Account-based selling for a team of three

The short version.

Account-based selling means choosing a short list of companies and working each one as a market of its own, instead of writing to everyone who fits a profile. The consultancy that says it pioneered the approach around 2000 describes it as treating each key client as a distinct market.^[1]

A founder or a team of three can run the selling half with a list, a weekly rhythm and the discipline to leave most companies alone. This guide covers the list, the research, the week, the limit, and what to stop doing. It ends with where SYNC fits and where it does not.

Choosing the accounts.

Most companies are not buying now. The LinkedIn B2B Institute puts it like this:

The figure is a rule of thumb, modelled from how rarely companies replace what they buy, and it was written about advertising. What moves a company into the market is change: Gartner reports that 99% of B2B purchases are driven by organisational change.^[3]

So choose each account on two questions. Does the company fit what you sell? And has something changed there that your product answers: a new team, a vacancy, a new site, an acquisition? Write the reason down in one sentence, with a link to where you read it. If you cannot write that sentence, the account waits.

What to research.

Research an account until you can answer three things, then stop. The piece on information foraging explains why stopping is part of the method.

• 01The change. Read the careers page, the company's own site, LinkedIn, the press and public register pages. Note the date wherever there is one.
• 02The people. Find the user, the champion, the person who signs and the one who could stop it. The seven roles says how to recognise each.
• 03The case. Why this change makes your product worth a conversation now, in two or three sentences you could say to the person who signs.

Buyers read about you too. Gartner reports that 75% of B2B buyers say they prefer a sales experience without a sales rep.^[3] A message has to be worth more than what the reader would find alone.

A week's rhythm.

• 01Monday: the list. Drop accounts whose reason has gone. Add a few where a new reason appeared.
• 02Tuesday and Wednesday: new accounts. Research them and write the first messages, one new person per account at a time.
• 03Thursday: the answers. Follow up where someone replied, and make the calls and LinkedIn messages on your list.
• 04Friday: the notes. One line per account on what you learned, so next week starts from notes and not from memory.

Keep the pace low. SYNC's own ceiling is at most three messages to one person, and three to one account, in any seven days, and never twice to the same person within 48 hours. The same ceiling works by hand.

How many accounts one person can work.

We found no independent study that gives a number. The limit is set by hours, so work it out from your own week: the hours you can give to selling, the time a first research pass takes, and the time an account in progress needs each week.

An illustration: with eight hours a week, a first pass of 45 minutes and 20 minutes a week per active account, four new accounts take three hours. The other five hours hold about fifteen accounts in progress. These figures are assumptions for the arithmetic, not measurements. Put in your own.

For a team of three the sum is per person. Split the list by account, never by role inside one account, so that one person owns the whole buying group of each company.

Indecision costs the most time. The authors of The JOLT Effect studied 2.5 million recorded sales conversations and report that 40 to 60% of lost deals ended in no decision.^[4] An account that goes quiet after a real conversation deserves one clear question. After that, it goes back on the waiting list.

What to stop doing.

• 01Buying a list and writing to everyone on it.
• 02Sending the same message to every person in an account. The reason stays the same for everyone; the angle changes per person.
• 03Working an account because it fits the profile, when nothing has changed there.
• 04Writing to the person who could stop the purchase before anyone inside has argued for it.
• 05Counting opens. An open only records that a small image was downloaded, not who downloaded it. What we cannot measure yet shows why our own count could not be trusted.

Where SYNC fits, and where it does not.

SYNC by iSyncSO does the research and the drafting half of this work. It fits a team that knows who it sells to and has no time to read every account.

• 01It scores each account on up to twelve criteria, written from what SYNC learned about your company and from how you recognise a good prospect. You can edit them. A criterion without evidence is marked “could not establish”. It is never guessed.
• 02Accounts land in tier A to D. A and B are worked; C and D are left alone. Every signal and every score links to its source.
• 03It maps the buying group in seven roles. In a contact plan, users hear first and buyers last. Blockers are never written to.
• 04Every new account starts with a person approving every message before it is sent; you can relax that per account. The email leaves from your own mailbox. LinkedIn messages and calls are tasks for you.

It fits less well in four cases.

• 01Accounts you already know personally. A relationship beats a researched first message.
• 02Selling mostly by LinkedIn or by phone. SYNC sends email; the rest stays your work.
• 03Markets that need a language other than Dutch, English, German or French.
• 04Companies that say little in public. SYNC writes only when it has a reason it can cite, so those accounts wait. A cited reason is not always a recent one: the check does not require a date, and the review screen marks a signal without one as undated. The accounts we left alone has the count.

Email addresses and phone numbers come from a lookup provider. Everything in this guide also works with a spreadsheet.