Imagine it’s January or February 1st, your new named account list of 500 companies has been published by your operations team. Ready, Set, Go. Which company do you work first? 

Most reps will start with an existing customer and see what upside they can generate in an account. Plus, it’s always easier talking to an existing customer who knows you. But once you’ve gotten through your list of customers, what do you do next?

Well your ops department told you that our average sales price is 40K. We convert 45% of our customers from evaluation to closed won. And only 8% of the opportunities we talked to evaluated the platform. You’ll need to generate 28 meetings/opportunities in order to close 40k worth of business. According to close.com, typically sales funnel conversion rates are between 3% and 7%. You better get to work huh…

Most good reps will segment their prospects. There’s a variety of ways to do this. Typically you would look at either the size of the organization, the industry, number of employees in the department in which you sell into, or revenue size. But wait there are more tools for this exercise including, Linkedin, Crunchbase, HG Insights, CB Insights. Now that you are organized and know your targets, let’s begin to choose the companies and begin our research.

You would want to check and see if contacts from the company you are going to prospect already exist in your CRM. Do those contacts still work there? Most likely you’ll have to call or send an email to those contacts to figure that out. We’ll also follow the company on linkedin or there’s a series of other ways to stay up to speed on a company’s news. Google Alerts is yet another way to stay on top of company news. BusinessNewsDaily cites 5 additional alternatives to Google alerts to stay on up to date on company news.

Now I will map the personas I’m going to sell to. You start by going to linkedin and figuring out the titles and responsibilities of each of the prospects you contact. You could spend days and weeks just getting a gist of how the department functions at one company. Whoa talk about a serious amount of dedication that takes. Okay now yet another tool to map your account contact hierarchy and the persona each of those contacts fits into. Where do you even begin to think of the messaging to use for each stakeholder. Do you start from the top of the hierarchy and work your way down or do you start at the user level and work your way up? Some also decide to work the contacts right in the middle of the organization too.

Plus you have to personalize the messaging or else you shouldn’t expect any type of response.

Why not shift to a tool that knows your messaging and applies it to your outbound emails on the fly? Let TotalSDR increase your response and SQL conversion rates by more than 50%. So instead of 8% of meetings evaluate, now 16% of meetings evaluate. Instead of needing 28 opportunities, Now you only need 14 opportunities. Again TotalSDRs messaging capabilities are personalized using our proprietary AI to do the work for you. Now you can get back to mapping the key stakeholders in your accounts and making sure you are contacting them and reaching out effectively.