Real Walkthrough - Prospecting An Account (and what to look for)

Hey, what's up? Closed one community gonna highlight today how I use my account planning doc to sift through and really operationalize my cadence for how I go about prospecting my entire book of business. So the first thing I have pulled up here and I think this is really a prerequisite, but make sure when you get say three hundred or a thousand or however many accounts assigned, go through and tier all those accounts for me. I try to have only about like 5% in tier one, 15 to 20% in tier two, and then the rest in tier three. So tier one are my absolute best accounts. Tier two are the ones I absolutely want to target. But maybe they're not as high a priority because they they're smaller size of prize in terms of what the deal would be. Or maybe they're not as quite ICP fit in terms of ideal customer profile, meaning I'm not quite sure if they're a great fit for our solution. And then tier three is going to be 80% of my accounts, in short, where maybe it'd be a really small opportunity, maybe just doesn't look like it would be a good fit. And I'm taking solace knowing if I put an account in tier 3, I might never see it again unless they come inbound or unless they show some sort of intent. So now that I have all of my accounts tiered out, we can see the Cubs that I have tier one, these other accounts as well. This is just a dummy example here, but what I'm going to do on a weekly cadence is every single day it's going to be my goal to sequence two different accounts and target four different people at those given accounts. So two accounts per day, four people per account. You're going to start to target about eight people every single day. And that's a manageable amount. So that, you know, really my approach overall is like do a little bit every day. So you never have to do a lot. You never have to do a nine hour prospecting day as an account executive, but commit to doing that two by four every single day. So in my example here, maybe today I want to target ujet and I want to target the Chicago Cubs. So the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm actually going to go to Sales Navigator and I'm just going to go to ujet as an account. I'll search for them in the top. Typically I'm going to look at a couple different things. One, I'm going to pop open their website, get a quick sense. Hey, what does ujet do. Oh yeah, they do CX through AI powered automation, intelligence, Omni channel orchestration. Amazing. You know they look like a good fit. Yes, they do. For what we do. I'm then going to go back to Sales Navigator. I like to quickly actually pull at these insights down here. This gives me some sort of just like are they struggling as a company, are they scaling or they're growing really quickly. You can also see different things like job openings or new hires. And then I'm going to go into the specific employees and the reason for that is I want to start to identify, hey, who are those four or so people that I want to ultimately target. Now since there's 308 different employees at this company, I want to put some filters on. I'll move my big head over to the right. So what I'm going to do here, excuse my missed click there, beautiful. Is pop open this view. So I have this entire kind of landscape here. In my world I'm looking at more like sales related roles and I'm also going to look at higher level folks like a cxo, a vp, a director. So in short, I'm looking for people that I would want to target that have the authority that if I did land that meeting that they're the right Persona ultimately. So Louis looks like a pretty good example as a VP of sales. Keith would be another person that I would want to target. National channel director perhaps. And then Jeff could be potential fits as well. So kind of as I go through this, I'm going to pop open Keith, I'm going to pop open Lewis. You can see that they come up here in this top tab. I'm also going to write them out. So I'm going to pop open to my account planning doc. By the end of the year this will be completely full, but for now I'm just going through one by one. I'm writing down the name, I'm writing down like hey, Keith, Dennis would be my first target. Lewis would be my second target and I'll sometimes put in the role as well here. Beautiful. So I'll come back here, I'll do a couple of other searches. My goal is to get like four or five different people up there. So I'm going to clear this out. I'm going to also look at things like do we have any past customers? So I would toggle this on. I would also look at is there anyone that follows our company that could show that they're a little bit higher intent or you know, they're Familiar at least with what we do at a high level. So I see Baker Johnson CMO is not exactly who we target, but that could be a good person to reach out to. I'll pop open Baker. I could talk target Holly. I'll pop her open for now as well. Great. Got a couple more people. And I'm also going to search like in our world, like operations is sometimes really good. So I'm gonna search like Revenue Operations would be a pretty good Persona that we'd want to target as well. Of course you could filter for this, but because it's a specific title, I'm just going to search for it. It looks like Laura would be a great candidate. Senior Director of Enablement and Revenue Operations. Great. So I've got my people. I'm going to eliminate Holly from this and I'm going to target Baker and Laura as well. I'm fill that out. Laura Baker. Boom. Awesome. So from here what I'm doing is as I look through you, Jet, I have marked in sequence, meaning like, in short, I'm targeting this account, but I should actually rename this just in terms of like actively targeting. Because what I want to do when I go through Keith, Lewis, Baker and Laura is actively think of a way, hey, how could I not just enroll this individual into a, you know, 15 step, 28 day sequence? How could I take an even better approach? So when I look through each of these individual contacts, actually the first thing that I'm always looking for, number one, is mutual connections. Number two, I'm looking for previous users. If they might have used our technology in the past, they're gonna be a lot more familiar. Then I'm gonna look for like any really unique details, like do they have a side business? Have they authored a book, like something I can latch onto? And then fourth, I'll also look for an opportunity to potentially send like a gift to them. If I can think of some like really hyper personalized detail for someone that's, you know, a SVP of sales at one of my tier ones. So we'll kind of go through that one by one. So I'm going through Keith. The first thing I look for is my mutual connections. I have a lot with him. In this case, I'm gonna parse through these, say, hey, is there anyone I'm close with and maybe I could reach out to them and see how do they know them. Broker and intro. Looks like no team links. Team links would be featured here, meaning somebody at my organization is connected with them. I see down here he's Been there at eight months. Doesn't look like any previous companies that use Gong. I could always pop this open. I see some other stuff here, like youth basketball coach. That's pretty interesting. Youth soccer coach. So I could do something there in terms of gifting. I'm kind of taking mental notes with Louis as an example. I'm going to scroll down here and look for the same stuff. Right. Do we have shared connections, shared education, things like that? Again, no team links. He's been there three and a half years. Came from Ringcentral. Great. And then any other details down here as well? Anything I can kind of latch onto? We'll keep going one by one. So going to go over to Baker, who's cmo, takes pride being a husband, a father. Wonderful. Going to look through some of this. Great. And now finally, I actually do have team link. So I see that there's three different people connected with Baker, Amit, Iran and Jake. What I'm actually going to do from here, given that that's number one thing I look for, I'm going to put a meet Iran and Jake in a quick Slack channel internally and just link Baker Johnson's profile and be like, hey, does anyone know Baker? Right. I'm going to post this link in there. Does anyone know Baker? I saw all three of you are connected. If you do, would love to draft up a note and get introduced as one of the top accounts I'm targeting. So that's going to be my approach for Baker and then for Laura, I'm going to go through her last shared education. What could this be? Somebody I know went to school with her. I might reach out to that individual. She's been at ujet for quite some time. Went to San Francisco State University. Awesome. So what I'm going to now come back to is basically seeing these four different people. I'm going to come up with a plan of attack for Baker. I'm going to try that teamlink connection where I'm going to reach out to those three people internally. So I'm not just going to enroll him into a sequence. For Lewis in particular, I don't have anything great here. So I'll probably just put him into like a really highly personalized sequence where I can put in some, like, good information. I could try to latch onto this more like him being co founder, president, but I saw he gave up on that a couple years ago, so I might just kind of ignore. And then with Keith, given, it's my number one person I'm trying to target. I'm Gonna think of some idea for like a gift that I can send over to Keith. So I'm gonna go back to Keith here and I think this is a good mix, right. I have four people. I'm gonna put two into sequences. I'm gonna try mutual connections with one and I'm gonna try a gift with another. It looks like he's a huge John Wooden fan. Cool. And it looks like he has some other good quotes here as well. As long as you try your best, you're never a failure. Where my head goes with this is like I could buy him a book from John Wooden. I could go to Amazon, type in John Wooden. I could also put a quote like this on something he likes like from Etsy and send it over to you jet's office or try to find his address as well. So I think this is a great quote. As long as you try your best, you're never a failure. I'm not going to go all the way down. See he went to UC San Diego. He's a big basketball fan as well. I'm just going to go over to Etsy, I'm going to type in like custom basketball gift or something. Awesome, Awesome. And again I'm looking for some like cheap type gift that I could put that quote on to something given he's a big basketball fan. He doesn't volunteering wise as well. So as one example, I could put it on this and I could put some word art around it. It cost me $16 and I could put a couple of John Wooden quotes. I could put put on a little like basketball jewelry dish, put that quote there as well. I type in John Wooden as well. Beautiful. Or I could get him something as simple as this. Right. This would cost me 9.99. It's a John Wooden quote. It would go in his office. I could ship this over to Keith. I've got a pretty good plan. So Keith gift Lewis sequence, Laura sequence, Baker teamlink. And I'm going to put in my plan of attack here. Send diff to heat. John Wooden fan Baker connected with three people at com Warm intro sequence, other two. So all in all it takes me maybe about five to ten minutes to put in some of that different research. And then from there I'm just going to execute from there. So I'm going to send off that gif. Take me a couple minutes. I'm going to send that internal slack. So I'm going to have to come back to this message. It's going to take some time. Then I'm going to go to my sales engagement platform and actually put Laura in a sequence specific to revenue operations and that Persona and put Lewis in one specific to a sales leader. Hopefully this was helpful start to finish. But really by the end of this, it doesn't seem like a lot, but if you stay diligent and you target two accounts per per day, you target four people at each of those accounts. By the end of Q1, you're gonna have gotten through all of your Tier 1 accounts. By the end of Q2, all of your Tier 2 accounts. And then you're gonna have warm leads the rest of the year. People that told you, hey, reach back out in three months. People you weren't able to break through on that. You'll kind of re target and re approach based on new contacts that joined. It's a really great way to stay organized and stay on task from a prospecting sense. To build this into your operating cadence on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.