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Selecting Top Tier Sales Accounts at Scale is as Easy 1-2-3

4 min read
Updated Oct. 17, 2023
Published Jun. 6, 2016

When you dive into persona based selling and selecting your accounts, the best sellers in the world communicate with personalization to top tier accounts. And the best way to prioritize these top tier sales accounts is to rank them based on their characteristics as they apply to your ideal client profile (ICP).

By determining where an account fits in terms of size, industry and vertical, and categorizing them based 1, 2, and 3-leveled tiers, you’ll be one step closer to selecting and prioritizing those top tier sales accounts.

An easy way to define the top tier sales accounts is to nail down your desired account profile and the realm of qualities within your ICP. Let’s assume there are roughly 10 characteristics of an ideal account. Six are requirements — must have account qualities — and four are nice to have’s.

Some of these qualities will largely depend on your specific business, but here are some examples:

  • Industry
  • Size
  • Tech stack
  • Vertical
  • Location

An account who embodies all seven or more of these characteristics would be considered an Tier 1 account. From there, the Tier 2 account most likely covers around six of those qualities. And finally, the accounts that are still in the testing stage would be considered Tier 3 accounts.

How does an organization replicate this at scale? There are tons of technologies on the market — from simple lead scoring, all the way up to predictive lead generation. But the one thing that holds true is that each of them are using data points based on your existing customer base to rank accounts — allowing you focus on execution, rather than identification.

If you are truly driving an account-based approach — or as Craig Rosenberg calls it, Account Based Everything — then there should be very close, if not direct, alignment between where you are spending your time as SDRs, as AEs, as Marketers, and as an entire organization.

This strategy allows teams to hyper-focus their activities based on the priority of the account tier.

Tier 1 accounts should be handled with 100% personalization and intentionality. Tier 2 will likely be fit for a 10-80-10 model of personalization at scale. And Tier 3 accounts are those in a new vertical or industry not yet proven to be in the ICP.

Automation enables teams to execute on Tier 3 accounts while freeing up focus a creative and meaningful strategy for for Tier 1 and 2 accounts. With automation, an organization can test a new market without burning time, and uncover if they should double down or if there is not a fit.

Sales development is like the lynchpin of overall account-based success. There’s a team of Marketers identifying scoring and making sure they fit the right profile, and then there’s a team of AEs that has to go execute based on the messaging, but everything the SDR does must be catered to resonate with those top tier accounts.

Salesloft is here to empower the modern inside sales team to do more, be more, and execute at a higher level. Empower your team to be more personalized, more efficient, and more effective when reaching these top tier sales accounts through a brand new workflow built to be flexible, give access to more insights when it comes to selecting and tiering your 1, 2, and 3 accounts.

We’re not here to tell you what’s new — we’re here to tell you what works. And delivering personalization, sincerity and professionalism at scale is the key to success in sales development.

For a more comprehensive look into Salesloft’s internal SDR process, download our free playbook and optimize your sales efforts to start crushing your sales development goals today.