How to Master Account Prioritization?- Jacob Leisher

But I feel like there's like one key thing that I find a lot a new tool is for their company and there's like, how do you find the sweet spot of the. And then I like to try and build a system that pulls in.

Our guest today is Jacob Leisher, a dynamic sales leader with a track record of rebuilding and scaling SDR teams. With over 200% outbound opportunity creation, water on water and experience across startups and SaaS giants, Jacob brings a unique blend of sales and marketing expertise. He's here to share his strategy for account prioritization and the secret sauce behind its success. Without further ado, let's welcome Jacob. What are the some of the trends which you're seeing in the SDR world and if you have any tips for let's say SDRs who have been there for, let's say a couple of years and are not sure what to do, like, how do they find their next path?

Yeah, I was actually. So I threw out like a little poll just to see, you know, what are maybe some, some areas of topics. I just know kind of a hot topic that always seems to jump up is, you know, how do we prioritize accounts. And I think that there's so many different layers to it. But I have a little bit of a secret sauce I was willing to share with you today and talk through it.

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean I looked at your results. I know you have not updated your LinkedIn Probably I think that was 200% increase in outbound operation, quarter on quarter. So. And I also looked at your track record and I think it has been phenomenal. So is there any secret sauce which you want to share there too?

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think it all goes hand in hand. Right. I think I can just speak to like a little bit of my background and just, I think I think of things in a little different way because of it. I got right to work when I was 18. I did, I did life insurance for a little while. So I got some, you know, closing experience there. But it's obviously still way different. I think a lot of sellers figure that out as you can go to, you know, door to door or selling insurance and then step into the business to business world and you know, kind of get the door slammed in your face and then you either learn and grow or, or you kind of. It's the sink or swim moment. Right. So there's a lot of differences and nuances when you're looking at B2C versus B2B. But so yeah, I did A couple other things after that, I actually got roped into doing litigation funding. So I was part of a team that would look into personal injury claims that were brought to law firms. And let's say those law firms didn't particularly have enough funding to get the case all the way. We would actually go and fund them and then get a return on that investment once they got their payout. So I end up doing that for a couple of years. But I've always kind of had a knack for sales and marketing and so I started to actually kick around this idea of building a platform that I kind of predicted that Facebook was going to have to make a decision either this is going to be a good place for businesses or a good place for users. And I think we see it play out today, right? Like nobody when Facebook first came out, it's like, you know, you'd see a great burger on your feed and be like, I'm going to go try out that restaurant now. It's, you know, that instantaneous, like I'll buy that T shirt, but it's not going to get me out of my seat, out of my house, into a business. And so I built a marketplace, marketing platform, social platform. It's called Entice Us. And the whole premise was what are businesses going to do to entice us to come there? Spent some time up in San Francisco, raised some money doing that like most startups that ended up not working out. And so when I was sitting there at the end of the road for that one, it was, well, I'm good at tech sales. I know I can go, go do that. So that's actually how I got my start really in tech sales. Into the SDR role, I went and worked for a third party outbound agency, shout out to Inside Sales Solutions. It's a great, great place to go learn. Right. Like I, I quickly was pitching 10, 20, 30, 40 different products throughout the time I was there. Been with a lot of great companies, whether Sophos, Splunk, you know, IBM, Dell, you name it. I worked one of their campaigns for, for helping grow business for some of their channel partners and they're still doing great things over there today. They've been in business for a long time. Just a overall great place to get your start if you're looking to make a break into tech sales. Yeah. From there got recruited out, ended up working over at Tech C, which ended up being kind of a blessing in disguise. It was remote visual customer support or field support for technicians. And I think my, my second day of training at the WeWork office in Tampa when they came and said, hey, we're on lockdown now for Covid. And as you can imagine, a visual support solution during COVID was, it took off pretty, pretty quickly. So it was a lot of challenging, fun work and growing and you know, tons of opportunity. And so yeah, I was there for, for two years, had some great successes there, you know, some, some big accounts, really learning how to work with a Persona that I wasn't really used to yet. You know, done the network engineers, the network management people, you know, sold the cyber security. But all of a sudden I'm, I'm in the customer support world and having to relearn all that and also, you know, field technicians, stuff like that. Yeah, from there, Salto and then, you know, most recently over at Split, which is, which has definitely been an interesting 10 months. Right. Came here to kind of rebuild, revamp the SDR Org and we got acquired by Harness back in June. And so now I'm over here on the Harness team and you know, helping build up that, you know, same part of the business, but great being able to work with and help support, you know, the growth of. I think we just onboarded 24 new SDRs. We, you know, building up the, there's three other managers we got, you know, one in Boston, one in Dallas, one in the UK, you know, helping them out as much as I can and just really trying to build this org and it's been a fun, wild ride.

Wow, that's, that's quite right. I mean I could, I could think of so many questions to ask you, but in the interest of time, I'm going to only ask you one. Besides the account privatization before we jump into that is what led you to stay in the SDR space and not move up the ladder, you know, become VP of Sales or do something else.

That's a, that's a great question. I think for me, you know, having kind of that sales and marketing brain, I think the two just collide perfectly with sales development. I think also when we chat about like account prioritization, you'll see I kind of look at things in more of a holistic view, like how can all. I call it Cerberus, right? You know, three headed dog you have sdr, marketing and sales. And like, how do we really make that like a single body that goes and tackles the market together? And it just happened to be an area that I think is, you know, I, I, I kind of predicted it a couple years ago that I think SDR salaries are going to keep increasing. I think the demand for skilled SDRs is going to continue to grow. And I think we're seeing the, the crux of that really come into play now of like, is it, is it a place for, you know, like is it the entry level job that we always considered it for the past 10, 15 years or do we really have to invest in skill and invest in our people and level them up? And I think we're starting to see that transition really take form now. But I think, I don't know. I love the hunt, love the chase. I feel like the rules of the game change with like every quarter, but also every person you're trying to reach out to. It's, I like to say it's like a game of whack a mole. How do you easily win the game of whack a mole? You get really good at covering all the holes and so I think that's where I just find the most fun.

No, I think that's an interesting perspective and I like that the example of you gave the three darks. Beautiful man. Thank you so much. Let's jump right into it. I think we've talked, talking about account prioritization today. Floras tell us, you know something which we don't know because. And I'll give you some background because I run a boot camp and I just finished two cohorts today. I mean I'm running two parallel cohorts. One starts at 5am and one starts when. I just ended that like an hour ago. And on the day one we did briefly touch upon account prioritization and I was talking about how I used to run this Excel sheet back in the day I had an intern who would put the things on Excel and I would assign different weightage to each account and that's how we would go about account privatization. Today we have tools like Keyplay, Ocean, which I really love because that kind of takes the whole pain away. But yeah, happy to hear, you know, how are you doing it? What are some of the things which people should consider before they do go into the compatisation?

Yeah, no, that was, that's like a great place to kick off. Right. I think like most organizations today and I think one of the little key differences where I've kind of separated myself and found some successes, we all do some form of like ICP scoring. Right. Like we know what our customers look like. Like do they have the same demographics, whether it's employee count, industry. Right. And we either provide like a tiering system or A scoring system. But I feel like there's like one key thing that I find a lot of sales leaders or SDR leaders miss and that is like, and as you know, you've run some teams too is like we have to hit a certain asp dollar value to make SDR or a profitable and like, you know, net positive part of a sales organization, the average number is around like 25k, right? So like that's where we need to aim. But one of the things that we're not doing, particularly a of SaaS companies or SaaS leaders aren't doing, is not looking at like, hey, we know how we sell. And so if we sell on a per seat basis, are we figuring out what is the total potential revenue based on number of seats? You know, like, so let's just say it's a company we sell to software engineers. There's 100 engineers at this company. We know our average per seat is this. We can now assign like here's a total potential revenue value. And then now if we take it one more step further and this is where things get really interesting. You can now look at your ICP data, your customer data and say, hey, well of our customers we know on average they have 100 potential seats, but we've only sold 30 on average. So we now know based on any net new logos, we want to go after what is now our predictive revenue. I like to assign a scoring system to that. Do you have ICP score? Is it a good fit? Does it check those boxes like here. What's the total potential revenue? Are we even in the right ballpark? What is the average predictable revenue that we need to go after? And now you can really prioritize by that. But also taking a step further, like assigned to AES versus SDRs, you know, if you have an AE and you have let's say quotas based on like 250k and then you run this predictive revenue scoring and you see, hey, they're going after just, just only, you know, 25k potential accounts. You know, you need to go cycle in maybe some bigger ones or how or what the volume they're going to need to do is. You can start to pull in all the other metrics, right, that are more downstream of, you know, what's our close one rates, what's the timing like for, you know, these size of accounts. You can start to really create a super powerful engine that at least points you in the right direction and make sure you're at least like starting off on the right track. And I can't tell you how many times I've gone in and like, hey, let's audit this, let's run it through this model. And it's like, hey, 60% of the accounts we're going after, we should not be going after at all. You know, let marketing take that list of accounts and hopefully bring them in inbound. But if we're going to be putting resources, bodies and seats, we want to make sure we're focused here and making sure we're focused on doing the right things with the right accounts day in and day out.

W. That's something that I've never heard of. How do you do that? Like, do you have like a toolkit? Do you have like a particular tool you use? Excel sheet.

So, so there, there's definitely a couple of ways I'm definitely more of like, I want to be as accurate as possible. You know, you could run like a LinkedIn search and be like, hey, what's the total engineering count? Or you know, or sales rep count or whatever it may be you're trying to find that per seat. I usually go into sales nav and I will make like an end all be all Persona list in sales nav and then do the one to one account research. I have in the past, like gone and hired, you know, outsource people from like Fiverr that do LinkedIn sales NAV research, set them up with what I need and give them like a bucket of 500 accounts at a time. That helps me scale it a whole lot faster. So. But I haven't really found a tool. LinkedIn used to have one that would do this at scale for you with a Persona base. And they got rid of it. I think it was called Sales Insights, but everybody would buy at one time, do all of their research and then never renew. So they got rid of it. But as of right now, I don't know any other way to do it because it's a pretty one to one research base. But I always like teach this with my, my SDRs is I would rather spend an entire day or an entire week right now getting all the answers I need to then just go execute beyond that point. Just like you would, you know, prospecting. Like, hey, you have a hundred accounts in your patch. Let's go build the end all be all prospect list for this right now. And then I can do all that research, everything one time, get everything set up, and now I can just execute on those hundred accounts for the next 30 to 60 days, right? So I try and do the same Thing as I build account lists out for my team. The other thing too I think that's super interesting to maybe touch on as well is you know, tons and tons of trends around like you know, intent or signals like and making sure like your outbound approaches around that. There's obviously a lot of great things there but you have to rely on I think a lot of third party data and I think you probably experience it, you know, like you go to an intent scoring, it's like oh wow, intense score is you know, a score of 92 out of 100, let's call them. And it's like, well yeah, they're web searching about this stuff right now because someone just bought it at the account and now all the people have to use it are suddenly pinging all over the web researching what the new tool is for their company and there's like how do you find the sweet spot of the third party tools that don't tell you what the sweet spot is? So another thing I like to ask, like ICT score is always great, that potential revenue score, making sure we're in the right pocket. And then I like to try and build a system that pulls in almost like MQL scoring, like lead scoring. But how take like all of our leads or contacts in our system and assign value to the different interactions and then surface that at the account level. And that's kind of the last one is like what's our personal intent score based off of the lead interactions today. And I think if you build out a system with those three things you have like a baked in account prioritization that is you don't need anything else really at the end of the day.

Wow. I think you're probably echoing what I've also seen a lot on LinkedIn nowadays and we all have seen the debate between our B2B and 6 sense. You know how that went. I used to work with a company which, which was acquired by six Sense. So I'll not, I'll not really comment on that. Yeah because, because at that time we used to even talk about that hey, six Sense is bad, our data is better. And that was eventually acquired by six Sense anyways. But I think I've been hearing that this a lot that you know, there's no intent tool out there which, which really serves the purpose, which works the way you, you're describing. And it's always better to build something of your own. You mentioned Sales Navigator, you building the internal system. Is there a particular tool which you have found which comes closer to what you're doing so that people can take a look at it. Maybe.

Yeah. I mean I think like it's always good to go pick the any of the third party systems that like do intent that focus on first party first. I think there's value but like how do if it's not customizable to assign scoring or value based on like how you view it right. Like, like you might have like let's say if you break down the content that's coming from marketing, you'll have top of funnel, mid funnel, bottom funnel where you can assign different scoring to that if you build it. Myself I've yet to see a tool that allows me to go in and say like hey no, this piece of content that this person interacts with is a lower score than this piece of content. Just doesn't give you the flexibility. But I think there's a lot of interesting tools coming out right now that I think are starting to kind of pull that information in at least like your own data and surface it. 11 I'll call out right now that I think is doing something really interesting is actively AI. So they basically built like your own personal GPT that will scrape, you know whether like you use gong or anything like that. The scrape out call recordings, keywords from there from like all of your salesforce data from your power dialer or outreach and start to funnel all that together and then even give you like prompts for hey, you should email this person because of this conversation that happened or here's what we saw or heard in this conversation. You should follow up with this person. Then they actually build out the messaging for you. And I'm a big fan of I'd rather tear down than build all the way up from scratch. So there's, there's definitely some interesting things that I think are coming out with the AI space and just pulling in first party data but I haven't really seen it on like in a true account score and how I like to see things done.

Did you say active leads?

I actively. Actively. So like actively. Yeah, the pretty interesting stuff what they're doing. I met with them, solid demo actually going to probably we're doing a POC over here harness with them. But definitely right when I saw it I was like that's exactly what I've kind of been looking for. If there's an AI tool I'd want to use there, I think they're right in the wheelhouse.

Yeah, that sounds amazing. I'm going definitely going to check that out. Thank you so much Jacob. I think we are right on time. Truly appreciate it, man. Thank you so much.