Sales Success: Mastering Sales Prospecting and Target Accounts with Will Smith

Okay, fabulous Hub heroes, I'm super excited about today's conversation for two main reasons. One, we're talking sales and yo, sales is cool. Two, more specifically, we're talking about prospecting and target accounts in your sales process. And of course, with that, we're here with Will Smith, the man, the myth, the legend, to help us navigate this conversation. Now, if you don't know Will, he, he is a certified HubSpot trainer with a track record of a hundred plus companies successfully onboarded to the HubSpot platform. Will came into the world of integrated digital marketing in 2018 equipped with decades of invaluable high school teaching experience, which helps him create and deliver engaging training programs that guide HubSpot clients to getting the most out of their HubSpot investment. I hope everybody understands how important that is. Will has spoken at HubSpot's annual Inbound conference, delivering a deep dive session about how to successfully onboard and manage organizational change, which can be hard when implementing the HubSpot marketing and sales hubs. When Will isn't hubspotting, by the way, he is doing the musician thing on the weekend, volunteering at his church, or simply having a good time with his wife, Christy, three kids, Nick, Grayson, Rob, and two dogs, Athena and Sydney. Will, how the heck are you doing today?

I'm doing great, George. You seem pretty excited, so I'm guessing you're doing pretty well too.

I am doing great. I am very excited. I always love getting on the mic, creating content, adding value, and with you here, I just know that's going to happen. All right, Hub heroes, if you're listening this, by the way, on the podcast, make sure you head over to the community. That's community.hubheroes.com or go catch it on our YouTube channel as well. Ladies and gentlemen, let's go ahead and get into the prospecting and target accounts. Let's get into the good stuff. Well, one of the things I want to do is level set for everybody who might be watching or listening to this. And so can you just start out by explaining the concepts, basic as they are, of sales prospecting, how you think about it, versus maybe old school prospecting, so that our listeners who might not be familiar with it kind of have it as a foundational piece as we move forward?

Absolutely, George. I'm so excited to be here and talk to you today. Let's start with the old school prospecting, because old school prospecting, I think of two examples here. I think of the old school salesperson just dropping in and pitching. They're in the company car. They're circling around their territory and they're looking around and they say there's a business, that business needs a new phone. For example, a new phone system. I always love that classic the office cold opening where the guy walks in and he's like, hey, can I meet with Michael Scott and Pam Beasley? The secretary says, you know what, he's not here. Knowing full well that this new phone system is going to totally replace her. So it's hilarious. If you've watched the office go check out that scene again, it's a great cold open. The second example I think of when I think of old school prospecting and that is those cold call nights. Hey everybody, we're going to get together, we're going to grab a bunch of pizzas. We're all going to stay late today on a Tuesday night and we're just going to just pound the phones. We got this brand new list that we just bought and so we just going to pound the phones, eat some pizza and we're just going to have a great time. We're just going to pitch slap everybody and when they answer right in the middle of their dinner. So that's what I think of when I think of old school prospecting now, new school prospecting, of course, we're in the digital age. We got all kinds of new tools, new things to do. I don't know about you, George, but I still get pitch slapped, you know, after I accept that LinkedIn connection. Oh God, my. All of a sudden it's like, thank you for connecting and now I'm gonna slap you with a pitch, a sales pitch. New school prospecting is finding that balance of getting the data that you need and just being helpful, human with it, not somebody that's pitch slapping somebody else being helpful with it. How can I help you with this solution?

Yeah, I love this so much. And by the way, if you're watching this or listening to this and you're like, oh yeah, we just had pizza and a brand new purchase list just last week. And if you're out there pitch slapping people, by the way, which I think I'm going to steal that saying forever.

I stole it from somebody else.

I'm just saying shame on you. With that said the new school way, what you're talking about will with adding value, let's drop in another layer of what I would say foundation. And that is understanding. Sometimes understanding is the power that organizations need to actually make the change. And so why is prospecting a crucial aspect of the sales and marketing process. Even if a company has already bought into this inbound as their methodology, how does this kind of layer together with that?

Yeah, so when I think of inbound, inbound is helping those who are actively seeking your solution. You have the content, you have the solutions. They're actively looking for you. In the most base level. It's almost like you and your organization, you bought into inbound, you've set everything up and now we're just going to wait. We're going to wait for that form fill. We're going to celebrate when somebody fills out that form and then just go right after them. That is inbound. Not done too well. And so where prospecting comes in, this is where you're actually helping companies or organizations or people who may not know about your solution, who may not even know that they have a problem or that there's a better way of doing things. You are the person that can specifically help you and help them solve that problem. So the two complement each other this way they expand your reach. You know, you still got a prospect. You're not waiting, you're not sitting around for somebody to just find you in an inbound way. It also helps you target specific segments inbound. You know, you're kind of waiting. You don't know who's going to find you. You don't even know if they're going to be qualified or not. With prospecting, you can target specific segments. And what I mean by that is if you're prospecting, you may discover things that you don't even know. You know, we always talk about, talk to your customers and have a conversation with them and figure something out. But when you're prospecting, even if you're cold calling and it's done right, because cold calling is not dead, just going to throw that out there. But this helps you with discovering cross selling opportunities, upselling opportunities. Prospecting can help with market research.

I love this so much. What comes to mind when you're talking about this prospecting along with the inbound methodology and the waiting is this active motion. And it's an object that is motion stays in motion and getting your sales teams to be in motion. You also started and I, I think you used the word target, but you use it in different way. And I think speaking of pairing things together, prospecting and the second part of our conversation that I want to pair together is target accounts. So prospecting in action, in motion, having this kind of research or list or segmentation mindset. So let's go back to another foundational Element. And let's just talk about what are target accounts. Like how do you will think about or as an educator explain them and how do they differ from just your typical like, oh yeah, that's a prospect lead, potential customer conversation.

Yeah. So I love this question, George, because they seem similar, but what are the differences here? Target accounts gives you a very strategic focus, whereas prospecting, the opposite of that almost is kind of like, hey, we're in business, you have money, you're my prospect. That's a pretty wide net right there. So that's the first one, targeted focus versus anybody with money. Second one, coordinated effort, meaning team effort versus individual efforts. You know, we always think of the salesperson, that lone wolf salesperson. You probably have that person on your team. They're like, I'm going to close this deal, I'm going to be the hero here. Whereas with target accounts, that's more of, hey, let's work on this together as a team. When we win, we win together with these target accounts. The other thing that I think is very different is you can allocate your resources better with target Accounts. It's so strategic, it's so focused. And then finally the last thing. And I know as a helpful human being, George, you're gonna love this one. It's the long term relationship, the lifetime value and the growth of the account versus I'm gonna close you and I'm gonna move on to the next person.

Yeah, I love me some lifetime value. And actually sticking around for a human relationship, it is super powerful. I'm glad I have you here today because the funny thing about target accounts is most people don't know what accounts to target. And so this might be. It depends, we'll see. But regarding target accounts, what criteria should sales teams consider when selecting the accounts to actually target, AKA focus on as a team? And again, it might be, it depends answer. Or you may have seen some patterns across multiple companies or industries that you can say, yes, it depends. But maybe start here or there.

I love me a good pattern. So George, let's start with. Let's start with who. You know, I bet you if you go into your sales team, you go to the service team, your customer success team, and you just say the following statement. Who's your favorite client to work with? I bet you they have at least one person where they would go, oh man, I loved working with. Insert company name here. And if they're a salesperson, they probably got a great story to tell you along with that, who are the dream clients? And that's where I would start. Start with past successes. So that's going to be step number one. Past successes. Who are the best people that you enjoyed working with that really are still around that you have that long term growth with already the next one. Step two Move on to existing relationships. Are there upsell, cross sell opportunities? What about referrals? And since I said the R word here, a few soapboxes I may just stand on Listen, your customers, your people know when you're in a dry spell because everyone starts coming out with like a referral program. Just get into the habit. People don't do it occasionally. Always get into the habit at certain points in the customer timeline to ask for that referral so that it's not coming out of the dark when you're feeling a little bit desperate. If you're feeling desperate, they may be feeling desperate. Everyone's busy anyway. Move on to existing relationships. I would then focus in on your ideal customer profile. Having said that, is it time to to go back to the drawing board? Is your ideal customer profile from 2015 even if your ideal customer profile is from 2019? You know we have this whole thing where everybody's lives changed in March 13, 2020. A lot changed, goals changed. Did you revisit the challenges that your ideal customer profile is now facing in a post pandemic era? If you're going to focus on the icp, it may be one of those things where you just have to go back to the drawing board, get everybody in a room together and just say hey, we haven't looked at this in a while.

Oh well, that might be a rewind point of the actual show right there. And I'll tell you why. Because you listed out three things and there are bits of pieces of my brain that were exploding as you're mentioning them. Step one by the way, my brain goes to Birds of a feather flock together. Their friends are going to act like them and obviously that's why you would want to target them. The second thing is I am always having conversations with organizations to read the book Referral Engine by John Janst. The referral system is just something they do and not something they think of in hindsight. And this idea of ideal client profile and keeping it up to date. So many people think that ideal client profiles and Personas are one and done. They don't realize or think about how much they've changed, how much the business has changed, how much the products or service have changed and therefore what used to be is not still the same. Such a good section again you might want to rewind and jot some notes, listeners. I feel like we're going to have a little bit of a tennis match here, Will, because now we're going to kick it back to prospects for a second and talk about this idea of prospecting. Now that we have the foundation of what we think of and what we're talking about. Prospecting and target accounts. And so can you share some common challenges or even misconceptions that people might have when they think about sales prospecting?

Yeah, I think the first misconception is we think of prospecting as a past thing, as something that is, you know, well, we've always done it this way. And so coming up with something new. We don't want to do that. Revisiting our ideal customer profile. Well, we've always done it this way. We don't want to challenge ourselves to create or think of something new. And don't forget the evil cousin of we've always done it this way is, well, we tried it once already. It didn't work. We're not going back there. Maybe it's time to revisit these things. Those are some of the challenges and misconceptions that I see. There are some other things like, you know, competitive market, you know, everybody's busy. I can't reach the decision maker when it comes to prospecting. But really, those kind of micro challenges, those bubble up to the surface. The deeper challenge is I don't have quality data to work with. I don't know my ICP very well at all because the data I'm collecting isn't there or I've defined my ICP poorly. I'm not doing my research because I'm doing things the way I've always done them.

Ooh, that we're just gonna spit some fire. Okay, well, I want to stay in this vein of challenges and misconceptions this time. Again, a little bit of that tennis match. What are some common challenges or misconceptions that people might have about what we've started to talk about? And that is Target Accounts.

Yeah, most people think that Target accounts is just a tactic. That's it, that it's just a one and done. We're going to try this for three months, six months, and we're just going to half try it. That's the other thing. It's commitment. Not occasional. Anything you do occasionally is not going to yield the results that you. If you occasionally go to the gym, you're not going to be in the healthy state that you want to be. In if you occasionally have some broccoli. I hate broccoli. You're not going to have what you need in your body to fuel yourself to get to the gym. So, so many people, they're like, well, we're going to try abm, another word Account based marketing, another word for target Accounts. We're going to try that for three months, and if it doesn't work, we're scrapping it because we tried it, it didn't work. We're going to leave there. So I think that is the biggest thing, you know, the biggest misconception there is that it's just a tactic. It's just one thing we're just going to try, and it doesn't work. It takes commitment, it takes time, it takes collaboration, it takes a lot. While you're doing all these things, you cannot put it all into the ABM Target account baskets. You still got to be doing all the other things that you're doing. It's a piece of the puzzle.

Ooh, I like this idea of a piece of a puzzle because I want to take two pieces of the puzzle that we've been talking about so far. Will and I want to put them together. And in this question, in your mind, how does prospecting, the topic we've been talking about, and target Accounts, the other topic that we've been talking about, how in the world should we be thinking about them fitting together as a cohesive piece?

So to me, Target accounts is actually the next iteration of prospecting. If prospecting was a university course, a 101 course, target accounts would be the 201 course. When you level up, do you forget everything that you learned in the first course? No, it's just the next evolution. So for me, prospecting is you're casting a really wide net, whereas target accounts, it's right there in the name. You get targeted, you get focused. You get focused on quality over quantity, you get selective. Both of these things. Prospecting and target accounts require alignment of goals, require use of data, require personalization. Target accounts is the next evolution of prospecting.

It's interesting, Will, I need to pull something out that you just said. Where my brain went versus how I think most people also think about this conversation. You use the word target, as in you are getting more specific. You're targeting what you want to do. When most people think about the words target account, I feel like they're in this mindset of ready, set, aim, fire. Because we're at war in the sales battle of target those accounts. Men, man your battle stations. The Fact that you pivot this to like, no, we're talking inward here, targeting our focus and targeting our efforts and streamlining the process to actually have valuable human conversations with those people that we can help. I think there's something huge that happens right in that place. And I love this idea of 101201 and moving forward. Well, you're standing here. And again, listeners, if you're listening this on the podcast, you could go over to YouTube or go over to the community, community.hubheroes.com and watch it. But you're standing here with an impact T shirt on, which obviously means you know about HubSpot. You use HubSpot. You love HubSpot. I'm sitting here doing this interview. Most people think I work at HubSpot, even though I don't. It's the orange wall. It's the orange walls, I'm telling you. So I have to ask, how does HubSpot play a role in streamlining the sales, prospecting and target accounts, processes and conversation that we've been having today?

Three ways. I'll list them off and then I'll explain. First one is alignment, the second one is engagement, and the third one is team deployment. So let's start with alignment. Let's say you've had HubSpot for a while now. Rather than scrolling through maybe two years worth of activities, past activities, web visit, open emails, things like that, HubSpot condenses and streamlines that part of your question that I love, George. HubSpot streamlines all of that to show you the latest activity, the planned next activity. And this goes with team deployment. Who is either planning that activity or is going to be a part of that activity, whether that's a meeting, whether that is, hey, they're enrolled in a sequence, this email's going out. You can see that all in one place. So that's the alignment there, which also helps you with seeing their engagement. You can also see in one spot, well, with this particular account, how many deals do we have going? But more than that, underneath those deals, you can visibly see what are their website visits, how many emails were open, how many things. So again, you're not scrolling through two years worth of activity timelines in order to figure out where does this account sit. And then finally, what I love about it are the roles that you can assign, the buying roles that you can assign because this helps with team deployment. So maybe you have somebody on your marketing team that used to be an accountant and now they're in marketing. And so you notice that There is a. We'll call him Jim after the Jim Halpert of office fame. Jim is the financial person at this target account. You know what, I'm going to ask Dwight to write an email to Jim because Dwight understands, as a former accountant, he understands his pain points. He knows how to speak the language. He knows how to appeal to the budget holder. That is, Jim, if you're working as a team, how you deploy your team, deploy your resources is going to be very different because HubSpot helps you see that, align it to make sure that you get all that engagement that you need.

Did we cover all three? I'm trying to make sure that we covered all three because you said alignment.

Engagement and team deployment.

Team deployment, yes, we did. Okay. Beautiful. Beautiful. All right, let's dig in a layer deeper before we actually pull back out and kind of have some other questions. We're here. We're having a HubSpot conversation. We might as well have a HubSpot conversation. Are there specific HubSpot features that can assist in this? Because I fully understand there are people that are bumping into this interview that might not be using HubSpot today. And so I want them to know, like, oh, this all sounds great, but can you get it into a tactical world that I can actually touch? Are there specific HubSpot features that can assist in this that the viewers or listeners should be paying attention to? And like, oh, this is how I can make this reality.

George, for your listeners, when you're done watching, listening to this podcast, this is what you need to do. Get to your HubSpot portal and if you haven't activated your target accounts, go to the contacts menu, get down to target accounts and just activate them. Now. It takes time to set things up and do things right and everything, but this is where you're going to see value immediately. I want you to go on the left side all the way down to the bottom. It'll show you website visits. To me, that feature is huge because I have so many people that ask me, how do I know that people have visited my website if they haven't filled out a form, they haven't converted on a form. What websites visits do for you is these are prospects. These are visitors that are coming to your site that haven't converted on a form yet. Using the HubSpot tracking code, it can detect IP addresses for the page view. Now, these are going to be large companies. When you get there, you're going to see a filter that says Internet provider is equal to false. That's to get rid of people like you and me that are, you know, just working from home and have Verizon or T Mobile as our Internet service providers. But for your universities, for your larger companies, they're going to have a dedicated IP address. If you get nothing else out of this episode, look at that particular area of your HubSpot portal because most people don't know it exists.

I love that. Turning on target accounts. I love too that HubSpot has even got a prospecting tab now and there's a whole bunch of information there. So listen, ladies and gentlemen, at the end of the day, I love what Will said. Go into your HubSpot portal. If you don't have a HubSpot portal, hit Will or me up, depending on if you're looking at free Starter Pro, whatever you're trying to do. And we can get you rolling. But here's the thing. Let's go back to the human, because the human is what's important. Mindsets are what are important. And so Will, when you think about this sales professional. What kind of mindset should a sales professional adopt when approaching sales prospecting and working with target accounts as one cohesive piece that they're going to do? Where should the cranium be?

So let's start with prospecting. So we've all heard the statistics. Oh, sales has changed because the 80% they can. Your prospects got to know 80% about you because of the Internet. Well, the same is true for the salesperson as well, especially if they're looking at a company. So it's almost like that old Western, you know, that Western showdown. They're like, I know everything about you and you're looking across at the other guy and the other guy's like, I know everything about you. And so where can we meet in the middle? The place that we meet in the middle is remembering that these are humans. And I've heard the quote, George, you probably have said this numerous Times. It's not B2B, it's H2H. It's H2H. It's that simple. So instead of staring down, I know everything about you, Western style. When you're prospecting, reach out in a helpful human way. So that's prospecting. Let's talk about target accounts. Now, what's the mindset for target accounts? The best mindset for target accounts is a collaborative mindset, a team mindset. There's no room for a lone wolf here. There's no room for the sales hero here. If you're going to do target accounts, the right way you have to be in a mindset of this is the team working on this together. When the team wins the account, we all win the account.

I love this so much Will, because my mind and I fully understand, ladies and gentlemen, I have a strange mind. I get it. But when you were talking about the kind of western showdown and then you even started to talk about the team mentality, it came running back tombstone, I'm your huckleberry. Because it's this idea of like first action starting the conversation. But, but Doc was on a team. Well, here's the thing. When you listen to most, you know, organizations, most thought leaders, most C suite executives, if we can't measure it, it doesn't make sense which I, I totally get. So we have to have the conversation today. What are some key performance indicators or KPIs metrics if you will, that sales professionals should track to measure the effectiveness of their sales prospecting and target account efforts like in HubSpot or elsewhere, I don't care where. But what should they be measuring so they can understand like hey it is being successful.

The first metric that I love to take point to is engagement. What's their level of interest? And like I referenced before website visits, are they coming back to your website? They may not have raised their hand yet and converted on a form identified themselves to you. But what's their level of interest from that? Whether it's content, whether it's your emails, whether it's the website or any other touch points that you may have. What's the level of engagement? That's the first thing. The second thing that I would take a look at is what are my opportunity to win rates. How many of these people that are opportunities converted into customers. Next one builds on the last one and that is retention rates. If we're building long term relationships, we have to retain these people. Are we doing that? Which leads to very happy metric that people like to look at customer lifetime value. Are you building the relationship? Are you retaining these people? Therefore what's the lifetime value? So those are kind of from the customer perspective. And I would, I want to point out one metric that's from an organizational perspective. You really have to take a look at what's the ROI of target accounts. If we're investing this time energy money into target accounts, what's my return on it? And of course the metrics that I listed are going to tell you your roi. So don't just look outward but also look inward to your team.

Man, I hope people have their notepad out, some spray Paint some chalk, an iPad, something. I hope they're jotting down notes because to have that list of KPIs that they could be paying attention to and have some metrics towards is going to make conversations internally in their organization so much easier. All right, let's keep digging in. Well, can you share some actionable tactics or strategies that our listeners can implement immediately today after they get done watching or listening to this podcast or watching it on YouTube or in the community that will improve their sales prospecting efforts or enhance their approach to target accounts? Like what's the 1, 2, 3 things that will Smith has on this question?

So this is a tough one because I've said many times this is collaborative, this is a team sport, this is all these things. A lot of times you can't just jump into a sales meeting and just say, hey everyone, I just listened to this great podcast with George P. Thomas and Will Smith and we're going to do this, this and this. It takes time to socialize that idea. So let's talk about the individual listener watcher. Whoever you are, you as an individual, what can you do to after listening, watching this? And that is do your research. I wish there was like a magic wand to say, hey, if you just go into HubSpot and click here, there and this other place, your life's going to be that much better. But it's not that simple. So what can an individual do? Do your research because this is a long term strategy and if you're going to be the one that's leading the charge, you got to know pretty much everything that there is to know about target accounts and that means doing your research. How does this apply to my organization? And then once you socialize the idea and you got your team ready to go, forget everything. Not literally, but how can you collaboratively work with your team if you're standing up there like a know it all, more minds make better work. You know, whatever you want to say. This is how we're going to get a really good implementation with someone leading the charge, but then stepping back, being humble and saying, I don't know everything. Let's get the team in and get their ideas ideas as well.

Row to America as a team. Let everybody discover what's going to work. I love that idea. Well, especially in the world of sales, I mean the world in general. But in the world of sales, things are constantly evolving. How can listeners or viewers stay updated on the latest trends and technologies related to sales prospecting? Target accounts is there like some go to places, books Podcasts, how do you stay as educated as you are on these topics?

George, I'm going to go a little bit off on this question, and what I mean by that is I'd love to be able to say that this book's going to solve your problem. Reading this and seeing this podcast, I'd love to be able to say that, and everybody's world would be better. Something that I recommend that works for me may not work for someone else. And so, George, what I'm recommending to your audience, and I want people to kind of lean in a little bit closer. The best strategies, the best resources are the ones that you're going to use consistently. For me, I like podcasts like your podcast, George. That's where I like to go. I like books, but I can't read books because at the end of the day, I'm pretty tired, and if I'm sitting on the couch, I'm probably going to fall asleep reading a book. But I've discovered that I do much better if I listen to books. And so that's what works for me. I'd love to give you one thing, but just to recap what I just said, folks, you need to do something. Know yourself, and do something that you know that you're gonna do consistently.

First of all, there's some life philosophies there. Know yourself, leverage, consistency for power. If I bring in the other, answer the question, it's literally like research and educate yourself on the thing. So listen, we might be helping you in sales, prospecting and target accounts, or we might just be helping you in life right now with the things that are coming out of Will's mouth. Will, you didn't know this one was coming, but this has been a great interview. And I just. I want to ask this question as we start to close up. What's one thing? If you had to drill it down to hashtag one thing, what's one thing you hope that people take away from today's episode?

One thing that I hope people take away from this episode is that it's not all set in stone. You got to be flexible. You got to say, challenge what you're usually doing. And I'll give an example for that. I noticed that I listen to books best when I'm just coming out of the gym early in the morning because my brain is just receptive, very receptive. I then continue listening to books or the book that I'm currently listening to during breakfast. I can get an hour of reading or listening in just by doing that. So challenge what your your process is challenge what you're always been doing. If something didn't work before, is there another way that you can do that? So the one thing is hashtag challenge assumptions.

I love that so much. Will, if people have questions for you and they want to reach out, where do you want to point them to?

Spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. My friends spent a lot of time there, so DM me on LinkedIn. If you like email, you could always catch me@wsmithpactplus.com but if you want a quick answer, LinkedIn's where you go.

LinkedIn is the place where we all jam out. Hey listen, if you're listening to the audio podcast, make sure you head over to the YouTube channel or head over to community.hubheroes.com to watch this bad boy. Also, not only just watch it, but there will be additional resources located in the description of the community area. Until next time, he's been Will Smith. I'm of course George B. Thomas. Remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human and we'll see you on the next episode of the Sidekick Strategy show real soon.