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B2B Account Prioritization Guide
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Your plan is set, and your territories are divvied up. How do you make sure your sales team is working as efficiently as possible? This free guide details everything you need to prioritize accounts for outreach. Ensure reps are always working the highest potential accounts in their books. Our new account prioritization guide includes discussion on fit and timing, intent signals, ICP definition, and account scoring. Keep scrolling to read through the guide. “Most companies have a definition of what makes a prospect account a good fit (“this kind of account is a fit for our solution”), as well as what elements signal the right timing for outreach (“when should we reach out for maximum impact?”).” Every account should fall into one of four quadrants. The Good Place.These accounts are both a great fit and they’re ready to buy. These are the opportunities you can win in the short term and ideally where your reps are spending most of their time. This is the zone to win. Get Back to Me (GBTM) Zone.These accounts are a great fit but the timing isn’t right (yet). They may be under contract with a different vendor or have another major priority this quarter. When you talk to them, they’ll probably say something like “This sounds great, but let’s talk next quarter.” This is valuable information you can use later, and you should absolutely be keeping track of that. More on that in a bit. False Hope Zone.These accounts are a bad fit even though they’re currently looking for a solution. In fact, you’ll probably even win some of these - mostly because they’re ready to buy something similar to what you offer. But, you’re likely to find that you can’t repeat this process, and/or they’re bad customers who will be difficult to service and likely to churn. These will often come through your inbound demand gen channel and are tricky because reps will hear only the good news about timing and ignore the bad fit signals. The Bad Place.These accounts aren’t a fit and they’re not looking to buy. Hopefully, you’ll avoid these altogether, but it’s more likely that your team will waste time on a sales cycle with no chance of success. These frequently arise from poor prospecting. If you have a geographic territory model, reps are in danger of spending a lot of time here unless they’re excellent at discovery and qualification. With a little ops work, you can keep reps out of The Bad Place entirely. More on that as we go. Accounts can move between quadrants, though your ability to influence that movement is limited. Most fit and timing criteria are beyond your control. All you can control is how and when you connect with those accounts.
Your plan is set, and your territories are divvied up. How do you make sure your sales team is working as efficiently as possible? This free guide details everything you need to prioritize accounts for outreach. Ensure reps are always working the highest potential accounts in their books. Our new account prioritization guide includes discussion on fit and timing, intent signals, ICP definition, and account scoring. Keep scrolling to read through the guide. “The fit and timing quadrant helps clarify how much attention you pay to an account, depending on its fit and timing qualifications.” Every account should fall into one of four quadrants. The Good Place.These accounts are both a great fit and they’re ready to buy. These are the opportunities you can win in the short term and ideally where your reps are spending most of their time. This is the zone to win. Get Back to Me (GBTM) Zone.These accounts are a great fit but the timing isn’t right (yet). They may be under contract with a different vendor or have another major priority this quarter. When you talk to them, they’ll probably say something like “This sounds great, but let’s talk next quarter.” This is valuable information you can use later, and you should absolutely be keeping track of that. More on that in a bit. False Hope Zone.These accounts are a bad fit even though they’re currently looking for a solution. In fact, you’ll probably even win some of these - mostly because they’re ready to buy something similar to what you offer. But, you’re likely to find that you can’t repeat this process, and/or they’re bad customers who will be difficult to service and likely to churn. These will often come through your inbound demand gen channel and are tricky because reps will hear only the good news about timing and ignore the bad fit signals. The Bad Place.These accounts aren’t a fit and they’re not looking to buy. Hopefully, you’ll avoid these altogether, but it’s more likely that your team will waste time on a sales cycle with no chance of success. These frequently arise from poor prospecting. If you have a geographic territory model, reps are in danger of spending a lot of time here unless they’re excellent at discovery and qualification. With a little ops work, you can keep reps out of The Bad Place entirely. More on that as we go. Accounts can move between quadrants, though your ability to influence that movement is limited. Most fit and timing criteria are beyond your control. All you can control is how and when you connect with those accounts.
Account prioritization Even in a good year,69% of salespeople don’t have enough leads in their pipeline to hit quota (source). It’s worse now, as inbound has slowed down and outbound is harder. Right now, reps need more top of funnel pipeline to hit their opportunity creation goals. In addition, up to half of sales performance can be explained by a rep’s territory potential versus their sales skills (source). Even a great rep can’t sell to a bad territory. So, just stop giving good reps bad accounts. Okay, if only it were that easy! Deciding what comprises a seller’s book of accounts is a lot more complicated than just divvying up a list of accounts and handing them to a salesperson to work. The guide that follows is going to show you how to make sure every sales rep on your team is calling on the best possible accounts in your market, and how you can implement these methods now, even after your 2024 territories have been set. Once you’ve segmented your market and rolled out your new territories or updates books, you need to help reps prioritize which accounts or segments to work first. Are there certain accounts that are more likely to buy now? How do you identify those? How do sales reps know which accounts to focus on first in their new territories? Account prioritization is systematically determining which accounts have the highest potential and should be worked first. Fit and timing Most companies have a definition of what makes a prospect account a good fit (“this kind of account is a fit for our solution”), as well as what elements signal the right timing for outreach (“when should we reach out for maximum impact?”). Let’s talk more about each of those and how they work together to help you prioritize the highest potential accounts. First, please meet the fit and timing quadrant. The fit and timing quadrant helps clarify how much attention you pay to an account, depending on its fit and timing qualifications. “Every account should fall into one of four quadrants.” Timing signals change predictably over time. Accounts will move back and forth between being in market and not in market as they buy solutions, renew solutions, and go through budget cycles. Given enough information, you can probably predict most of these moves, but there’s not much you can do to change an account’s readiness-to-buy timing. Fit rarely changes. However, you may find accounts that grow into (or fall out of) your ICP, either through organizational changes or acquisitions, or periods of significant growth. You may find new accounts in your ICP if you start selling a new product or venturing into new markets. Lots more on ICP shortly. Pipeline starts with account coverage based on both fit and timing As a sales leader, it's your job to focus rep effort on the best fit, highest timing accounts in your SOM. Ensuring effective account coverage is a shared responsibility between marketing, ops and sales. Account coverage requires continuous adjustment. You have to actively manage coverage all the time; it’s no longer sufficient to relegate this to a once-a-year territory planning process. You may divvy up your territories once a year (though of course, we think you should switch to a dynamic books model), but you should be continuously managing which accounts reps are working in their territories. We're going to go into a ton of detail about account scoring, understanding ICP fit, and intent and timing signals in a moment. But before we get to that, here are a few ways to improve account coverage: 1. Integrate rep-level account coverage analysis into every 1:1.Help reps learn how to better cover the best accounts in their books or territories. Show them which accounts to focus on and which to ignore. 2. Identify “black holes” in your market coverage.What accounts are you missing out on? Make sure you're engaging every account in the A group, and look for accounts your team could be working in the B and C segments. 3.