No More "Spray and Pray:" How Crunchbase Enables Account-Based Selling | Ang McManamon - 1567

The days of “spray and pray” selling are over. So how can sellers maintain a consistently full pipeline of prospects and leads? Through targeted and account-based selling. In today’s episode of The Sales Evangelist, Donald is joined by the VP of Sales Management at Crunchbase, Ang McManamon, to discuss how she uses account-based selling in her own work.

Why go into account-based selling?

• A year ago, Ang’s team talked to their best clients and saw an appetite for account-based selling.
• Prospects would use Crunchbase for funding and capital management news, and people liked the database options for prospecting.
• There are so many sales tools today, yet finding high-quality accounts and decision-makers is still tricky.
• Before, there were no strategic ways of looking at accounts and contacts. Now, you can be intentional with your actions.

Setting up Crunchbases’s account-based selling:

• First, figure out the target audience. Companies say they do it, but they frequently don’t get precise enough to best impact the audience.
• Narrow down organizations by size, but look for people based on many factors.
• Ang targeted 50 accounts per person on her 35-person team. Then, they researched the messaging, cadence, and outreach that would best apply to those targets.
• Look at the potential buyer intent. What web pages have they visited on your website?
• Luckily, Crunchbase has great name recognition. However, prospects often don’t know the specific things they can do with the platform.

It takes diligence as a leader to hold sellers accountable.

• While the account list is a priority, it’s not necessarily a restriction. If the seller isn’t getting anywhere with a target account, they should be able to move on and find new targets.
• For outbound selling, sellers use Crunchbase to view recommended accounts or new contacts within those accounts. Then, they create an automatic email from Outreach and set up a cadence.
• Sellers use strategic intent tools to inform them of their best outreach method, and they use Salesforce to track data and activity.

Potential problems (and solutions) with ABM:

• Initially, Ang’s team wasn’t using Crunchbase and wasn’t ‘surrounding’ the sale, interacting with 1-2 people rather than 4-5 who could impact the sale.
• Incentivizing the sale for larger-scale prospects can help get your foot in the door.
• Finds reps with a higher sense of ownership when using account-based selling because sellers feel more in control over the process.
• When working with strategic accounts, win rates increase roughly 48%, but the cycle is slightly longer. It sounds like a great trade-off to us.

Ang’s major piece of advice? Account-based is here to stay, and it’s a better and more strategic way to sell your products. It takes time to nail down, but it’s worth it. Visit Crunchbase.com or email sales@crunchbase.com to see what the Crunchbase platform offers.

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This episode is brought to you in part by Skipio.

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Mentioned in this episode:

HubSpot and bluëmago | STUDIOS

HubSpot and bluëmago | STUDIOS hubpspot.com/marketers bluemangostudios.com