T.E.E.A. & Account-Based

Setting up and executing a company strategy has been traditionally called Go-To-Market (or GTM). According to Friedman and Lawrence, that is “the plan of an organization, utilizing their outside resources (e.g. sales force and distributors), to deliver their unique value proposition to customers and achieve competitive advantage.”
For everyone working in the Revenue department, this means setting up the following Account-Based steps:

• Target

• Educate

• Engage

• Advocate

According to Infinityn’s Agile Account-Based Growth (or ABG), in fact, there is no point in building up an effort and allocating investments in the wrong target and that’s why nowadays this step is the foundation of any go-to-market. In recent times tho, the buyers’ behavior has been shifting towards taking decisions far from the sales reps and rather getting information from the plethora of public sources available. While the era of information has contributed to flattening any asymmetry on the buyer side, this has started a revolution in the way companies are selling and advertising their solutions. Nowadays identifying when a buyer is at a certain stage is crucial to calibrate the right level of effort rather than adopting a so-called “spray and pray” approach from the past.

Latané Conant was probably one of the very first authors who started to map out these stages and discuss such an approach in her book “No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls”. Many marketers nowadays thanks to AI advancement in martech can decide whether they need to create campaigns or create content accordingly. A recommended approach we take away from that is not only to have content and an action plan at every stage but to drive the buyer down (or forward) to the funnel.

If an account is ICP-fit we should simply monitor it, but if it’s in the Awareness stage we should provide insights around the need our solution fulfills and be top-of-mind for the time our buyers will consider purchasing a solution fitting their need.
During the Consideration stage, a need has been already identified and prospects at our target buying group are looking for a solution that can solve their challenges or opportunities. This means it is the right time to make sure the buyer is connected to our sales team and there’s no better way than asking Sales to reach out to the right buyer personas from that account. Of course, outbound is not the only way to go as inbound from these accounts at this stage can also be complementing this approach.
When it comes to the Decision phase, the buyer is already aware of what the market offers and needs to make sure he receives the best solution and the best price. At this stage if you’ve previously engaged during the consideration phase it means you’re in the right spot and marketing and sales teams should nurture the relationship as well ass develop trust by delivering insights and guiding the buyer through an informed decision. If everything goes in the right direction, then the next stage is Purchase.

6sense Buying Journey

Adopting a buying journey perspective rather than the classic waterfall or funnel is important to realize that there are stages when the buyer is not engaging directly with you but it’s making autonomous scouting. This means the buyer is not coming to download your whitepaper or any gated content but rather moving freely in the “dark funnel” and if we wait for the buyer to show us an interest we may miss the opportunities. Not only that, most of the time marketing teams are investing their effort and strategy around arbitrary scoring systems to generate Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) that may be a result of wrong accounts or personas (including students and competitors downloading forms).

6sense Dark Funnel

One of the key takeaways for marketers and sellers comes from this book and 6sense ABM tactical approach. The below infographic describes how sales and marketing teams align when taking into account the buying journey. The idea is to move away from the traditional MQL metric to identify when accounts are “in market” (Marketing Qualified Accounts) and based on this insight act by reaching out.

6sense Marketing &Sales Alignment