[Leadership] How to properly prioritize accounts in your territory

This is the thing that's so common, is right. People are like, hey, this company raised funding. So then I reach out and they're like, hey, you have money? Can I have your money? Basically, like how all of this, these outreaches go. When somebody raises funds, everybody tries to lean on that. Everybody tries to lean on that because it's a public, easy to access data source that all of these data tools have access to. So, like, if everybody has access to it, is it unique? Are you going to actually stand out? Like, you know, they're going to get 50 congrats on your funding that you just got, you know, like the couple of days after that PR press release goes out. All right, Nick, I had an idea for something we could talk about today. Given that it is now July by the time this goes live, or it's just about to be July. I wanted to talk about account prioritization and some interesting stats that I've learned. Some, some things that we've learned working a bunch of different companies and how reps can better prioritize their accounts to make sure that they're actually spending their time on the ones that matter. What do you think?

Yeah, I don't want to talk about that. No, I'm kidding. Yeah, no, that sounds good. I think it's something, especially at the moment. The industry is going for a period of change. Right. We all know it. And we're being asked to do more and more. Our territories are getting bigger and bigger. Our account looks, lists are longer and longer. How do we make sure we, we can be really busy and not really effective. Right. So how do we make sure we target the right areas for the biggest return on our investment? That's, that's what I think is key about this.

Yeah. And I think what I see, I think a really common approach, one to like just territory alignment and assignments is, hey, you just now own this territory. Like you have this like area of land that you cover. Right. I think that's like the most common way that people just like associ territories, which I think is interesting when it comes to. If you're expecting reps to be able to travel and be on site in all of those places. But I feel like it's still a very archaic way to align territories when it's not in person all the time. Unless it's very specific to time zones, you should easily be able to work accounts, you know, cross time zones and cross regions. Unless, you know, barring something like very specific, like language barriers and, you know, travel expectations, things of that Nature. Right. I think that's kind of like one thing I think about.

Yeah, I'd say that's top side tip. We're not saying we're going to dig into now. But as a top side tip, if you're a sales leader or exec listening to this, scrap your current plan and look at it from the point of view of your customers and see if you segment it differently.

Yeah, like go customer first. Rather than saying like, oh, I have a rep that I hired in the uk, so they are now our UK rep. Right. Like, right. Doesn't always have to work that way. And I think we should be more creative with how we actually, you know, associate our top accounts or associate accounts in general to. To reps.

I was pretty reasonably successful at sim2go, right. As a territory based rep. However, I probably would have been even more successful or and done more of the company if I'd have been global IPSD based rep because that was where I got all my business. But I just did it in one territory because that's all I had access to.

Yeah, yeah, right. Like you're thinking about it from like a customer perspective. Okay, now we're going to go down a rabbit hole that, yeah, that could go into a whole nother topic. But the main one we wanted to talk about was like, okay, you're given this swath of land, right. You're now like the landowner of whatever territory you have. And there are oftentimes, I would say reps aren't given like really good data about the accounts that are in their territory. Some companies I think do a decent job of this. I'm sure there's companies that do a pretty good job. But I think in general reps are given pretty bad data about the accounts that they have within their territories to go after, which makes it really hard to prioritize which ones that you should focus on or even just like knowing what accounts exist within your territory. Like there's so many small biotechs that pop up like all the time. You know, everybody you kind of leans on like, oh yeah, we want to target big Pharma. Like oftentimes like big pharma may not even be your best possible client. Right. And so I think the first step is just understanding like, what are the accounts that you actually have within your territory and building like an exhaustive list of these accounts.

Sure.

And so I think what's cool is nowadays you have a lot of tools at your disposal to do this. Like, you know, well, if you don't have access to like certain databases. You should try and get access to some of these databases. Like Gosset AI is like a really cool one that we use a lot. But there's lots of these ones out there that can like give you access to this type of data. Sales Navigator can even help you pull it, you know, things like that. But then you, you also. I don't even remember where I was going with that now.

So I had a point to add on to what you're saying. I think I'll save you here. You, you sit back. Um, so to, to make a point, you said you need. The first thing you need to do is make a long list of these companies, these accounts that you have, and then you need to start to prioritize them. And I think often people go down the, I don't want to say lazy, but the comfortable route of how can I prioritize these, oh, this company's got this many departments and this much money. Let's do that.

I would argue they don't even do that exercise half the time. Well, I recognize gsk. Cool. I'm going to go like Target.

But yeah, and just to give you a fairly like, common thing that I've seen as a leader is people are like, well, we need to get GSK or we need to get Ashley Zeneca because they've got big money. That may be true, but then you look, we've got six month run rate, okay? It's going to take you a year to land them. If you focus only on them, you're going to run out of Runway before you get there. So who's going to bring you the money now would be an important question to ask in that account situation. Because your objective is money now, Right?

And I also see people too do. The flip side of that is like, hey, I don't want to sell the academics because they don't have money. Which is like also just blatantly false. Like there are plenty of academics that have lots of funding and there are plenty of academics who can afford things. You just again have to find them and prioritize and prioritize them.

And then there's lots of them. So lots of them. With a small amount of money, if you, you know, it's still good.

It depends on the cost of your, you know, service, product, whatever. But still.

Yeah, and I think there's, there's the two things. One, we don't prioritize and if we prioritize, we don't do objective based prioritization. So what are we trying to achieve? And how are we going to achieve that then? Let's put the accounts in that fit that profile.

Yeah, everybody does it subjectively. Like, I feel like this account is good. I had a conversation with them. I feel like it feels good. Feels like this is going to be a big account for us or something. Or I saw this news article, they raised funding, so that's going to be a target account. Like, okay, but like, just because somebody raised funding doesn't mean, like this is the thing that's so common is right? People like, hey, this company raised funding. So then I reach out and they're like, hey, you have money? Can I have your money? Basically, like how all of these outreaches go. When somebody raises funds, everybody tries to lean on that. Everybody tries to lean on that because it's a public, easy to access data source that all of these data tools have access to. So if everybody has access to it, is it unique? Are you going to actually stand out? You know, they're going to get 50 congrats on your funding that you just got, you know, like the couple of days after that PR press release goes out.

Exactly. It's like, to give you probably an analogy that made sense for a lot of people to listen, if you're a parent and every time payday comes around, your kids are like, hey, you have money? Can I go? Can I have some? We're all used to allowance. Can you ask me how, where's my money? That don't feel great, right? No hug, nothing. Just where's my money? You got paid, right? That's what we're doing.

Yeah. And so I think the, the point that we're making here is like, step one is build a large list. Step two is you have to come up with an objective called scoring model of some way to actually rank your accounts. And when we say objective, it's like these are actual data points that you can gather and it's not like your gut feeling on something. So objective data points might be therapeutics, sorry, therapeutic areas that they're going after, modalities. Indications could be employee size even. Right. Maybe the R D spend that they have, it could be the number of active programs that they have on their website, could be the targets that they're going after. Right. So if they're going after specific targets that you have assays for, stuff like that. And so you want to basically look at your current set of customers, like, who are your best customers that you have today? And not only the ones that are just like spending a lot of money, but like the Ones that are actually, like, good to work with too, and that, you know, don't cause problems for you. Like, there are companies that could spend a lot of money with you, but they're requesting stuff as, like, a service that is, like, really hard to, to deliver. And so if you just purely look at, like, revenue for how much it's driven for you, you know, that could become an issue, you know, too. So it's like you basically want to identify what are all of the things and make an ideal customer and then work backwards from that to say, okay, how are we then going to score and rank these accounts? And ultimately what you're trying to get to here is some form of revenue potential within each of these target accounts that you could go after. And part of that is maybe an arbitrary number that you have to put towards, if they're working a specific target or a specific modality or specific therapeutic area or something, you want to put some arbitrary scoring or some sort of number tied to those things, and it's less so, and it's less important to have that number be 100% accurate. But the point is, then that number becomes a way to standardize your comparison across all of the accounts. Right.

Also gives you that metric of I've done this and I've spent X number of time, amount of time, and actually my success rate is quite low compared.

To what I'd expected.

These are not my companies.

Right.

You can learn from it. You don't like. It may turn out to be that you were wrong. But if you've, if you've got this metric to go by that standardized, then you can at least review that. You can iterate, you can, and find where those wins are.

Then you basically tweak the little algorithm that you have for your territory. Right? Yeah. And then now you all of a sudden you have a scoring model to go back and say, hey, here's the 500 accounts in my territory, and then here's the scoring model I'm going to apply to them. And now all of a sudden you can have like a ranked list objectively, of all of the accounts that you should be spending your time on. And I guess we can come back to, like, one thing I guess I forgot to mention at the beginning is like a data point that I recently heard was that reps typically only work on average, 40% of the accounts in their territory. Right. That means if you have a list of, you know, 500 accounts in your territory, you're only working 80 of them. If I did that math, right, um, so, like, that leaves this huge gap of accounts that aren't being targeted. But, like, what if the 80 that you're working or you're trying to get into are like the wrong accounts? And that's like a huge. Actually 40%. That's terrible math. I don't even know what I did with that math. It's way more than that.

Yeah, half it. Double it. Take away half.

Yeah, half it. Double it. Triple it. Yeah, I, I. There's another podcast I listen to, and they have a rule where they say we don't do live math on the podcast because we all just sound dumb. So here's. There we go. That's why we don't do live math on a podcast.

Well, there's two reasons. One, you call it math is maths, right? Because if you're only doing one sum, that's why you'll get to the wrong answer. But maybe we should only do live math on the podcast.

It's 200 counts. We're 200 counts out of the 500. But that doesn't. I don't know where the hell I got that number. So your point being? You're working a set set of accounts, and unless you have an objective way to say you're working the correct accounts, it's hard to spend your time wisely and know that you're spending your time wisely. The other advantage to this too is if your manager comes to you and say, hey, what accounts are you targeting? You have a very easy thing to go back to and be like, hey, I've targeted these accounts because of, here's my, literally my sheet, my algorithm that I put together to say, these are why I'm targeting these accounts specifically. And like, I don't think many managers are going to argue with you about that. Okay, sounds good, right? But then all of a sudden now you want to start tracking success towards your outreach and how you're growing those accounts, et cetera. But yeah, at least it gives you that North Star to kind of target and go after. Let's take a quick break from the podcast to talk about what we have going on over here at Succession. We work with 40 plus life science sales companies to help them find more opportunities and close more deals. We provide a range of services to support your sales growth. So whether it's increasing top of funnel opportunities with done for you lead generation in person, or virtual sales training reinforced by personalized training plans, recruiting top sales talent, or just building custom AI workflows to help make your team more efficient, focus on selling so if you're ready to transform your sales strategy, visit Succession Bio and schedule a call with Nick and I and we'll see how we can support you. Cool.

And I think that one of the things about this with reps and probably with reps that are really proactive and good, is that if I'm targeting a smaller list, look at all of these potential tiny things that are over here that I'm ignoring. And I think the key is you don't necessarily ignore them, but you give less, less investment of your time to them because you've done the maths and you've calculated that they are less likely to have potential. So it's a needle in a haystack. So let's put some time into those. But if you have a sequencer or something, you do it in that way. So let's say you got 40, 50 hours in a week. Like 45 of those 40, 45 of those hours are going to be spent on your top accounts where you can bet the most potential, but you'll spend a little bit of your time trying to nurture some of these other ones because who knows what's the next big thing and what you'll learn from those.

Yeah, I think it's an interesting point. Right. Because if you're, if we know that you only have time to target your, to only target 40% of the accounts in your territory, that is where like I would call it, the human effort should go. Right. Because you want your human effort to be spent on the areas that you know are going to bring the best return. But then there's still literally 60% of your territory that's not being touched at all. And that's where so many of the different tools and, you know, leveraging AI, leveraging automation workflows, leveraging these data sets to like find contacts, enrich them, pull in their contact details, write custom messaging, be able to do this stuff towards that 60% sort of the long tail of your accounts and is a great way to have that engine running like always on. And then while the humans are working on like that top 40% and frankly like, you may even want to like pull that down and like, because of how good these tools are getting from an outbound perspective around, you know, doing, doing outreach to generate meetings and like, because they're so good, you may even want your humans focusing on like your human time spent on the top 20% of accounts. Yeah. And when that way you're spending even more time on those absolute best accounts and you have extra time to Put in extra effort to generate more results at those top accounts and then you have the rest of the stuff kind of happening. Always on, they're always engaging the rest of your territory and that stuff bubbles up to the rep when it's ready to then be taken forward from there.

Yeah, well, maybe that's an argument for actually territory based reps. They should be out pounding the pavement again because we can automate the internal work and they should be out meeting people.

That's fair too. Doesn't work as well if you have a really small team, but yeah, yeah, that's all it is.

Exactly. That's pretty cool. And the other thing I'll say is that there's a lot of companies out there, but we know some of them that follow us, that they don't have a lot of these tools. You can also automate your LinkedIn. Right. And there's tools out there that are really relatively cost effective to help you automate Messages on your LinkedIn. Your LinkedIn is your profile. If I was a rep these days and I didn't have tools, I'd probably invest in something like to automate.

Half of this stuff is so cheap. Like you could get a, like some of these things like for less than like 100 bucks a month. Like you could probably get a couple of really powerful tools just from like your own spending to, to, to make, to probably, you know, to, to give you back a ton of time. You will literally close more deals, you will get more commission and if you view like $100 a month as an expense, then, you know, that's, you know, it's just not the right mindset to have like. But if you come to want to invest in it, like you should do it yourself. Get access to these tools, start using them because it's gonna make a difference.

And particularly if it's LinkedIn, because it's your profile. Most companies can't really say much about you doing things on LinkedIn. Right. Because that's your personal space.

Right.

Be careful. But you know, I would. That's where I'd go with this.

Yeah, no 100%. So yeah. What's the quick recap here? Is coming up on a new quarter. Got to do some sort of territory planning. You're probably doing some sort of conversation with your manager to prep for it. And so when you're going through that, start by pulling a list of all the accounts in your territory, all the accounts in your region that you could go after. Create a scoring mechanism based off of your current existing clients that you have your best clients that you're already working with. Create that algorithm and then apply it to that giant list of accounts for your territory. And then that's going to give you an objective list of accounts that you should be targeting. Yeah. And then from there, spend your effort on those top accounts that you have, you know, the human manpower to do and that. Then below that for the rest of them, set up systems, processes, automations, workflows to make sure that you're constantly engaging, you know, the remaining 70, 60% of the accounts in your territory.

Yeah, it sounds like quite a long list, but it's actually quite a straightforward list. So I'd say go, go now and by this time next week, pull all your accounts and prioritize, put all your accounts and list them and get the data.

I mean, even just like pulling and knowing all the accounts, new territory is going to be a big, a big win. Right.

So don't worry. Just go do what you can. Because not to get too geopolitical, but account reps are like governments at the minute and they're always trying to take new territory. So it's going to change, it's going to grow, it will change anyway. So don't, don't let the. What is it? The good.

Don't let perfection. Yeah. Get in the way of progress. Yeah, yeah, it's a good one. All right, well, if you guys have question about any of this stuff, let us know, hit us up on LinkedIn, ask us, we're happy to answer. See you on the next one.