and then those that come lower on the list. I’ve found that when sales leadership comes up with a territory they come up with random measures – assigning only companies with 5,000 employees or more, for example. Though there’s probably one level down that’s still worth targeting, it isn’t necessarily worth spending a ton of time thinking about those accounts.
I think it’s important to run campaigns on lower-tier accounts, even if it’s just an email campaigns. Even if you never talk to them, make a call, or customize messaging, why not set up six-part email campaigns over a 30-day period and do 5, 6, 7 of those at contacts at these companies? It’s super easy to do if you have the right tools.
A lot of the time it comes down to list building and automating email and call outreach. Tools like Salesloft or Outreach.io can help automate this process. List building is a big part of this because when you go down that next level, maybe the organization hasn’t given you these contact so you have to go out and find them yourself. There’s all types of tactics such as outsourcing your list building, working with inside sales, and making finding these contacts a focus. List building on a hundred accounts when you’re targeting 5 to 10 people per account is a project that takes a day or two. It isn’t something that should take you weeks.
Prioritize what those contacts are, and don’t forget about them – the tendency is to not reach out to them at all, but rather than ignoring them utilize a campaign you don’t have to think about. If you get results, great, and if you don’t, it’s not like you were reaching out to them anyway.
Set up automated email campaigns and make sure you don’t have to customize them. Just launch them and be smart about your campaigns. It’s simple and easy to do. You can learn a lot from your least favorable targets, and less people are reaching them so you may be able to set up meetings with them.
At OutboundView we help B2B companies think through how sales teams can find more qualified opportunities. Our Filling the Funnel Bootcamp provides 1:1 coaching where we work with your salespeople on prospecting their territory.
If you are trying to find more qualified opportunities for your B2B company, contact us and setup an intro call.
