Target Account Selling (TAS) is a B2B sales strategy focused on identifying and pursuing high-value customer accounts with the greatest potential for generating revenue. Instead of a broad, shotgun approach, TAS emphasizes a personalized and targeted engagement with specific businesses or organizations that perfectly fit your ideal customer profile (ICP).
How does TAS differ from traditional selling?
Altify has been around since the beginning of target account selling. Indeed, we shaped the category, with TAS methodology baked into our software solution since the beginning. Although our software has evolved overtime to simplify selling in an increasingly complex business environment, today our TAS solution still follows the key characteristics of target account selling. These principles are as follows:
Key Characteristics of TAS
- Focus on high-value accounts: TAS prioritizes accounts with significant revenue potential. This strategy is most effective for sales organizations focusing on large, complex sales processes where there is much to gain from winning a deal over the long-term as opposed to just a transactional sale.
- Deep customer understanding: TAS focuses on truly understanding the customer’s unique business challenges and goals. This requires in-depth research and two-way conversation with the buyer to uncover an accounts’ needs, challenges, and buying processes.
- Personalized engagement: Leveraging the power of an entire revenue team, TAS helps sellers execute on tailored sales and marketing efforts to address specific account pain points in a way that would be impossible for a lone seller to achieve on their own.
- Cross-functional collaboration: Of course, in order to collaborate and execute on these tailored plans, revenue teams need to work closely across roles and functions to deliver unparalleled buying experiences for their customers. This includes close cooperation between sales, marketing, and customer success teams.
- Long-term relationships: Finally, TAS puts the relationship at the heart of the deal where sellers seek to build strong, lasting partnerships with key decision makers in accounts.
The problem with lone wolf selling
In a world without a targeted and strategic approach to selling, it’s much too common for sellers to simply gain a primitive understanding of an account before formulating a proposal, and shooting that proposal off to a desired customer, only to move on to the next one.
Lone wolf sellers, or those sellers largely acting alone, have a tough time standing out from the crowd in a hyper competitive business landscape. This is due to a fundamental change in the B2B sales space that has proven that lone wolf sellers and transactional sales approaches are largely out of place in a modern, B2B selling motion – one that prioritizes relationships over all other aspects of a sale.
The world has evolved and left lone wolf sellers behind.
Here’s why lone wolf selling doesn’t cut it anymore.
The primary reason is that buying groups have evolved beyond one wolf sellers. What are buying groups? Buying groups are essentially groups of decision makers within accounts responsible for a purchasing decision. There are many reasons why buying groups have become instrumental to the purchasing decision a large enterprise makes, and also explains the evolution of the revenue team. It takes a team to sell to a team.
Along with the challenge of attempting to concur buying groups, here’s why it takes an entire team to close a deal:
Buyers expect more
Additionally, buyers have come to expect more out of the buying journey and sales process than to be treated merely transactionally. They want sellers to show interest and understanding about their business, even desiring sellers to have as deep of an understanding about their challenges, goals and objectives as they have themselves.
This is especially true when it comes to big purchasing decisions. While a transactional seller might succeed in situations where the stakes are low, when the stakes are high, buyers expect to be guided by a seller who acts as an advisor.
For buyers, having a selling team invested in their business is a better investment down the line. As veteran seller Scott Jackson points out in Not Just Another Vendor, when it comes down to it buyers will choose a solid relationship with sellers who understand and solve challenges than just a product specific fit.
“When you come up in a sales culture that doesn’t think strategically nor does account planning, everything is opportunistically focused,” Scott says. “A lot of the salespeople I encounter basically just show up in front of potential customers and say, ‘Here’s my list of tools; what can I sell you today?’ instead of coming in with the intent to understand more deeply how they can help someone achieve their goals.”
Scott continues: “It’s a challenge for people to begin reframing their approach of understanding who’s who within an account and what value we want to create for them. It really is a paradigm shift.” But Scott believes it’s a shift worth making.
Time with buyers is slipping and every interaction counts
Although target account selling is by no means a new topic, as you can see recent evolutions in how B2B selling gets done have made it only more relevant, not less. One of those advancements is in the digital revolution and the selling/buying journey.
Today, buyers are spending less time with sellers face to face, and relying on independent research. This research is gathered via digital channels, which can be influenced by the marketing team (and better help the seller). While this points to the importance of digital marketing and how that ties into the revenue team, it also impacts the importance of making the most out of each and every interaction with the buyer.
A lone wolf seller will find it hard to deliver on everything that needs to be delivered during these interactions and will often lose out to a seller with more resources at his/her disposal.
TAS means leveraging the entire revenue team
As important as it is for your sales team to take a targeted approach to their key accounts (a defined list of accounts that are likely to be closed), it also takes an entire team approach to successfully grow revenue in accounts. This means having full coverage over every aspect of the buying journey – bringing in executive sponsors when needed, collaborating with customer success and marketing teams over plans to best address customer needs, and also ensuring that you are armed with the content you need to stand out from the competition when attempting to tackle especially challenging accounts with large buying groups.
Without the revenue team, you simply cannot function at peak performance in target account selling.
Fundamental components of the revenue team include
- Sales
- Customer success
- Marketing
- Executive leadership
Is Target Account Selling for everyone?
TAS has proven benefits for sales organizations, but it takes full commitment and the right sales team in the right selling environment to reap its full benefits. Where target account selling really stands out is in the B2B landscape where sales teams take more of an advisership role, and less of a transactional one.
Additionally, if you have a very defined ideal customer profile, target account selling will work far better for you than it will for a company that is broader and appeals to anyone.
Lastly, Target Account Selling does require a good deal of investment. While the return on investment will make it worth it for companies that glean the full advantage of TAS, it will be less effective for those businesses that have routinely smaller deals.
That’s not to say that TAS only works for key accounts. On the contrary, many sales teams gain an advantage by leveraging the strategies they have used on key strategic accounts across a territory or portfolio of smaller accounts.
However, the finances have to be there, and the big deals help in justifying the considerable investment revenue teams and businesses need to make in acquiring new logos and growing revenue in existing accounts.
Why Target Account Selling is Vital in Complex Sales
Now that we’ve highlighted how invested organizations need to be in order to take full advantage of TAS, we should also take a look at why target account selling is worth the investment for businesses, especially those with long and complex sales cycles.
Businesses who leverage a target account selling approach see a lift in revenue, better relationships with customers, happier customers, and increased lifetime value.
Let’s get into all the reasons you should seriously consider a target account selling model for your sales organization.
Enhanced Sales Efficiency and Productivity
Who doesn’t want a more efficient, productive sales process?
By concentrating on high-value accounts, sales teams can maximize their time and resources, leading to increased productivity. At the same time, a deep understanding of target accounts allows for more targeted messaging and tailored solutions. This in turn accelerates the sales process. When you combine personalized engagement and a strong value proposition, you get an increase in the likelihood of closing deals.
Increased Revenue and Profitability
TAS helps sales organizations focus on the people that matter in their most strategic accounts. By focusing on the people and deals that matter, businesses benefit from bigger, better deals. This focused approach also allows sales teams to develop deeper relationships and win more deals while enhancing their customer lifetime value (CLTV). By nurturing strong relationships with key accounts, businesses can increase customer retention and better leverage upselling opportunities.
Deeper Customer Relationships and Satisfaction
Remember how we talked about the importance of making the most of every buyer interaction? One of the benefits of TAS is that you can overperform when it’s most important to do so thanks to improved customer interactions. By leveraging the strength of the entire revenue team, sellers come more prepared than would be possible if they were simply acting alone. This leads to not only a deep understanding of target accounts but also enables highly customized interactions and solutions.
The outcome from this is stronger customer loyalty. It’s no secret that building trust and rapport with key accounts leads to long-term partnerships and advocacy. The practical benefits of that are not only increased revenue but additional opportunities down the road. After all, satisfied customers are more likely to recommend your solution to others.
By implementing a well-executed TAS strategy, businesses can significantly enhance their sales performance, build stronger customer relationships, and achieve long-term growth.
Interested in learning more about how elite sales leaders are using TAS to build trust and grow revenue? Download our book, Not Just Another Vendor, to get practical insights from veteran sellers, and visit www.altify.com to get a first-hand look at how we have operationalized TAS methodology in our technology.