We all are marketers and sales professionals by birth, whether we realize or not. We pitch our USPs during job interviews, or while pitching an idea to our team at work, and it goes on. If you look at it, you are able to influence these people because you know to at least some extent (addressable market). At least to the point that they are willing to hear you out.

So, the question is – do I know them enough to know what influences them? Now, put that into a marketing perspective – how do I get to know my prospect, when there are thousands of them on my lead database? Am I even targeting the right people?

Often, the ones we think as target market and the ones that actually are – can be different. In fact, our entire marketing plans tend to pivot, once we discover this.

Let’s break it down a bit – imagine, you are entering into a new geographic market for your product. You need to know

• What is the total market size for your domain in that geography (market universe of your ideal target persona)
• Further segment and look into how many of that ideal target universe are a good fit for your wares (total addressable market)
• Segmenting even further, you might want to know who are interested in your product or ones similar to yours, and if they have a budget for it. (total serviceable market)

Addressable market is not equal to serviceable market

A key aspect to remember is – addressable market doesn’t mean they are serviceable. It is not about what is the size of the market that is addressable, but about “are they reachable?”, “are they relevant?”

Often, we tend to segment our target segment based on the firmographics such as:

• Company size
• Revenue
• Employee size
• Location, etc.

But firmographics is only the tip of the iceberg. There is more to it. What we need to know is – which of these targeted companies would be interested in your solution and why. It means you need to identify signals that indicate the buying cycle and intent level of your shortlisted companies.

Know your prospect’s account journey + buyer journey

There is always an account journey + a buyer journey. What this means is – a company being in a certain revenue range, location or headcount, doesn’t necessarily mean they will be interested in your offering.

You need to understand the journey of the account (targeted company). The journey factors you may want to know, may include several factors relevant to our product/service offering.

Let’s say, you want to promote your martech software – you need to know where a given account is in terms of their digital transformation cycle, how sophisticated is their martech stack, what is the size of their marketing and sales team, where are they in the buying cycle, is your product a good fit to their current environment, etc.

To complement this, you need to understand the buyer journey as well – who are the decision makers involved, what’s on their agenda, who are the users within the company, who are the influencers, why would they be interested in your product, do they have a budget, is this the right time for them to buy a product such as yours, etc.

Chart out your account plan, keep it dynamic

Once you have all the relevant information you need on your target accounts, all that matters is – how are you planning to reach out.

Ask yourself:

• Do you have a clear outreach plan?
• Have you set clear expectation on the ROI?
• Is your account plan flexible for real-time amendments?

The constant feedback that we hear from our customers when they use our account based marketing solutions, is that they enjoy the fact that their account plan can stay dynamic.

Imagine a situation, where there is a leadership change at your target account, which in turn can change a few aspects of their behavior. You need to be able to adjust your campaigns accordingly and more importantly get notified on these changes.

Create an impact on the accounts that matter!

It is not about re-inventing the wheel every time but about making sure that the linchpin is reliable. We’ve often seen that this reality check at times is humbling but it’s but always worth it.