Why Segment Accounts to Accelerate Sales?
Recently, I met up with 10 technology P&L leaders and asked them what ‘Sales Enablement’ meant to them?
Over half of them responded that sales enablement consists of developing sales productivity materials.
Well, that’s only part of it and there are many tools you can use to increase sales productivity. Account segmentation is one of the most important areas they had completely missed. It’s difficult to grow revenue faster than your industry’s growth rate and faster than your competitors.
Your sales team must be having a bunch of these questions for which they don’t have any definite answer:
What accounts do I call?
Where are the best opportunities?
What accounts should I contact first?
How can I improve my results?
Do your Sales Operations or Enablement teams have good answers?
Well, here is a point of view.
What is Account Segmentation?
Why is this important? Not all accounts are created equal. Some of your accounts will spend a little, and others will spend a lot. Some will spend this year, and others will spend next year. Some will respond well to your value proposition and others will respond well to your competitor’s value proposition. If you cannot rank accounts best to worst on revenue potential and propensity to buy, you will miss the number.
So segmenting accounts helps a lot in deploying your sales resources to the right accounts.
But then why Segment Markets?
Customers are different. Some are small, while others are large. Some are driven by price, while others want the best service. Some want breadth of services, while others want a targeted offering. Some are early adopters, while others prefer battle-tested solutions. In the end, segmentation helps salespeople meet the needs of a diverse customer base.
Segmentation also helps create Ideal Customer Profiles or ICPs. These are target accounts with the greatest spend potential at the lowest acquisition cost. Accounts are scored and prioritized using a flexible formula. The formula applies to current customers, opportunities, and prospects. Sales Reps are then better able to prioritize up-sell, cross-sell, and new acquisition activities.
How can you Segment Markets?
The best segmentation plans use three categories: profile, behavior, and needs. They are often blended together to effectively target customers and prospects. Understanding who they are, what they do, and their needs are important. This helps salespeople satisfy a diverse customer base. Ultimately this approach translates into:
Larger deals
Faster sales
Better win rates
What should an account segment process result in?
An effective Account Segmentation process delivers:
A prioritized list of current customers and prospects
Potential spend figures for all customer types
An Ideal Customer Profile
A completely analyzed customer master database
This allows you to help sales with bigger deals and improved win rates.
If you are not using account segments to rationalize and deploy your sales resources, you are simply not being efficient in your selling strategy. This one exercise can save you a lot of sales bandwidth and yield 10X results.