If you are a business owner or a sales rep, we bet that the idea of having the perfect sales funnel that converts a prospect into a lifelong customer has crossed your mind at least once.
What if we told you that it doesn’t need to remain just an idea? What if we told you that your sales funnel can be made to flawlessly fit your customers’ needs, encouraging them to make recurring purchases?
This is entirely doable through target account selling, more commonly known as TAS.
SalesWorks has been helping businesses from all sorts of industries across the region not only successfully deploy and report on their sales strategies, but also drive conversion across the sales funnel. With more than 25 years of experience in hand, we are here to share exactly how you can make the perfect sales funnel through TAS.
What is target account selling (TAS)?
TAS, otherwise known as account-based selling, is a sales strategy that pinpoints or identifies prospects that match a business’ ideal customer persona (ICP).
This means selecting them based on their pain points, competitors, budget, revenue, industry, and other factors that may be relevant to your business, and then personalizing your sales plan to “woo” these highly qualified leads.
TAS allows sales teams to dedicate more time and resources to closing sales with these customers, instead of using a “shoot in the dark” method (like cold calling 50 random people on a list) that most sales teams are accustomed to. In other words, sales teams are able to create a bespoke sales strategy according to the customer – which increases the likelihood of them making a purchase.
The 4 stages of TAS
The TAS process is broken down into four crucial stages, and getting familiar with them is the first step to making it work for your sales team and your sales workflow.
Here are the four stages:
1. Deciding on your objective or goal
As with all endeavors, it’s important that you understand why you’re setting out on a specific journey. In this case, why are you utilizing TAS? Is it to sign new accounts, close deals quicker and more efficiently, or upsell existing accounts? Once you have got this down pat, you can then move on to the next step.
2. Pinning down your target account
We’ve reached the crux of the entire strategy, which is to find accounts that fit your ideal customer profile like a glove. Heavy research is needed for this, because you’ll need to ensure that your product or service is the solution to their problems.
A couple of things to consider:
- Are these accounts in an industry that already loves or uses your product or service type?
- Is the company big enough to invest in your product or service?
- What are the accounts currently using or doing to solve their problems? Are your competitors involved?
Do note that a customer profile isn’t the same as a buyer persona. Here’s a visual to make things a little clearer:
And here’s how to create a profile:
If you prefer, and if you would like to dive in a little deeper to make your funnel even more efficient and effective, you can always create individual buyer personas within the account (such as the key stakeholders that are responsible for making decisions, signing contracts, and greenlighting investments, and so on and so forth).
3. Making a list of qualified accounts
This can be another tricky stage as it requires even more research, but we trust that you’ll be able to do it. So, now that you have narrowed down the ideal customer profile, it’s time to pick 10 to 20 accounts that actually are worth pursuing.
But hold your horses – it doesn’t end there! You’ll need to move on to other criteria such as growth, revenue, and most importantly if they have the budget for your product or service.
We recommend picking a few accounts that fit your criteria perfectly before you move on to the next and final stage. After all, you wouldn’t want to work on an impressive list of accounts that don’t actually fit what you’re after!
4. Start selling!
We’re nearly at the finish line here; it’s time to go out and start selling to your targeted accounts! Whether it is sending an email or calling them, put on your best sales face forward and go for it.
Here at SalesWorks, we are proponents of face-to-face marketing, a sales strategy that can definitely help boost your sales and close more deals. You can read more about why we think so here, but we have been leading the industry for years now and are backed with data on why it still works best.
Want to find out more about this and how we could potentially help you? Contact us today and let’s have a chat!