Building an Account-BasedRevenue OrganizationEric MartinSenior Director, Demand GenerationSalesLoft

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Building Account-Based A Little About Me

● Joined SalesLoft in September 2016

● Rapidly growing SaaS company with amazing product/market fit

● An unbelievably supportive culture with strong core values

● High inbound lead flow, but wanted better quality - not just quantity

● Needed to head upmarket. The answer: Go account-based

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Account-based engagement is, from a practical perspective, a waste mitigation mechanism.

You build an account-based practice to focus resources on the good fit accounts, and divert resources from bad fit accounts.

Building Account-Based A Practical Perspective

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A Brief History

A multi-year labor of love, and alignment

2016 2017 2018

TAM / Market Sizing

Constructed a Total

Addressable Market estimate

and sized our market.

Account Selection and Kick-Off

Continuously improved our

account selection and

assignment processes to serve

a rapidly scaling organization.

Began execution of

coordinated sales/marketing

plays.

Orchestration and Scaling

Ramped up coordinated

sales/marketing plays, built a

solid foundation of

ABM-capable tech, grew our

demand generation team.

Building Account-Based A Brief SalesLoft History

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Building Account-Based Total Addressable Market

Conservative Total Addressable Market(Bottom-Up)

A “bottoms-up” customer analysis starts with your customer base and extrapolates how big the market is based on certain characteristics. (Seats, ARR, etc.)

Helps you better understand the market share required to meet your goals, and the accounts that will get you there

Ideal Customer Profile

Get a good understanding of how many of your current customers truly fit your ICP.

Geography

Don’t forget to have an understanding of where your customers are, this will significantly impact your field efforts.

Technology

If your product requires a certain integration point or platform, take that into account.

Aggressive Total Addressable Market(Top-Down)

Usually a more aggressive market size estimate, the top-down TAM starts at a high-level view of the market and tries to size the market based.

Challenge yourself to be as realistic as possible here - thinking about the market you’re really in. SalesLoft’s market for example, lives inside the CRM market.

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Building Account-Based Two Key Levers

Resources

The people, time and money dedicated to working that account

Personalization

The level of personalization of the message (industry-specific, account-specific, etc.)

The two key levers you pull when executing coordinated account-based sales and marketing efforts:

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Example Basic SaaS Tiering Strategy

70%

20%

10%

Tier 3Fits basic firmographic characteristicsAligned with findings from Total Addressable Market analysis

Tier 2Tier 3 qualified, plus technographic or other critical qualifiers, such as CRM or MA system

Tier 1Hand-picked by marketing and sales leadership

Building Account-Based Tiering Example

Per

son

aliz

atio

n

Res

ou

rces

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Building Account-Based Account Selection

Account selection needs and processes will vary greatly depending on your TAM and business model.

Here are some things to think about:

Quantity - Total number of accounts

Assignment - Quantity per rep

Frequency of refreshes

Assignment - Target vs. non-Target

Take the CEO’s temperature Start at the top of the sales org

Orchestration

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Building Account-Based Key Concepts

What Is Account-Based Orchestration?

A new way of viewing company-wide account-based engagement throughout the buyer’s journey

The meeting point between strategy and tactics for a company that has an account-based approach

A high level view of how marketing and sales people will dedicate their time and budget resources to accelerating current deals and generate new pipeline

What Doesn’t Change?

Marketing is still responsible for generating brand awareness and educating the market

Sales is still responsible for uncovering pain, challenging customers, working an ROI plan and creating urgency

Customer success is still responsible for delighting customers

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Visualize

Orchestration is the key to account-based success.

Marketing and sales activities

Shared accountability (and metrics)

Create a high-level visualization of engagement

across departments

Align with Sales

Sales and marketing alignment isn’t set it and forget it. Share performance metrics, meet

regularly and hold each other accountable

Don’t fall victim to volume

Customer-Centric

Whatever you do, don’t resort to the same old volume of

sales and marketing activities - focus on personal, human

value delivery

Building Account-Based Orchestration

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Building Account-Based The New Funnel

TOPO Account-Based Funnel Stage

SalesLoftMarketing Program Objective

Target Account

Engaged Account

Sales Qualified

Lead

Sales Accepted

Opportunity

Target Account Pipeline

Closed Won Lifetime Value

Demand Generation Pipeline VelocityClosing and Implementation

SupportRenewals and Expansion

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Building Account-Based Orchestration: Visualize

Tier 1 Demand Generation Pipeline Velocity Closing Implementation Support

Lost Opportunity

Metrics

Sales & Customer Success

Demand Gen

Content

TEMPLATE

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Target Account Pipeline

Share the metrics, share the accountability, meet regularly.

The combined contribution

Emails and calls are a start

As a revenue organization, this is your first step into a shared

sales/marketing metric to track. Without sales and

marketing there is no pipeline to open or close.

Sales Activities on Target Accounts

If you’re spending marketing time, energy and dollars to a

account, sales should be working it. Bring in email and

call data from your sales engagement platform to start. Being able to measure contact

persona coverage is a plus.

Throughout the whole funnel

Marketing Coverage and

Influence

If sales is selling into an account, you should be

marketing before, during and after. A good start is

measuring the % of total target account pipeline is “touched” by marketing

Building Account-Based Orchestration: Align with Sales

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Building Account-Based Orchestration: Customer-Centric

Mission

How we can help our customer deliver a better sales experience to their customers

Metrics

The numbers that tell us if we’re helping our customers effectively and efficiently

What Guides and Drives Us

How We Guide and Drive Our Customers

Sales

Understand their business better than anyone else so we can challenge them to achieve ROI with SalesLoft

Success

What we’re doing to help our customers use our product better

Demand

What we’re doing to secure our customers’ most valuable currency: their attention

Content

A core value delivery mechanism for all customer-facing functions

Our Customers

Unanticipated Learnings and Takeaways

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Unanticipated Learnings

Don’t overlook the issue of account assignment

If you’re rapidly growing, be prepared for a hunger for more

Alignment speeds up and improves execution, not more tech

Once you have a list of target accounts - they will be coveted. How do you spread the wealth among sales teams and reps?

Account quantity will be a challenge if your sales team is rapidly growing. The more reps you have, the more target accounts you will need, especially on the lower end of the market. Shoot for a balance, and better prepare for scale.

Alignment and development of a robust orchestration strategy will supercharge your execution - not more tools.

Building Account-Based Learnings

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Three Key Takeaways

Do an in-depth TAM and create a foundation

Establish shared accountability

Concentrate resources on higher tier accounts

Do your homework. Don’t rush to account selection. The first step is the most important: building a strong TAM that will be the foundation for your named account list.

Marketing should share key high level performance metrics with sales. Along with shared metrics, assign key tracking metrics unique to marketing and sales to measure account coverage.

If you have a large target account list, make the effort to concentrate resources on Tier 1 and 2 accounts. Use intent data and other signals to “promote” Tier 3 accounts.

Building Account-Based Takeaways

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Thank You!

Connect with me and continue the conversation.

Building Account-Based Takeaways

@ericjmartin

LinkedIn App QR Code/in/ericjmartin