Prioritizing and Scoring Your Target Accounts

Sales, marketing, and success leaders. Think about your ideal customer and turn to your left and right. Do your GTM colleagues have the same ideal?

Too many GTM teams are out-of-sync, and it often starts right here – with the ideal customer. When there’s little agreement on which companies to target, you end up with:

• Marketing generating interest in accounts that don’t close or renew.
• Sales slogging uphill with prospects that aren’t in-market or aware of your business.
• Success prioritizing customers that aren’t great matches for where your business is headed.

Instead of getting stuck in this unhappy Venn diagram, make the definition of your ideal customer a priority. All of your GTM leadership should buy into the same definition of what makes a great customer. Here’s a shorthand on how to get started:

• Describe the ideal customer using both binaries (e.g. “they must use Salesforce” or “they must be in the EU”) and weighted scores (e.g. “companies with large call centers are better targets” or “financial services companies are better targets”).
• Match these characteristics with firmographic and technographic data that you can access (e.g. via LinkedIn or your favorite data provider).
• Collect all accounts that match all of your binaries. Then, score your remaining list using the weighted factors that you defined. 

That’s your prioritized list. Marketing isn’t running targeted programs to your entire addressable market. They’re focusing resources on the top, say, 1,000 accounts that they can meaningfully engage. 

Same thing for sales. They’re not running with their own target account list. The circle in their Venn diagram overlaps fully with marketing’s. They’ll look at their resources and determine where their cutoff is on the prioritized list. Say, the top 600 accounts. 

Now, those top 600 accounts are getting attention from sales. And they’re also getting prioritized messaging, targeting, and community building from marketing. That’s going to turn into more and better pipeline. 

But what if account #601 comes to your website and is poking around your pricing page? Behavior beats firmographics every time, so long as those binaries are met. Prioritize account #601. 

Plus, you’re going to be constantly reevaluating your scoring system. Ideally, you should be reevaluating your scoring system every quarter. You can do it by:

• Looking at dynamics in your pipeline. What are the firmographics and technographics of deals that close won and have high lifetime value? Can you adjust your scoring system to reflect that?
• Interviewing customers, listening to sales calls, and other qualitative analysis. You can quickly understand pains better and translate them into symptoms that you can score. 
• Assessing who’s engaging with your community. Maybe you’re finding fans of yours that aren’t buying because of a product mismatch. Is that an opportunity for product expansion and rescoring?