ADOPTER
Your Account-Based Selling journey starts here
Here’s all you need to know if you’re dipping your toes in Account-Based Selling (ABS).
MATURITY MARKERS FOR ADOPTERS
Starting small
Adopters are more likely to be SMB than other segments. Breaking this down, we have 5 in 10 organizations that are considered small-sized (under 100 employees) and 4 in 10 medium-sized (100-500 employees). While this number sounds definitive, size isn’t necessarily an indicator of ABS maturity across the board. While there are slightly more large-sized organizations as you mature with 1 in 10 Adopters, to 3 in 10 Leaders having large-sized companies of 501+, you can still be a small business selling enterprise solutions to a large-sized company.
8 in 10 Adopters have under 50 salespeople, with the rest sitting between 101-250 salespeople
9/10
Adopters are small to medium businesses
The majority of Adopters have less than 100 employees when getting started.
7/10
Adopters have under 100k records in their CRM
The majority of Adopters don’t have hundreds of thousands of account records. In fact, only 1 in 10 have total account records above 500k.
4/10
Use Salesforce CRM
Adopter’s CRM platform usage are more spread out across providers. However, Salesforce still is on top with 2x the users as Hubspot
GO-TO-MARKET ALIGNMENT
7 in 10 agree they have strong organizational alignment to support GTM motions…but there’s a catch
What’s the catch? This statement includes those that somewhat agree. When we start to unpack this, only 2 in 10 strongly agree with this statement. Coupled with the fact that Adopters top challenge is organizational alignment, the combination begs the question… Are they really aligned?
Just under half of the Adopters have a RevOps function, and 2 in 10 plan to add one in the next 12 months
Comparatively to other maturity levels, Adopters are less likely to have a RevOps function. However, there’s an indication that most recognize the importance of the function, which is also a reflection of where the industry is headed. This function helps create alignment across people, processes, and technology that helps to influence ABS effectiveness.
PRO TIP:
Align with leadership on when is the right time to invest in a revenue operations team. It could be when you hit a certain employee count or annual revenue.
THE STATE OF DATA
Few Adopters agree they have strong data governance and management in place
4/10
agree they have strong data governance in place in their organization.
Only 1 in 10 strongly agree
6/10
agree they have clean and actionable account data enabling effective selling.
Only ~1 in 10 strongly agree
4/10
agree parent-child account data is linked accurately in their CRM with clear account relationships and territories.
Only 2 in 10 strongly agree
“Align executives, introduce RevOps, and align digital strategy with RevOps & Sales Enablement.”
– Adopter
Get everyone on the same page
Aligning the entire go-to-market team including; Marketing Sales and Customer Success (i.e. to drive shared objectives) is the top challenge across all maturities (23%). Following this, lack of account visibility for sales teams (16%), leadership not prioritizing ABS (15%), and the ability to effectively report on results of account-based selling strategies (13%) are also top challenges.
THE STRATEGY
Are you set up for success with ABS?
The two most important strategies for Adopters are identifying new sales opportunities/whitespace (25%) and land and expand (21%). However, the majority of Adopters feel like they are not executing these strategies well. There’s especially low confidence in their ability to be effective when it comes to account visibility and account-specific content, which is similar across maturities.
PRO TIP:
Enable your team to have better visibility into their customer accounts and be more effective with tools like account hierarchies and third-party data from providers like Dun & Bradstreet.
