Kyle Asay argues account executives shouldn't trust Ops scores or employee counts alone. Instead, manually score accounts on three tiers: Priority 1 has both use case and budget, Priority 2 has one, Priority 3 has neither. Verify budget through company websites and LinkedIn.
Your assigned territory is literally how you make money in sales. Which is why it's so surprising to me that most account executives do not properly score and prioritize their territory. Most AES rely on one of three metrics or combination to prioritize accounts. They look at revenue, employee count, or an account score provided to you by your sales operations team. This is not an effective way to prioritize your territory for a couple of reasons. One, data quality is normally terrible. I'm sure you've noticed accounts in your book that show us having very few employees and very low revenue, but actually have a good number of employees and high revenue. You've also probably seen that some of the accounts that Sales Operations thinks should be your best accounts have no employees and they're out of business. The other reason why relying on these metrics is a bad idea is it doesn't tell you the full story even if the data is accurate. Would you rather sell to an account that does 500 million in revenue but has no use case for your products or sell it to a smaller account that does 15 million in revenue but has multiple use cases for your products? Because of bad data quality and because of a story behind even the best data, it's important to take a different approach to scoring your accounts. The method I have always used for myself when I was an AE and for my teams is to manually prioritize based off of a three point scale. Priority one through three. Priority one are accounts that have both use cases for your product and available budget for your product. If use case is proven. Priority two are accounts where they have one or the other. And then priority three are accounts that have neither budget or or a use case. To put this into an easy to understand example, let's look at somebody selling luxury cars. A priority one prospect for luxury car salesmen would be a middle aged professional. They have budget because they have a job and they have a use case. They drive. Priority two. One example would be a teenager. This is an example of use case but no budget. Teenagers drive but they don't have money and so they are not a good prospect for luxury car salesmen. The other example of a priority two would be the one of budget but no use case. For this example, think of a wealthy retiree on a private island where they have tons of money but they have no need for a car. And finally, priority three would be a preteen. They can't drive and they have no money. No use case, no budget. So. So when you look at your account through this lens, manually score them priority one, two or three. The way I judge for budget is just to look at their website and look at their employee account manually, usually through LinkedIn. And I just use common sense. If it's a five person startup and I'm selling a $100,000 plus ARR solution, they probably don't have the means to afford that solution. If it's a 200 employee startup and I'm selling a $15,000 ARR license, then they probably could make a way to purchase that if the use case was proven. I hope this helps as you think about how to prioritize your accounts. If you want more in depth lessons around this topic and many others, go to salesintroverts.com where I host my best frameworks.
