In my last post I mentioned that I was going to spend 30 days working only five accounts. I quickly realized the first and obvious problem was that I had to figure out which five were worth my attention.
This seemed simple enough. I would start with my pool of accounts and then I would rank them. Decide what makes a company a good fit, give more weight to the factors that matter most, and let the best accounts rise to the top.
Simple.
Except that I immediately ran into a problem. The first run of the ranking surfaced the wrong companies.
Going into this, I assumed that the more evidence I could find of a problem my product could solve, the more valuable that account was to work. But when I looked at the accounts that rose to the top, I realized the system was rewarding something I hadn’t intended. One of the factors I was treating as evidence of opportunity was also really common among companies where there was less opportunity.
The problem wasn’t that these accounts were smaller. It was that I was giving them more weight than accounts where the same amount of work could lead to a much bigger opportunity. At the end of the day I am still in sales.
Once I understood that, I stopped trying to build one perfect score and started thinking about the order these decisions should happen in. If I were building this again, this is where I’d start.
Rules
1. Create your gates
These are the things that have to be true before an account is worth spending time on. Depending on what you’re selling, your gates will be different. To find mine, I made a list by asking myself, “What would make a company a hard no?”
Here are some examples:
- Company is outside your target market or geography.
- Company is too small or too large for your product.
- They don’t have the technical setup your product requires.
- There’s no actual use case for what you sell.
- They already use your company/product.
Structured funnel
2. Rank your remaining accounts
Once an account gets through those basic checks, ranking starts to become a lot more useful. Now you’ll be comparing companies that actually make sense.
Here are a few questions that could help you start structuring your funnel:
- How closely does it fit your ideal customer?
- What technology are they using?
- How are they currently solving the problem?
- How difficult would it be to replace what they already have?
- How valuable is the problem if you can solve it?
3. Understand what you don’t know
When you’re building your structural funnel, having a clear understanding of what you don’t know is just as important as having clarity on what you do know.
I’m working with limited tools, and unless you’re doing this at a company with unlimited resources, you’ll likely be limited to the tools you have available. Naturally, there was information I wanted to know about every company that I couldn’t get reliably across a few hundred accounts.
For some of it, I could find clues. Website traffic could tell me something about the potential size of an opportunity. The technology a company uses could tell me something about how difficult they might be to win. Recent hiring could tell me where they might be investing, and job postings could give me an idea of what problems or priorities they might have internally.
But those are still proxies. They can tell me where to look, but they aren’t necessarily reliable enough to make the decision for me.
As you’re building your funnel, each step is making a decision about which accounts deserve to move forward. If I’m going to use a piece of information to eliminate an account or move another one ahead of it, I need to know how much I can actually trust it.
One other thing I learned: the research should get more expensive as the list gets smaller. I don’t need to deeply research hundreds of companies. I need enough information to narrow the list, and then I can spend more time figuring out what’s actually happening at the accounts that survive.
From that, I’m left with a much smaller group of accounts that are actually worth paying attention to.
These aren’t the accounts that are most likely to buy. I don’t know that yet. I will say, these are the five accounts where the fit is strong enough, the opportunity is big enough, and there’s enough evidence to justify spending more time.
Rules → structured funnel → collected outcomes → learned ranking.
Next up: collected outcomes.