The days of “spray and pray” selling are over. So how can sellers maintain a consistently full pipeline of prospects and leads? Through targeted and account-based selling. In today’s episode of The Sales Evangelist, Donald is joined by the VP of Sales Management at Crunchbase, Ang McManamon, to discuss how she uses account-based selling in her own work. Why go into account-based selling? A year ago, Ang’s team talked to their best clients and saw an appetite for account-based selling. Prospects would use Crunchbase for funding and capital management news, and people liked the database options for prospecting. There are so many sales tools today, yet finding high-quality accounts and decision-makers is still tricky. Before, there were no strategic ways of looking at accounts and contacts. Now, you can be intentional with your actions. Setting up Crunchbases’s account-based selling: First, figure out the target audience. Companies say they do it, but they frequently don’t get precise enough to best impact the audience. Narrow down organizations by size, but look for people based on many factors. Ang targeted 50 accounts per person on her 35-person team. Then, they researched the messaging, cadence, and outreach that would best apply to those targets. Look at the potential buyer intent. What web pages have they visited on your website? Luckily, Crunchbase has great name recognition. However, prospects often don’t know the specific things they can do with the platform. It takes diligence as a leader to hold sellers accountable. While the account list is a priority, it’s not necessarily a restriction. If the seller isn’t getting anywhere with a target account, they should be able to move on and find new targets. For outbound selling, sellers use Crunchbase to view recommended accounts or new contacts within those accounts. Then, they create an automatic email from Outreach and set up a cadence. Sellers use strategic intent tools to inform them of their best outreach method, and they use Salesforce to track data and activity. Potential problems (and solutions) with ABM: Initially, Ang’s team wasn’t using Crunchbase and wasn’t ‘surrounding’ the sale, interacting with 1-2 people rather than 4-5 who could impact the sale. Incentivizing the sale for larger-scale prospects can help get your foot in the door. Finds reps with a higher sense of ownership when using account-based selling because sellers feel more in control over the process. When working with strategic accounts, win rates increase roughly 48%, but the cycle is slightly longer. It sounds like a great trade-off to us. Ang’s major piece of advice? Account-based is here to stay, and it’s a better and more strategic way to sell your products. It takes time to nail down, but it’s worth it. Visit Crunchbase.com or email [email protected] to see what the Crunchbase platform offers. This episode is brought to you in part by LinkedIn Sales Navigator. The

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