Have you ever visualized how impactful your B2B marketing strategies would be if you have precise insights on your target accounts! As a marketer, it gives you a sharp edge from your competitors. As using this data, you can rearrange your priorities, call the right person, create better campaigns, write personalized messages, and positively impacts decision-makers. Overall, you can shorten your sales cycle and close more deals. After all, in this digital era, data matters so do the insights that we get from it.
To become better as a salesperson, you need to ask yourself some fundamental questions? You need to look into eight aspects to understand where you are currently positioned as a sales professional: –
1. Identify the accounts that have maximum potential
2. The challenges you face while handling these accounts
3. Check if they have the necessary budget to invest in your solutions
4. Is there a sense of urgency to get the issues resolved?
5. Have you identified opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling their products and solutions?
6. Do you know the competitors you are competing with to get your ideal accounts?
7. Are you putting your message effectively, or do you need to work on that?
8. Are you approaching your prospects and leads effectively based on their decision-making cycle and organizational structure?
Answering these eight questions will help you understand how much you know the accounts you are handling and what you can do to make the whole sales process simple.
Now, let’s understand why B2B sale is a complex process.
Sales is a challenging job and selling in a B2B environment is even more challenging. The reason being a simple B2B sales cycle would go on for a minimum of three months to almost a year. Ask any B2B salesperson, and you will realize there is one major challenge that they face: –
B2B sales aren’t one to one; instead, there are multiple stakeholders involved who influence the decision to buy your service or product. To close a deal successfully, you must customize your marketing efforts as per every stakeholder and their role in the decision-making process.
As a sales professional, if you don’t have a clear picture of what you are doing, you are probably working without a proper direction and doing so will only lead to dead ends. It is where account profiling comes in. It gives you a proper direction on how to pursue your accounts by mapping out the decision-makers, their role, and their pain points.
Also, account profiling helps you understand if the accounts you are handling fulfil the BANT criteria or not. BANT here stands for,
- B- Budget
- A- Authority
- N- Need
- T- Timing
Think of this whole sales process as a maze. The first step towards understanding a maze is to map it identify crucial points and map them. Doing so makes the picture clearer and gives you a direction to work.
Now how do you map the maze?
Hold team meetings and have general discussions with your co-workers, trying finding answers to the eight fundamental questions of account profiling. Once you have a thorough discussion with your team, let your team get on a call with clients and prospects. The more complicated the maze would be, the longer and more frequent the calls would be. Have a thorough discussion with the clients, and once you are done with that.
Search them on online and offline mediums, extract some more information, and draw the complete picture of your account.
How will account profiling impact your marketing?
Profiling your accounts makes your marketing campaigns extremely effective. Afterall marketing is about going the extra mile to understand the needs of your prospects and clients. Account profiling gives you enough scope to know your prospects and their whole decision-making process. It, in turn, helps you to minimize the problem of losing sales over dead ends or no decisions. Listing down the five significant benefits of account profiling: –
1. Guiding the decision-making funnel through different layers and players.
2. Exploring opportunities to upsell and cross-sell
3. Carving a precise position for your offerings among other competitor’s products
5. Reaching out to the right people at organizations
Sales is a challenging task but leveraging account profiling can help you understand the best accounts to target. It will equip with marketing intelligence which can be utilized to shorten the sales cycle and close more deals.
