How to Weight Your Target Account List Measures

Building your list of target accounts from your ideal customer profile should be a priority for any marketer. Whether you’re doing Account Based Marketing or not. As I posted about yesterday, I like to break up the target account list into three elements: Firmographic, Receptivity, and Readiness. 

Before I break down those scoring buckets in later posts, I want to spend a bit of time talking about how to weigh each grouping. It will always depend on your own situation, but here’s a way you can think about it:

Firmographic is basically the ante for the table. You might be a European based company that needs field teams to support customers. So, Asia/Oceania, Africa, or Americas, etc.-HQ’d companies are out. Or, you might be a start-up that simply doesn’t have product fit for servicing enterprise companies, so a gate around employee count or revenue size might matter here. Whittling down your TAM to this set is useful, but not enough. Servicability of the market will affect how much you weigh this score.

Receptivity is basically a measure of openness to change. It’s not a buyer intent signal that shows someone is indeed in the market. Rather, it looks at the likelihood that a company will be willing to change their approach or model to align with your narrative. Remember, just because two companies share the same firmographics doesn’t mean that they are as likely to change. Being deterministic about “banks are cautious” or “small companies are nimble” isn’t always a great guide. 

So, if your offer requires a significant process change, like say altering how HR manages employee payroll, then you’re going to want to weigh this much more heavily. Receptivity can change over time as an organization evolves or outside pressures increase. But for the purposes of short term list generation, it’s a static measure. As I mentioned, I’ll explore readiness in more detail in another post.

Readiness is the final bucket and it is focused less on determining which account to target and more on when. Buyer intent signals like “quality” engagement with your website can drive this up. If your market has non-standardized buying processes (e.g. not linked to tax season, or construction season, etc.) knowing when someone is in market will matter more. 

Or, if your market consists of a variety of alternatives that draw attention away from your submarket (e.g. you’re targeting CFOs with a budgeting software solution, but there are lots of related but non-competitive alternatives like compensation management) then it’s particularly helpful to know who’s in market and you should weight this score more heavily.

Alright, with the weighting out of the way, it’s time to dive into each of the components.