How do you prioritize your accounts to determine the right leads to pursue when you have marketing leads, your AE wants you to focus on a set of accounts, and you have tiered accounts?

Invest in data science to understand the type of customers that are purchasing your solution, look at why you are winning and more importantly where you are losing. Then start to apply this logic to your inbound leads, I ask my reps to have several leading indicators for success, for example, is this customer in the right vertical, who is contacting us and why, and how have they contacted us via a marketing campaign or inbound chat lead. You need to build a scoring system to find the balance between effort and reward. A good model is to look at cost of acquisition, what is the cost for us to convert this lead to a sale and how long is the sales cycle, this way you can filter and apply the correct resource to support, a tier 1 lead could be a dedicated contact from a rep vs a tier 3 lead is loaded into a nurture program until they reach a point in time to have a person contact them. Understand the cost of each stage of the sales process and how effective that stage is. This way you can build a book of business that has a high propensity to buy based of data and past sales. 

Sales is a team sport and this also applies to prospecting and sales development and proper prior planning will be key to your success. To ensure you're prioritizing correctly, you should consider the following:

• First, find commonalities between the accounts:

  • Start with the key accounts your sales team/AE wants you to focus on - and WHY?

    • Are there commonalities in these accounts? (Same industry, customer profile, decision maker, market/industry challenges?)

  • Next, review your tiered accounts - which accounts have the same commonalities as your AE's top focus?

• Bucket these accounts together and treat them the same in your prospecting efforts. Identify the commonalities.

  • If you're drafting a campaign or email, use the same content for similar ICP, account or industry. You can still personalize, but now you're personalizing minimal information instead of researching and starting from scratch each time.

  • Select your top priority accounts that align closest to your AE's top priorities and work those with the same intensity. Any account that does not align with your AE's top accounts can be nurtured at a secondary rate, but still use the same content/campaigns.

• When receiving marketing leads you should:

  • Identify if there are buying signals that would cause you to treat this lead differently than your priority accounts. Some examples may be leads that have a request for pricing/demo, a high lead score, or prior opportunity that was stalled or closed/lost.

  • Determine if the lead can be bucketed with your top accounts and leverage the same messaging/campaign.

  • If neither, treat as your secondary tiered accounts and continue to nurture the lead.

• Most importantly, review your strategy often with your AE, provide feedback to marketing on lead quality and be critical with your campaign strategy to ensure you're using the right message at the right time, for the right person.