The Coffee Campaign: A Must Try Account-Based Sales Approach
I don’t care about account-based marketing, I care about account-based sales. The problem with account-based sales is it’s an idea most people have heard about but nobody knows what to do with it. For this reason, effective account-based sales requires reps to be playmakers. What are playmakers? They make sales happen, they are the CEO of their territory, and they have a ‘whatever-it-takes’ attitude to hit their number. That doesn’t mean they have to go at everything alone but it does mean that they call the shots.
This is how we do it at XANT. If you have a good idea, let’s get’er done and that’s exactly what Joey Wood, one of XANT’s top sales reps, did. Rather than simply use LinkedIn or call his prospects, Joey and team brainstormed an account-based sales campaign that utilized a variety of communication methods to drive some big time results in a short amount of time. Do I have your attention yet?
The Results
The Coffee Campaign
It’s always great to get positive responses from prospects but it’s another thing to bring in the bacon. With this campaign Joey and team did both. Here are some of the statistics that were achieved in under three months.
- 18 scheduled meetings
- $700,000 in sales pipeline
- $147,000 in sales
If you don’t think those are good numbers you’re wrong. This is one sales rep and one campaign.
The How
Step One: Bring the Growth Team
First things first, we don’t have have sales, marketing, and sales development at XANT. We have what we call the “growth team.” That’s one team with one purpose and different roles. We plan, we break down silos, and we talk about how we can run a campaign together brining all of our unique differences and strengths.
Step Two: Find the Swag
What’s cool? Coffee is cool. Coffee is for closers. But, we thought coffee wasn’t enough. We wanted something that was local to our prospects in Texas so we found Yeti mugs. Yeti mugs with coffee is cool and it has a high perceived value. All we needed now was to get the XANT logo on it and we were set.
Step Three: Identify the Targets
When the team sat down it wasn’t about “spraying and praying” it was about identifying 18 accounts and 3-5 contacts at each account. Each contact was one of our ideal buyers. This list wasn’t subjectively thrown together. We used art and science. We looked at which accounts we thought would be best and then we ran that against the XANT predictive account scoring model called Neuralytics and we came up with a really tight list.
The problem was the addresses. We didn’t want to go through all this trouble and not have the person receive the gift. We couldn’t find a better answer so we had our sales development team make calls to verify the address.
Step Four: Execute the Cadence
Now comes the magic and this is where a lot of account-based marketing ideas fail. Marketing brainstorms these great ideas and then sales never follows up on them. In an account-based sales plan that doesn’t happen. It can’t happen.
To start, Joey and team sent the XANT branded gift with a hand-written note. In case you’re wondering, there is a big debate (between me, myself, and I) about branded versus non-branded gifts. Branded gifts always remind the prospects of your company but they decrease the personalization because it’s more about you then them. More to come on this topic later. The hand-written note is key. Joey and team personalized the first part of the message and then used the same message for the rest of the note. Hand-written notes are killer! The problem is they are hard to scale. Be watching for some really cool startups coming around the make this process much easier than it currently is.
When a gift is sent, a tracking number is received so the team knew when it landed. Once the prospect received the gift, the team placed their first phone call and if the prospect didn’t answer they left their first voicemail with an email. The team then waited one day and did call two, voicemail two, and text one. That’s right, we tried sending texts cold to prospects and this may have been one of the most powerful things we did. I still believe cold texting isn’t quite there but since the prospect had received a gift from us, we took the liberty to assume the relationship wasn’t completely cold.
If no contact was made, the team waited two days and then did call three and email two followed by waiting two more days to send email three. To end the cadence, the team waited two more days and sent a LinkedIn message.
Closing
Love this. Real results with out-of-the-box thinking. Welcome to the #playmaker club Mr Wood.
XANT Labs
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