3 Simple Steps to Hit the Ground Running as a New Account Executive

I'm frequently asked, what should my priorities be when joining a company as a new ae? Here's my advice. Number one Organize your territory. Number two Learn your buyer Personas what they care about, how they are measured, and what they are likely doing day to day. Number three Master the storytelling of two to three case studies that tie to what you learn from point. Number two. Let's go deeper into these. Number one Organize your territory. When a new AE joins my group, priority number one is helping them understand how to organize, understand and optimize their patch versus sustained success. When prioritizing accounts, most reps place too much weight on revenue and employee count. If they work for a mature company, they will often put too much weight on an internally calculated account score that is heavily influenced by revenue and employee count. Heavy reliance on these metrics is suboptimal for two reasons. Data quality, especially for privately held companies, is usually garbage, and these quantitative measures don't tell the full story. For example, would you rather sell to a company doing $5 billion in revenue but has no evident use case for your product or to a much smaller company that does 50 million in revenue with multiple clear use cases for your product? If you're like me, you're going to choose a smaller revenue company that has multiple clear use cases. I recommend that reps manually prioritize all accounts based on use case. The way I have my team tier their accounts is Priority one is use case and budget. Priority two is use case or budget. Priority three no use case and no budget. If you want more detail on this aspect, watch my how to Plan youn Territory and Prioritize youe Accounts YouTube video the second priority is learning buyer Personas. Before you could ever hope to articulate how your solution can help, you need Notions assigned to the product manager are likely related to the VP of Product priorities. This is a great way to look across an org to identify what they care about and how they're measured. If your account isn't hiring, there's no open rules in the account that relate to your prospect. You can look for comparable positions at competitors or similar companies. At a minimum, this research will provide insight into your prospect's goal deliverables and the tools they are using to achieve that. It will frequently inform other details of their current estate as well as and then finally master customer stories. Emotion sells and effective storytelling is what best evokes emotion. Look through your company's case studies once you're familiar with your accounts and the people you're going to sell to and find the ones that are most compelling for your top Personas within your top accounts. Memorize and practice telling these stories until you can tell them perfectly. These will be your go to response for well, what do you do? Questions that come up in both cold calls and discovery as a new ae. If you know what your best prospects care about, which accounts to focus on, and how to drive emotion with storytelling, you are ready to go create success. I hope you find this helpful. If you do, let me know in the comments. Would love it if you subscribe to my YouTube channel. And then as always, you can find my best frameworks@salesintroverts.com.