A beginners guide to account research
Strategic account planning is a great exercise to ensure you are talking in a relevant way to your customers.
This account research is also a core part of any pipeline generation activity. It demonstrates you understand your client and that you have done your homework.
To avoid endless scrolling and/or analysis paralysis, it is important to have a method by which you approach your account-based research.
Some basic google searches can help you to understand the high level initiatives of your client; how their priorities are changing with different company based, geopolitical or macro economic events.
To get started with quick account-based research, here are our top tips for what to search for when creating your account plan or performing general pipeline generation tasks:
Top 5 Google Searches for Researching Accounts:
Search 1: [Company Name] Revenue growth
What are we looking for?:
- What is the company’s revenue growth strategy?
- What is their commentary on this strategy?
- Who are the key commentators?
This information gets us into the head of our customer and what is important to them. It will also help us to understand different divisions, revenue streams, channels and business lines which help us with company structure and identifying new opportunities.
Search 2: [Company Name] Mergers and Acquisition
What are we looking for?:
- Is your target customer a M&A target?
- Is their growth strategy based on non-organic growth?
For customer success, client executives and strategic account managers, this gives you a quick glance into new license opportunities and potential quick upsell opportunities.
Search 3: [Company Name] Risk, Fraud, Fine
What are we looking for?:
- Has the company recently had some sort of news event which was related to a breach, fine or regulatory issue?
- Perhaps they are a commentor in the market on these types of issues? Especially if a competitor has experienced a breach
Again, provide insight into what is top of mind for the client today and what their executives are concerned about.
Search 4: [Company Name] speaking event [year]
What are we looking for?:
- Does your customer have executives speaking at events?
- Which event?
- What topics?
These are often approachable executives who are being asked to speak about their experiences and expertise in a certain market.
These executives are targets for potential customer related speaking events which can be your ‘flowers and chocolates’ to get the next meeting.
Search 5: [Company Name] News
Obvious, yes. But the company’s SEO team will be considering what they want you to read. This usually means growth and opportunity stories specifically aimed at investors.
This is valuable information to understand what would get their director's attention.
Look regularly to ensure you don’t miss the latest.
Habits for Account Based Research
Now we have some key searches which will be yielding information – we must build in a regular habit to check on these searches from time to time.
As mentioned in our last blog, companies are having to move faster than ever before to react to the recent, and ongoing global events that are shaking up our standard operating procedures.
An account plan must be up to date with all the latest news and events to ensure the messaging and approach is relevant. For example, we might not want to pipeline generate an opportunity in a divested company.
Having regular, key searches built into the account planning process has never been more necessary.
Creating this cadence helps to reduce the overwhelming and never ending task of research, to quickly ensure we understand the account to start calling into key people and give ourselves the best chance of success.
If you are interested in new ideas, inspir'em sales meeting exercises and lesson plans are available to continue the development of your teams.
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