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Your Top Five Accounts - Where Do They Come From?

  
  
  

Dave Kurlan is a top-rated speaker, best-selling author, sales thought leader and highly regarded sales development expert.

Where do your best accounts come from?

It's important to think about this from time to time and I was thinking about it today.

Take the company's top 5 accounts and, of course, that brings up another question; based on what? Volume? Profit? Potential? Relationship? Leverage? Ease to Work With? Let's set it up this way:

 Criteria  Weight
 Volume  1
 Profit  3
 Potential  2
 Relationship  2
 Leverage  2
 Ease  1

You may not agree with the weighting and you can feel free to change it but we have to begin somewhere.  Now, based on the score that you assign to your accounts, take your top 5 accounts.

For my sales development company the top five accounts would be:

Company 1 - Cold Call From a New Salesperson
Company 2 - Introduction from a VP at Company 1
Company 3 - Introduction
Company 4 - Introduction
Company 5 - Found us via the Baseline Selling Web Site

For my assessment company the top five end user accounts would be:

Company 1 - Introduction
Company 2 - Introduction
Company 3 - Introduction
Company 4 - Introduction
Company 5 - Introduction

...and the top five resellers would be:

Reseller 1 - Introduction
Reseller 2 - Relationship
Reseller 3 - Introduction
Reseller 4 - Introduction
Reseller 5 - Found our Web Site

As you can see, most of the best accounts come from introductions.  What does that tell you?  What were your results? What are the two lessons associated with cold calls?

(c) Copyright 2008 Dave Kurlan

 



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Posted by Dave Kurlan on Tue, Apr 29, 2008 @ 08:25 PM

COMMENTS

I would say that the lesson is that 20% of your top accounts came from cold calling. Excellent!
Now, having said that, I would also say that it is a no brainer that referrals and introductions are the best leads. But, the ability to generate both depends on your Ideal Customer Profile. Understanding your Ideal Customer Profile and how to sell to it is the foundation of success. Also understanding where you fit in the technology adoption life cycle (assuming you are selling technology or related services) should play an integral part in your lead generation efforts and sales process.
Here is my point....if you are selling into the SMB space and selling a product or service that is in the majority or laggard space, intros and referrals combined with inbound internet marketing are the way to go. If you are selling into the F1000, selling to the "C" level suite and selling to innovators and early adopters....you better have a pretty effective way to do outbound marketing (which will probably include cold calling) or your guys with $2M quotas are going to be very sad.
The biggest issue with cold calling is that people don't develop an effective process supported by compelling sales tools. They just lob out an occasional call and then don't understand why they don't get results. Just MHO.
Dave, love your blog...learn a lot...thanks for listening.

posted on Wednesday, April 30, 2008 at 7:13 AM by trish bertuzzi


Trish,
Great addition to this post, especially your last paragraph - people don't develop and effective process...occassional call...don't understand why they don't get results.
The other thing that needs to be addressed here, and I made reference to it in a recent post about Networking Groups, is that some salespeople aren't capable of making cold calls. It's not that they don't know how, it's that they are unable because of a combination of weaknesses that causes call anxiety. Folks with Need for Approval, and Difficulty Recovering from Rejection and a Dislike or Cold Calls will invariably be unable to prospect with any consistency or effectiveness.

posted on Wednesday, April 30, 2008 at 7:21 AM by


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