Account Based Sales Development
A New Methodology in Lead Execution, Target Outbound, and Pipeline Generation
By Lars Nilsson
Here’s a plain and simple truth: the best sales development teams today leverage technology to
perform smarter, better and faster. The proliferation of, and advances in, sales technology have
presented today’s sales development teams with an opportunity to completely revolutionize the way
they conduct business.
At its core, the Sales Development role remains the same as ever. Today’s Sales Development
Teams, like their account development and telemarketing counterparts of the past, are specialized
units focused on prospecting and building qualified pipeline for a company. They are measured by the
quantity of their outreach (e.g. dials made/answered and emails sent/opened/replied to), and are
typically paid on qualified meetings set up for their Outside and Inside Sales counterparts. The
difference is, today’s sales development teams must be smarter and more targeted in their outreach
to produce the same amount of pipeline, particularly in the Enterprise. Technology is helping today’s
teams achieve this new approach, and has been for some years. Take the case of dialing as an
example.
In the early days of Sales Development, a sales development rep (SDR) had to complete a hundred
or more phone calls and voicemails per day hoping to “catch” someone live. Eventually, auto-dialers
would make this arduous task easier, but then if nobody answered, the SDR would spend additional
time leaving a pithy voice-mail in the hope that perhaps they would inspire the prospect to call them
back (yeah right) or at least leave some form of audible company branded product message.
InsideSales.com and other emerging technologies now allow SDR’s to pre-record voice mail
messages so now even leaving voice mails can be automated and help the SDR get to his/her dial
targets within an hour of starting their day.
The point is, as the business world has changed and technology has evolved, so has the art and
science of Sales Development. Sales Development leaders are constantly evaluating new
technologies and best practice ideas to help cover more ground while keeping resources as lean as
possible. As a result, many forward thinking B2B technology companies are breeding SDR’s at the
same rate as their outside quota carrying sales counterparts, making a new outbound approach
possible by a different breed of Sales 2.0 vendors.
Here at Cloudera, we call this approach Account Based Sales Development (ABSD). The SDR team
has refined its approach to outbound prospecting into the enterprise with the help of two cutting edge
technology vendors; Outreach.io and LeanData – two companies that embody the essence of big
data. The ever present and ubiquitous LinkedIn Navigator is the third pillar in our outbound “SDR
technology stack”. Instead of beating on the empty phone doors we’ve seen as industry standard, we
have changed our approach to rely on technology to help us understand those that would be more
willing to take and accept our calls. Since implementing our ABSD strategy just 3 months ago, we
have seen unprecedented results and responses. In our first try within a target account, we sent a
three-email campaign using Outreach.io “sequences,” and our ABSD methodology delivered:
●
●
●
●
●
60% open rate
31% reply rate
15 net new meetings
Entry into three new lines of business
Two expansion opportunities within existing lines of business
● 22 hard bounces automatically purged out of SFDC
The results of all subsequent ABSD campaigns into specifically targeted enterprise accounts netted
similar results; all in the coveted double digit email open and reply rates. Using broader and less
targeted techniques with Marketing Automation mass emailing, typical open rates vary in the 5-8%
range and reply rates in the 2-3% range. I was blown away for I had never seen anything like this in
my 20 years of building Lead/demand generation teams.
Account Based Sales Development (ABSD)
|əˈkount bās sāl diˈveləpmənt|
The coordinated process of developing qualified pipeline in a Target Addressable Market by running
proactive sales development led multi-touch “sequences” into Target accounts. These coordinated
and proactive email “sequences” make it possible to deliver relevant solution and use case specific
content to a specific buyer persona.
● Using the “Mass” and “Auto” lead conversion tool LeanData, ABSD leverages the consolidation
of relevant inbound leads and account contacts. Social Networks & Contact tools like Linked
In & Discover.org also add title relevant buyer persona contacts to an ABSD campaign
● More efficient and intelligent email engagement with prospects via Outreach.io (other vendors
include Yesware, Sendbloom, ToutApp) deliver day and time specific emails to those we
believe carry the pain for our solutions and would/could/should be interested
● Integration of multi-touch call, email and social strategy as a follow-up bring it all together
When I first arrived at Cloudera, I faced a “problem” unlike any other in my career: we had too many
leads! In our case, it wasn’t just that we had too many leads for the SDR team to manage, but we had
too many of the wrong type of leads. Allow me to elaborate…
For those of you who don’t know, Cloudera provides an open source distribution of Apache Hadoop –
a pioneering and fundamentally new way of storing and processing data. It is commonly downloaded
for free. In today’s hyper-connected world where more and more data is being created every day,
Hadoop’s breakthrough advantages mean that businesses and organizations can now find value in
data that was recently considered useless. Cloudera provides enterprise versions of this software
alongside support, training, and professional services that provide a more robust enterprise-class
experience. The Cloudera platform includes the leading analytic tools, simple administration
technology, and compliance-ready security and governance.
Hadoop (big data) solutions are being talked about everywhere it seems, and Cloudera is at the
center of it all. People are downloading research, registering for online webinars and attending our
events in record numbers. We found out quickly that most leads that we captured were simply
investigating our free technology, and wanted to be left in peace to learn about the technology on
their own.
This goes directly against what we ask of an SDR; call 10x times, interrupt their day and push for a
follow on meeting with their sales rep. In fact, not only were these individuals not interested in having
conversations with us, quite a few of these same “prospects” were individuals we had no interest in
either.
To sum it up, our challenge was to determine which individuals were “SDR actionable” versus those
prospects who offered too low a value proposition for the dedicated attention of my SDR team.
Armed with industry specific use cases and in conjunction with their assigned Account Executive &
Subject Matter Experts, Cloudera SDRs create targeted email “sequences”. These sequences are a
series of concise emails that are written with the buyer persona in mind and are designed to generate
qualified meetings. For example, a three-email sequence will “drip” out three emails to the same
target audience approximately 2.5 days apart in hopes of getting either an email open, or better yet…
a direct reply.
The steps we take are:
Step 1: Create a Single View of Each Target Account
This is critical to the success of an ABSD campaign. Integration with LeanData places a
custom iframe into the Account Object and makes visible all of the unconverted leads in
Salesforce.com that were never converted against the existing account. By hitting a “Mass
Convert” button, all related leads will automatically convert into contacts. LeanData also makes
visible any duplicate accounts that may exist in the CRM database making for easier
consolidation and merging.
To ensure that leads get converted into existing accounts, we also use LeanData’s “autoconvert” functionality, which proactively converts all new inbound leads within our target
market straight to the account record. By isolating our high value target account leads and
automatically associating them with their respective accounts we have marginalized the
manual work an SDR has to do prior to execution and have identified the highest value leads
for more efficient and timely follow ups.
Today, 60% of our lead volume is auto-assigned to related accounts thus giving each SDR
hours back a day to focus on inbound lead prosecution, and more time to dedicate towards
outbound efforts
Fig. 1 – LeanData’s iFrame. After integration of LeanData with Salesforce.com, the LeanData detail section can be found
in the Account object of Salesforce.com. This will present for you all duplicate accounts and related lead objects that exist
against that named account. In this example, it shows us that we have one duplicate account record and 73 existing lead
objects that all come from the account: American Express. By simply selecting the “Mass Convert” button, you can
automatically mass convert these leads into contacts against the American Express account and thus get a consolidated
view of all “opt in” contacts that come from one of your target accounts
Step 2. Identify Target Prospects Within Each Account
With visibility to all known titles in the CRM, the SDR team (with account executive (AE)
coordination) is able to quickly identify other relevant stakeholders that DID NOT exist in our
CRM through inbound inquiries. By using LinkedIn Navigator and Discover.org, SDRs search
for people with titles relevant to big data, data architecture and “Hadoop” at the target account
and build them into separate lists. The key here is to choose titles you believe carry the pain
for the solution your products might solve for them.
What we end up with is everybody that has ever come to us and a target rich group of new
contacts we believe will care about what we present them.
Step 3. Develop Relevant Content
SDRs work directly with their AE and a Cloudera Industry Vertical focused Subject Matter
Expert (we have SME’s at Cloudera aligned to our top five industry vertical targets) to develop
three separate emails designed to send in a sequence a few days apart from each other
(we’ve done 2, 3 and 4 drip sequences in the past but prefer 3). The key here is to tailor the
message to the specific account, account type and vertical to ensure the short, crisp, use case
specific message that aligns to the target’s pain.
This level of targeted outreach wasn’t something we could do had we not been able to
combine all the relevant data we had in our CRM; hugely valuable!
Step 4. Generate Outreach.io Sequences
After the emails have been drafted, the SDR loads them into Outreach.io and sets up the
sequence to deploy over a week’s time. For our first few sequences we chose to have the
first email go out Tuesday morning, the second on a Thursday afternoon and the third on the
following Monday afternoon. Over the last few weeks, we have begun A/B testing with the
number# of sequences, the days, times, and messaging of the sequences. SDR’s have
become very prideful of their open and reply rates and drive each other to push the envelope
on weekly performance metrics.
Fig.2 – Outreach.io screenshot showing the results of a completed three email sequence ABSD campaign that saw 56%
open rate and a 25% reply rate. Interesting to note that there were 26 hard bounces and only five “opt outs” This
particular ABSD campaign executed on July 28, July 30 & Aug. 1 where most of the resulting activity occurred.
SDR follow-up activity resulted in nine meetings being set leading to three new opportunities being qualified and
forecast for $285K
To date, we have targeted 24 companies with individual ABSD campaigns. 86 qualified meetings
have been set up resulting in 45 opportunities created rolling up $3.7M of new forecasted pipeline. As
the SDR’s and AE’s get comfortable with the process and procedure of setting up each individual
campaign, there’s just more pipeline to go and create. I’ve had to adjust the comp plans for SDR’s as
a result of ABSD as the average number of meetings they are setting has increased by 20%. This
drives not only the increase we are seeing in pipeline generating from the SDR channel, but also
speaks directly to the Efficiency OKR that our CEO has concentrated the entire company on. We are
doing more with less and getting the right kind of activity in our target market segment while driving
more pipeline and more revenue. Beautiful!
ABSD is a derivative of the “Account Based Marketing” (ABM) movement that has been gaining
momentum as of late. I just learned that ABM was coined in 2004 by ITSMA but I had not heard of it
until earlier last year when Cloudera began using technology to target ads at specific buyer personas
within strategic accounts. Jon Miller of Engagio and Sangram Vajre of Terminus are both building
technology around ABM and I hope they plan to include more sales related functions along with
Marketing functions. In my opinion, ABM should be re-coined as ABS&M as the collaboration and
execution between Sales AND Marketing needs to be near perfect to be able to pull off the surgical
targeting of each subsequent account with the right messages from marketing together with the right
outreach, follow-up, and execution from sales. I’d also say that ABM was made possible because
Marketing Automation (MA) and Sales 2.0 mashes up the main componentry of out-bounding
targeted content into specific accounts with the title relevant contacts whose email and phone
numbers# can now be so easily found through contact vendors (LinkedIn, Discover.org, Data.com,
Netprospex).
This particular methodology was inspired by the contributions from thought leaders like Craig
Rosenberg and the entire gang at the Topo Sales Development Council. There, SDR leaders gather
and bat around technology and best practice ideas and push the envelope of what is possible in
today’s emerging Sales 3.0 world. Jill Rowley & Aaron Ross have been banging away for years on
their convictions about outbound and social selling and I have picked up so many ideas form them as
well. Props must also be given to Jim Fowler and Garth Moulton (of Jigsaw, now Data.com) for
creating the first ever contact exchange allowing reps to offer contact information from their rolodex
picked up from past sales cycles in return for the ability to view other rep’s rolodexes. This “buyer
persona” or title relevant contact database brought new life to my Account Development team at
ArcSight and accelerated pipeline growth to record new levels. This ability changed the rules of the
cold prospect outreach game forever in my opinion and will continue to propel ABSD to new heights.
While we are still in the early days of ABSD here at Cloudera, I do see this as the next evolution of
inside sales prospecting efforts. We finally have the technology to support the ideal process for
triaging, researching, and reaching out to target contacts at specific accounts with the right
messaging.