The # of Prospects To Target at Each Account

Learn how many prospects you should be prospecting at each account to maximize sales results: 

Video Blog Transcript: 

Today I want to talk about how many prospects you should go after at your targeted accounts.

This is a pretty broad question that we get asked all the time from clients and from users of Seamless that just want to know, "Hey Brandon, how many prospects do you go after at each account? Are you calling on one to two people at that account or are you calling on fifty at that account?"

The answer is it really depends. If you're going after a large account, and you're selling digital marketing software and you want to target Nike, well Nike's got 1,277 different marketers and half of those are digital marketers. That's a list of 500, 600, 700 people that you then have to quantify and figure out, "Who are the budget holders? Who are the decision makers? Who are the influencers?" and "Who are the users?" There are four categories: users, influencers, decision makers, and then budget holders.

Of course, some of those can be all of the above. Someone in an account can be the budget holder, the decision maker, and the user, and the influencer. At large accounts you're going to have multiple people that are filling each of those different roles. It really depends on the account. If you're targeting a large enterprise account, you're going to want to go after a lot of different personas so that you can build relationships with the business users, you can build relationships with the influencers, you can build relationships with the budget holders, and then eventually the people that are the decision makers as well. If you're selling mid market you may only be going after the budget holders, the decision makers, and the influencers. Really it just depends on your target market, your audience.

I do know that the larger the corporation the more prospects we recommend to target. If you're going after large enterprises, 500 employees or greater or 1,000 employees, you can't prospect, call, email, and social sell to two people at that account and expect that you're going to convert.

Let's look at conversion rates here for a second, guys. From cold prospecting to booked appointment, conversion rates across all the channels are anywhere from 2% to 10% cold. Now of course that increases based on the number of touches that you go throughout your sales campaign, but if you're converting at 2% to 10% of cold to booked appointment touches, that means that you need to have at least 10 or 20 people at that account that you're prospecting to book that appointment. If you're converting at a 10% rate and you're trying to sell to eBay and you reach out to 10 people, you'll convert one.

You've got to use the sales funnel to really tell you. Looking at the sales funnel is key characteristic to review, looking at the size of the account, also looking at how many people match the budget holder, decision maker, influencers, and users. Based on the size of the account you may only have a few that match that. Based on the size of the account you may have 50 people that match that. Prioritize those people, those contacts that match your ideal client persona profile requirements, and identify the priority of how you want to go after them. For instance, you may sell a product that's great to work the business user and the business user will connect you with the decision maker and the budget holder. You may know that you sell product where you need to go after the VP; they are the decision maker and the budget holder, and the VP will push down your solution to the influencers and users.

In my past career I'm a big fan of relationships from to top-down, bottom-up, middle and everything in between. Now I want to have strong, deep connections, relationships, with everyone involved at that account from users, to influencers, to decision makers, to budget holders. I want everyone to know that we're here to help them maximize their sales, maximize their income, and maximize their life with what we're providing, and to really understand any sales objections at every level, top-down, bottom-up, in between, so that we can overcome those objections. By the time those internal stakeholders all get together in a room, we've already addressed every single concern. Everyone knows us, everyone feels good about us, and they're ready to move the deal forward.

That's my recommendation, to build relationships up with every persona and of course it depends on how many people you really need to prospect at each account and the account size. That's an answer to how many prospects should you be going after at each account. I hope you found this sales tip of value. I'd love to hear in the comments section below strategies you leverage to identify everyone you should be targeting. 

 About The Author: 

Brandon Bornancin and the team at Seamless are on a mission to help you maximize your sales, maximize your income and maximize your life. Brandon is also the CEO / Founder of Seamless. 

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