B2B Account Executives waste time on accounts that look big but won't buy. Instead, prioritize two things: does your product solve a real problem for them, and do they have budget. Check LinkedIn profiles and job postings for signs they use competing tools and are hiring in the departments that need you.
Considering that a sales reps assigned territory is literally how they make money, it's surprising how rarely AES understand where they should spend their time. When a new AE or leader joins my organization, priority number one is helping them understand how to organize, understand and optimize their path for sustained success. Now throughout my career I've reviewed accounts with hundreds of reps. I've looked at thousands, probably tens of thousands of accounts, and I found that when scoring accounts, most reps place too much weight on revenue and employee counts. They default to. Well, the bigger the account, the bigger the opportunity. If they work for a mature company, they'll often put too much weight on the internally calculated account score, which is often heavily influenced by revenue and employee count. And heavy reliance on any of these metrics can be ineffective for two primary reasons. The first one is data quality, especially for privately held companies, is usually garbage. And second, these quantitative measures don't tell the whole story. Now, I doubt that the data quality sucks statement is surprising to you. I've never spoken to an AE that thought they had great CRM data and the impact is painful. Ops will highlight accounts for you to work based on metrics and numbers that are often wrong. However, even if you did have perfect data for every company in your patch, there's more nuanced territory management than just the metrics. For example, if I gave you these two companies, which would you rather prospect into? Company A with 500 million of revenue, 2,000 employees but no clear use case for your product or company B? Only 50 million revenue, just 500 employees, but you see multiple clear use cases for your product. If you're like me, you're going to choose the company B every time. But are you actually prioritizing your current territory accordingly or are you over indexing on account size and growing frustrated as you are unable to open many conversations? Let me introduce to you the prioritization framework that I've used as an AE manager and even now as a vp. Some Quick Definitions first, we're going to talk about the use case, which means you can identify where and how your product would be used at launchdarkly. This would be as simple as does this company differentiate by how they build software? If they are innovating through software, they're releasing features and they should be conducting experimentation. There's the use cases. Second, budget. This means the company likely invests or would invest in solutions like yours. I get a lot of questions questions on this one. How can I know if they have budget without talking to them first? What I'm looking for is the potential that they have budget, not that they've already allocated budget. My two favorite signals for potential budget are 1 the use of a competitor and 2 headcount growth in your target departments. If they're using a competitive solution, you know they're trying to solve a problem that you can solve. To find competitive solutions, I will search their current employees LinkedIn profiles for competitor names as well as looking at open job descriptions. People often will list tools they use on their profile and then companies almost always list solutions they use on job descriptions, hoping to find applicants that already know how to use those solutions. If they are spending money on a competitor, there's potential budget for you to capture then the other one I love to look at is the headcount growth and target departments. This is a great way to validate potential budget in an account and I think it's actually much better than just revenue or overall employee count. If they are investing in headcount for a department, they'll likely invest in solutions to support that headcount. I get this data in two ways. The first one is open job postings. So similar to finding competitors, I love to see if they're hiring in that area and what skills they're hiring for. I use the LinkedIn Insights tab to find this quickly at LaunchDarkly. A company growing their engineering team is a good sign that budget for our solutions could be made available. Now that you understand the use case and budget concept, here's how I have my teams tier their accounts. Priority one are accounts where they likely have a use case and budget. Priority two is you see likely one or the other use case or budget and then priority three is you don't see any use cases and it's unlikely they would have budget. Once this is organized, you should spend 80% or more of your time on priority one accounts, then use more scaled approach, SDR support, etc. On priority two and never look at priority three accounts again. Organizing your territory in this way is a time consuming exercise, but don't skip it or try to find shortcuts. Even the most optimized sales process will not make up for working low quality territory. Once you have this foundation, you are then able to go optimize your territory by going much deeper and ideally never have to wonder again what accounts should I work today? That's it for today's video. I hope you enjoyed this topic and that it was helpful for you as you progress your sales career. If you're looking for more ways to improve, I've linked some free resources for you in the description of this video and in the pinned comment below, simply visit that link, input your name, and tell me which email I can send this to you and I'll get them to you immediately. 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