Increasing your sales pipeline with low-quality leads is easy. Just have your sales team start cold calling and emailing every business that kind of looks like your ideal customer. Of course, you’d quickly find yourself wasting a lot of time and resources on prospects that just aren’t the right fit.
And, as a RevOps (aka revenue operations) professional, it’s your job to take a more strategic approach to identify accounts that are high-fit targets for your sales team. How can you do that?
We’re going to show you a 4-step process in this guide. Our goal is to help you align sales and marketing to drive growth and reach your revenue goals by increasing your pipeline with accounts that have the highest potential for success.
You’ll also learn:
- The role of RevOps in sales pipeline growth
- Why and how your company needs to update its ICP with more rigorous data
- How to scale your process of identifying and prioritizing high-fit target accounts
- How one B2B software company increased their sales pipeline by 15% using the 4-step process we’re about to share
The role of RevOps in sales pipeline management and growth
RevOps is responsible for driving predictable revenue by aligning sales, marketing, customer success and finance teams. So, when it comes to sales pipeline management and growth, your job is to ensure there’s a strategy to target and bring in high-quality accounts.
High-fit target accounts are companies that share key characteristics with your best customers. Some companies take a superficial approach to defining what those characteristics are. For example, they think any company that’s of similar size, industry, geographic location and business model counts as a high-fit target account.
But think about it: does that information really tell you if a company is showing any signs of being ready to buy your product or service? Nope! Which explains why it’s common for many companies to have a sales pipeline clogged with low-quality leads.
So, what can you do instead? At Rev, we recommend a different approach for sales pipeline growth. And, as we’ll show soon, this approach has helped B2B companies consistently accelerate pipeline growth with high-fit target accounts. But, first, let’s show you how you can do it yourself!
4 steps to increase your sales pipeline with high-fit target accounts
As a RevOps leader, your job is to drive predictable revenue for your business by aligning the goals and processes of all departments accountable to revenue. And that’s not easy. But some things can be made easier than you’re used to with the right tools and methods.
Here’s an overview of a strategy you can start implementing with your sales and marketing teams to grow your sales pipeline with high-quality leads:
- Develop a robust and dynamic ideal customer profile based on your best customers’ behaviors
- Generate a list of accounts with characteristics similar to your new ICP
- Prioritize your new list so your outbound teams know which ones to focus on first
- Create customized sales and marketing campaigns for each account
Let’s look at each step in more detail.
Step 1: Develop a robust and dynamic ideal customer profile based on the behaviors of your best customers
This might seem like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many companies don’t actually have a good understanding of who their ideal customer is. Often, the problem is that they’ve developed their ideal customer profile (ICP) on firmographic data like industry, company size or geographic location.
But, if you want a more consistent way to generate quality leads, you’re going to need to add more rigor to your ICP. How? You need to understand how your best customers operate, what their business goals and objectives are, and the specific challenges they’re experiencing right now.
You can manually find all of this information by researching things like a company’s website, job postings, social media profiles, PR campaigns and more. But there’s a problem: this level of research for every company on your best account list can be excruciatingly time-consuming and tedious—especially because companies are always changing.
Luckily, AI technology can get you all the information you need in a fraction of the time. At Rev, we’ve created a Sales Development Platform that does exactly that. Our Sales Development Platform will evaluate your best customers and generate what we call an aiCP (an AI-generated customer profile) that gives you insight into the characteristics that your best accounts have in common: sales tactics, product strategies, hiring practices and more.
Step 2: Generate a list of accounts with the same behavioral characteristics as your new ICP
Now that you have a better understanding of your ICP, you can confidently start selecting new target accounts that display similar characteristics. You’ll specifically want to focus on the companies that not only show signs of being a good fit for your product but also ready to buy.
Again, you could do this manually, but it will take more time than you’d like to find a significant number of companies to pass to your outbound teams. As you may have guessed, Rev has a solution to this problem as well!
Using your aiCP, Rev can generate a list of hundreds or thousands of businesses—some of which you may have never considered—that have similar exegraphics to your best accounts.
What are exegraphics? Exegraphics are the characteristics we talked about earlier. They’re the data points on how companies operate and execute their mission. For example, exegraphic data could show you that your best customers:
- Have recently experienced high turnover in their sales and marketing department
- Are early adopters of new marketing automation software technologies
- Have CEOs with a history of implementing subscription business models
With this information, you’ll be able to create targeted sales and marketing campaigns that speak directly to your ideal customers’ needs. But, before you do that, you’ll first want to…
Step 3: Prioritize your new list accounts so your outbound teams know which ones to focus on
All of the accounts on your new list should show signs of being a potentially good fit for your business. But not all of them will be equally so. To help your outbound teams know which ones to target first, you’ll need to prioritize the list based on which accounts have the highest likelihood of converting.
How do you do that? Well, if you do this manually, you’d need to review each account and make a judgment call (re: guess) on which accounts have the most potential. Of course, it would be hard to make those judgment calls without data to back them up.
By leveraging exegraphic data on your current high-value clients, Rev’s AI technology generates a Rev Score for each of the accounts on your new list. The Rev Score ranks the accounts based on the characteristics that matter most to you and their likelihood of converting, allowing you to prioritize and focus on the high-fit target accounts.
Not only does this save time and effort on your end, but it also ensures that when you pass the list over to your outbound teams, they have a better chance of closing accounts.
Step 4: Create customized sales and marketing campaigns for each account
Now that your outbound teams have the prioritized list of high-fit target accounts, it’s time to start reaching out. But you’ll want to make sure you’re not just blasting out the same message to everyone on your list.
Exegraphics are your best friend here as well. Why? Because with exegraphics, you can dial in your messaging to speak directly to the specific pain points and needs of any company on your list.
You’d also have data on where and how to best deliver your marketing and sales campaigns to each target account. For example, you may find that your high-fit target accounts tend to look at certain online resources before making a purchasing decision. This can inform where you focus your advertising efforts and where you direct sales reps to engage with potential customers.
How Splunk used this approach to increase their pipeline by 15%
Splunk, a data software company that provides a platform for analyzing machine-generated big data, recently acquired a company in the DevOps space and needed to figure out a way to enter a new market segment and generate demand for a new offering.
Despite having an extensive ABM list, they weren’t generating any revenue from those accounts and knew they had to do something different. So, they reached out to Rev and we helped them execute the strategy we just shared with you.
We started by refining their ICP to create an aiCP to have a living model of the characteristics of their best customers. Then, we used that aiCP to prioritize their account list and run content syndication campaigns to target the high-fit accounts.
How long did it take to increase their pipeline by 15%? Just three weeks! Read more about Splunk’s experience using Rev for pipeline growth here.
Increase your sales pipeline without the guesswork
In RevOps, your goal is to provide a strategy and operational structure that makes revenue growth a predictable, repeatable process. Using the four-step method for pipeline growth shared in this guide, you can take the guesswork out of increasing your sales pipeline with high-fit target accounts.
Ready to ditch the deadweight of low-quality leads and start closing more deals? Let Rev’s AI show you the companies you should target next!