You hear all the time that keeping a customer is cheaper than acquiring a new one. But no one says the same thing about prospects. In fact, the opposite seems to be true - a new prospect often feels more valuable than an existing prospect.
There's certainly a perception that if an account already exists in your database, then it’s bad. Sales reps don’t want to work old accounts - they want to prospect into new ones.
But favoring new prospects over existing prospects is just as wasteful as neglecting your existing customers in favor of finding new customers.
First, a question. Are you totally confident that you’ve exhausted all your options with every single account in your CRM? Recently? And nothing has changed with any of those accounts since you last spoke with them?
Of course not. No one would say yes to those questions.
If you’re like most B2B companies, you probably have thousands (tens of thousands, even) of accounts in your CRM. And yes, many of them are unworkable for one reason or another - not a good ICP fit, out of business, bad data, etc… But there's also a lot that are workable just sitting there unworked.
You've likely invested a lot getting these accounts to begin with. Don't waste that investment by letting all your existing accounts collect dust. There's a lot of gold left in those hills. So let's talk about how you can make the most of your existing prospects.
1. Refine or validate your account scoring
First, you need to know exactly which accounts are workable and which are not. A workable account is one that is a good fit for your ICP and hasn't been recently worked.
So you need to score your accounts to see if they're a good fit. You likely already have some kind of account score in place now. If you don't already have an account score, start simple. For B2B sales teams, you likely only need a few basic firmographics to create a score that you can improve as you go. More on creating an account score here.
For the sake of this post, let's consider "good fit" accounts to be the ones that would score at least a 7 out of 10 on some theoretical ICP account score. And let's say those good fit accounts comprise 25% of your database.
Have the accounts you've closed recently scored high enough to be considered a good fit? Are there any outliers? Should you update your score to better capture those outlier accounts, or were those just flukes? It doesn't have to be complicated, but take some time to make sure your account score reflects the reality of your actual customers.
There's probably another set of accounts in your database that have never been scored. Now's a good time to identify and score any account that's never been scored before. You never know what you might find in there.
We've written before about TAM, SAM and SOM, and how to segment your market. That's a great resource if you want more about segmentation.
2. Identify customer lookalike accounts
One of the best outbound strategies is to look at a great customer, research the companies that are most similar to them, make sure you have a good profile of what those companies are like, and use targeted messaging to run a play to them.
But too often reps speak in generalities. Not because they don't want to be more specific, but because they can't be more specific. Equip your reps to tell better, more credible stories by having them work a set of accounts similar to a customer they recently closed.
So do you have a good list of customer lookalike accounts? Prospect accounts that are similar in key ways to your best customers? Do you update this list when you sign new customers? Start with the lookalikes in your database, and make sure all those accounts are assigned to reps.
It can be difficult for reps to systematically identify other accounts that are very similar to customers they've recently closed, but when you can do this, you tell really relevant stories and make your outreach stand out.
More on making this process a lot easier in a minute.
3. Improve your account ranking
How do reps know which accounts to work first? They may use some kind of intent or timing signals to rank or prioritize accounts. But once the hand raisers have been exhausted, which prospects do they go after first for prospecting? Give reps clear direction on which accounts to prioritize, and why. Hold them accountable for working those higher-priority accounts first.
4. Get reps involved by improving the quality of their accounts
One of the reasons sellers don't like to work existing accounts from your database is because many of them think those accounts have been worked to death. This may be true in some cases, but how do you know? How good is your disqualification data?
If a rep thinks there’s a problem with an accounts they're trying to work, get them involved by systematically disqualifying accounts they can't work. There needs to be structure around this process, so consider providing a set of allowed disqualification reasons. If reps can include this information on the account record in your CRM, then your ops team can work to improve incorrect data or reassign an account when the timing is right. And accounts that aren't ready to buy can be more easily nurtured by marketing.
By allowing your reps to disposition accounts, then you’re not forcing them to nurture accounts that are better nurtured by marketing. You're helping reps work more efficiently by having them focus on accounts that are higher potential.
This is a good time to implement a returns process too. More on account returns here.
5. Try Market Map
So much of what we just talked about will take a lot of time and effort if you do it manually.
For example, finding customer lookalikes. Even if you just focus on reverse engineering your recent wins, that's still hours of work to dig into what your reps did to land that account, looking for similar accounts you could prospect into, and prepping the messaging. And that's before you send a single email.
But it doesn't need to be manual. This is what we built Market Map to do for you, faster and more accurate than you could ever do it manually, even with a hundred SDRs.
Market Map analyzes every account in your CRM to generate clusters of similar accounts so you can quickly identify groups of high-potential prospects that are a lot like your best customers. From there, you can see which of these high-potential customer lookalike accounts have been assigned to reps, which ones have not been assigned, and even which ones are actively being worked.
Every single time one of our customers tries Market Map for the first time, they have found unassigned, unworked accounts that are a good potential ICP fit, just waiting for someone to reach out. This is the lowest-hanging fruit in your CRM, and it's sitting there rotting away on the vine. Harvest that fruit!
