Lesson 11 - Prioritize Your Accounts

Get the companion study guide for all episodes — packed with practical assignments, templates, and key takeaways at thedailyquota.com

Not all accounts are created equal, and this lesson will show you how to focus your energy on those that are most likely to close. You’ll learn techniques to evaluate account potential and prioritize effectively. Your assignment will involve ranking your top accounts and justifying your prioritization based on potential value and deal likelihood.

Transcript

0:00

Nicholas, welcome back to the daily quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, and in today's lesson, you're going to prioritize your accounts. Now in the last lesson, we started our territory planning document, and you did some basic research on your territory, starting to understand the demographics, the trends, the historical information, and conducting a SWOT analysis. Now in today's lesson, we're actually going to list out all of the accounts in your territory and prioritize them into high, medium and low priority. Why do we have to do this? Why not just put the same effort into all of your accounts? Well, one you just don't have time, right? When you think about your bandwidth as a salesperson, it's quickly going to be eaten up by customer calls, internal meetings, pipeline, generation, strategies, pod pod sinks, right? You're going to be pulled in a lot of different directions, and your time is going to be severely limited. So it's very important that you start to think about which accounts are you going to prioritize, first, second, third, fourth, fifth, going on and on and on. The first way that I would do this is I would actually group your accounts by category first. So if you are looking at your territory and you see that you have a huge number of accounts in the healthcare industry, for example, then I would group those into I would put those into a group. Why? Because your sales strategy will probably be similar for similar types of accounts. So if you find that you have a large amount of accounts in one group, you can pursue a sales strategy for that group and scale it across those accounts, and that can make things a little bit easier for you. So group your accounts first. Another way that you can group these is by size. So if chances are, depending on the organization you're in, you might be assigned to a specific size of account, such as like startup or SMB or enterprise or strategic or key accounts or something like that. But ultimately, what you want to do is organize your accounts by size. So how many startups, how many small, medium business, how many large accounts, etc, if that's a factor in your territory, if it's not just look for any other strategic factor. Do you have accounts that are similar in certain ways that need to be grouped together? If not, that's fine too. Once you've grouped your accounts together, then it's time to prioritize them. The way that I would do this is I would set these up. I would set all of your accounts up in a spreadsheet, list them out, and then in columns, you want to start putting some basic information about these accounts. And the three things that I would recommend looking at the most one the potential number of users. So if it's a user based solution that you're selling, otherwise, think about a metric that makes sense for this, but ultimately like, what's the potential? What's the user potential? Estimate the number of potential users. How big is their organization? Larger teams most likely indicate a higher ARR potential, although not always. But look at potential number of users. Two, think about the company growth, company growth percentage, company growth trajectory, because the current size, even though it might be a smaller company today, if it's growing at an expansive rate, you might, you might think about this as an account that has a long term potential. It might expand very rapidly over time. And trust me, it can be really nice to get in as the vendor of choice for a fast growing company early in their growth, and then start to see that license adoption expansion grow over time very quickly. And then third, you should be writing down solution fit. I realize this one's a little qualitative, and a lot of these will be qualitative as we talk about some of the other things to consider, but you should be thinking about how much does this company actually need us? If it's a really big, fast, growing company, but they don't need you at all. That's probably not a high priority account for you. If it's a big, high growth company, and they desperately need a solution for this that's gold, and you should highly prioritize that account. So you want to be thinking about, what is the solution fit? How well does our product meet the needs of this account? How much? What is the size of their problem. What is the impact of their problem based on my research and my knowledge? So, yeah, make a column for each of these list your accounts, and then start to determine how much you would weight each column. Maybe you think about the size of the organization first, the growth of the organization second, and the solution fit third. It. Or maybe you think about the solution fit first, right? If this is a bad solution fit, it goes to the bottom of the list, and then you start to think about things like size and growth trajectory. Also, those are not the only areas that you can consider. Some of the other ones I have written down here, access to your decision maker, strength of your champion, strategic importance. It could be something that you're not even thinking about. Maybe this is a good customer for a case study or a testimonial, and you really want them on your roster, because it would be nice to evangelize their story to other customers. Maybe they have great name recognition, or they're seen as a thought leader in their space, and you really want to land them as a customer. Maybe it's competitor presence. Maybe you categorize all of the accounts in your territory by which competitor they're currently using, and then you do a competitor play, and you say, I'm going to go after everyone that's using x competitor or y competitor, because I know that we beat them on this and that feature right or we have a really strong competitive offer or differentiation against them. So you want to be listing all of these other factors out again, weight to them. Understand how much importance you place on them, but list all of these columns and work with your manager, your mentor, your new hire buddy on this. Once you have all those signals, review them and use them to sort your accounts. I cannot give you the tried and true end all be all method for sorting and prioritizing accounts. There isn't one anyone who says they can do that for you every time they're wrong. This is really going to depend on your solution, your your style, your approach, how well your sales materials are when it comes to selling to a specific industry, function, team, persona, etc. There are so many factors that go into prioritizing your accounts. It can be very personal. So work with your manager, mentor, new hire buddy, but use the guides that I've given you here today to start thinking about how you would prioritize these ultimately, you just need to do it. You can always iterate on it later. But if you if you're not planning some sort of prioritization, then you're not setting yourself up for success, because you're not going to be able to go after everybody. Cool. Now it's your turn. Go ahead and in your territory. Document. Write down all of your accounts, organize them into groups that make sense for your territory, and then prioritize them in whatever way your organization prioritizes. It might be tier one, tier two, tier three. It might be high, medium, low priority. Maybe they just want to know what your top 10 are. You know, follow the needs of your organization, but prioritize them in some form or fashion, and then share this guide with your manager for review, and your study guide will walk you through it. I think we provide you a template for this too. It's probably all in the same template, and that is it for today's lesson on the daily quota. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time bye. You.