Lesson 12 - Research Your Top Account

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Deep research can set you apart from your competitors. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to uncover key information about your top accounts, from organizational structure to pain points and strategic initiatives. Your assignment will involve completing a detailed account research document for one of your highest-priority accounts.

Transcript

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Nicholas, welcome back to the daily quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, and in today's lesson, you're going to begin researching your accounts, starting with your top prioritized accounts. Now in the last few lessons we learned all about territory planning, you did some research on your territory, and ultimately you prioritized your account list. Now that you have a prioritized account list, it's time to start building account plans for all of your top accounts, and a good account plan is going to include both account research and an account strategy. Now when we think about an account plan, if you've never done one of these before. A good account plan is going to contain all of the contacts that you know at the account. It will contain information about the accounts, top challenges, their key business initiatives, their company, overview industry, any previous engagements that you had, any strategy that you put together for how you're going to tackle that account. A lot of times it will include things like org charts or their current subscription information, but essentially, an account plan should have as much information as you can provide about the account as well as the strategy for tackling it, and the reason it's so important to have a good account plan is one. It allows you to show up with a point of view. So instead of just saying, Hi, I'm Nick I'm here to sell XYZ software, an account plan allows you to say, My name is Nicholas Hill. I know all about your organization. This is the research I've done on your pain points, your initiatives, your challenges, and this is how I believe our solution can solve your problems in a more unique way. Now ask yourself, which of those pitches are you more likely to listen to right chances are you are going to be far more engaged when someone shows that they know about your account, your organization, your challenges, your pain points, and they give you a point of view on how they can help. So that is the goal of why we're collecting all of this information, why we're doing account research, to start to understand our value hypothesis. And we'll talk about the value hypothesis in a future lesson. But ultimately, it's again, our point of view on how we can provide value. So in this lesson, we're going to focus on the research aspect of it. And there's two things you need to know. One, what are the different types of information that you want to learn about your account? And then two, where do you go to find all of that information? So let's start with number one, all of the information that you need to learn about your account. And I'm going to read a little bit off my notes here to make sure that I don't miss anything. There are kind of nine key areas that you want to think about when it comes to account research. First, how does this organization make money? So you want to be asking yourself, what do they sell? What is their product mix? How do they package and price their portfolio? What markets are they selling to? You really need to put yourself in the shoes of their revenue engine and understand what is causing the most revenue growth for them, because that is most likely what their budgets are going to be tied to, and where they're going to be willing to spend money to improve that engine. Number two, what are the core products and services they develop? So you want to be thinking about which products generate the most revenue. They might have multiple but they usually have one kind of flagship product that they get behind. What do they expect when it comes to their product, service development mix and their pipeline? Are they expecting to put all of their money behind a new product that's coming up, or are they expecting to continue to maintain and expand upon their existing product architecture, and then which products again, kind of are the most profitable. And you can look at their 10k statement to start to understand some of this. Third thing you need to know is, who do they compete with? So what is their competitive landscape? Who are their primary competitors? Where do they rank when it comes to market share? Where are they ranked when it comes to third parties? So when you think about something like the Gartner Magic Quadrant or the Forrester Wave, you know, those are just two examples. But think about whatever third party ranking system your industries use, your customers use, and look that up right. Where are they ranked, and how are they advancing their position? Are they doing mergers and acquisitions? Are they investing heavily in their product internally? You know, what are they doing to advance their their market share? Number four, what is their market potential? So when you think about their we call it the TAM, their total addressable market. How many people on. Um, what are they going after? Which types of customers are they going after, and ultimately, what is their share today? And then, are they focused on entering new markets, or are they going to continue going after kind of their bread and butter markets? So you want to be thinking about are, you know, there is risk, but also potential, great reward for entering a new market. And so you want to be thinking about, are they entering new products or geographies? How are they currently using your product? Right? Do they have licenses already? Are they a current customer? If they have licenses, how many? How many are they using, versus how many are they allocated? How many have they purchased? If your product is license based, and then ultimately, what are we doing? What are you doing internally, or your success manager doing internally to address any gaps in how many they've purchased versus how many they're using today? Are they? Are they focused on specific business units? Are they acquiring new business units? There are a lot of different questions that you can ask there. What is their financial performance? So this is another category, right? Think about their earning per share, quarter over quarter, year over year, revenue growth, profit margins. Are they? Are they a profitable organization? Are they in the red right now? Are they still investing and using investor funds to grow, or are they, you know, using organic profit to do that? And how do these results compare to their competition? Right? You want to think, have they? Have they done any layoffs? How are their competitors doing? What is their cash position? What is their cash flow? Do they have money in the bank to spend? So thinking about their financial performance, what are their key strategies and initiatives? So you want to be asking yourself, what are the strategic levers that they're putting in place to drive their corporate objective. Are they hiring new individuals? Are they putting new teams in place? Are they, you know, expanding across geographies or regions? What initiatives are they the most focused on to ensure their success? And what are the timings of these initiatives? What function or department or executive is in charge of leading these initiatives, you want to be asking yourself, Who is the person that's actually holding the bag on this? Who's the person whose reputation is at stake? Then you want to be thinking about what is their measurement of success. Now, for most organizations, we know that they're looking to increase revenue. Revenue is a very obvious measure of success. It could be cost performance, cost efficiency, risk mitigation. We'll talk a lot about increasing revenue, reducing cost mitigating risk, but you want to be looking up what have they called out as their key performance indicators. How are those key performance indicators directly tied to the initiatives or strategies at hand. Do we understand both the leading indicators, the things that they're doing to create that success, and the lagging indicators, the things that they're going to measure as a result of those actions? Have those or sorry, how are they reporting on these metrics, right? Is there? Are they a public company? Do they have to report these publicly? Are they reporting to internal investors? And then, you know, ultimately, we'll talk about how you can gain some of that information. What are their risks? What are the risks to these strategies? Perform a SWOT analysis as if you were the customer? What are their strengths, their weaknesses, their opportunities, their threats, that are on the horizon, and how have those risks changed over time? So when you think about their past year, their past quarter, their seasonality, are they facing new entrants, new risks on the horizon. And then when you think about risks, where in the funnel for them. Are these risks? Is it pipeline? Is it planning? Is it performance? Is it strategy? Is it delivery execution? Where do these risks lie for them? And then the final thing is, what are the analysts saying when you think about financial analysts, investment analysts, industry analysts, thought leadership firms like McKinsey Bain, Boston Consulting Group, and then don't forget the competitors, right? What are their competitors saying about them? Or what are competitors saying about themselves in comparison to your prospect? So thinking about these nine things to kind of recap. How do they make money? What are their core products? Who do they compete with? What is their market potential, what is their financial performance, what are their key strategies and initiatives? How are they going to measure success? What are the risks to that success, and what are the analysts saying about them? Now? If you can learn those things, I would if you can learn all of those things, I would be shocked. I would be massively shocked. It is very, very rare that you are going to be able to determine all of this information. This is the North Star. This is what you're going after. But it's not always going to succeed. And a lot of this information, it's proprietary, it's internal. It's not public facing. You can't get all of this by searching their website, by searching their blogs, even by searching their financial documents a lot of times. So you're going to have to get creative for how you learn things and how well you're willing, how deep you're willing to dig, right? So let's talk about some of the ways that you can actually search for this information. One you want to scan skin their website. When you're looking at their website, look through their investor relations section. Look through their blog posts, environmental impact statements. Read their newsroom look for company values and mission statements. Those can tell you a lot about kind of culturally, what they're after, especially for public companies, you want to look into their financial health, their business model, their strategic priority, their future plans. You can look at earnings reports, 10k filings, investor call transcripts, if they're private companies. You can potentially find fundraising documents out there. You can ask chatgpt to look at these things. You can actually upload documents directly to AI and use those. The next thing you can do is look at their career postings. So you can look at their career center, their current job postings, the types of roles that they're hiring for, what are the skill sets that they're looking for, you can sometimes find different methodologies or process these that they practice. Did I already say investor call transcripts? I can't remember. But investor call transcripts, you can upload those to AI as well and have it analyze those transcripts. Google News and alerts, look them up on on news aggregators, right? What's being said about them? What are they struggling with? Set up Google News Alerts to keep track of the latest developments, news articles, mentions of the company. You should absolutely have job alerts and news alerts set up for your top two or three organizations. This can give you a lot of insight into what that organization is doing. It gives you real time information about market moves, product launches, strategic shifts, and those things are incredibly timely. If you can get ahead of when those things are going to happen, then right when they happen, you can send an email about them and how your product or solution can help with those things, we mentioned financial statements and earning calls. Make sure that you're looking at those third party reviews and rating websites. So checking g2 trust radius, glass door, that's one that not a lot of people think about. If you really want to know about what's going on inside of an organization, check their employee reviews. Check their you know, hiring process reviews. Glassdoor can teach you a lot of information and give you some perspective on their reputation and their internal culture. Leverage AI tools we mentioned a few ways to do that. Social media is another way. You can check their social media or what people are saying about them on social media. You can look through LinkedIn Sales Navigator to understand posts that are being posted by company executives, by their competitors. You can look at growth alerts by department, which could signal some strategic initiatives or shifts. And then, if you want to get really creative, you know, just just Google them and start to see what comes up. You'd be surprised. Sometimes, you can find executive interviews on podcasts or YouTube. You can find a lot of information just by by looking around and seeing what sticks. Now, obviously, those are all public facing sources of information, but one of the most powerful sources of information is your internal champion. So if you have an internal champion, especially a strong internal champion, ask, ask what's going on. Ask what the challenges are, the initiatives, the priorities, all of the different things that you're going after, make sure that you're reaching out and that you're it's a two way street that you're giving value, and make sure that you're earning their trust by not spreading that information around or gossiping about it, but that you're using it to strategically help their organization in a robust way. So that covers all of the different public facing areas that you can go to search for information about your organization, as well as you know, making sure to ask your internal sources to ultimately collect as much information as you can. And now we've taken a look at both what information you should be looking for to help you lead to the value hypothesis. Assist, which we'll cover in the future the next lesson, as well as what are the different areas that you can search in order to get that information? So all right, now it's your turn for today's assignment. We want you to do this research for your top prioritized account. Your study guide is going to walk you through this, but you're going to go through the different areas that we discussed in terms of what you need to know about this account. We'll ask you to review these different areas of information, both public facing and asking your internal champion, and ultimately collect as much detail as possible. This is very important, because in the next lesson, you're going to be using this to inform your value hypothesis, which you will ultimately use to write your outreach messaging, to book a meeting with this organization. So take your time, ask your manager, mentor, new hire buddy, to have a second set of eyes on it for feedback. And that's it for today's lesson on the daily quota, thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time bye.