Creating a winning target account selling (TAS) strategy

Despite the hustle of B2B sales, reaching revenue targets isn’t always a numbers game. Maximizing your business’s bottom line often comes down to the quality of deals over sheer quantity.

Target account selling (TAS) is a sales strategy that empowers organizations to prioritize the highest-value leads in order to increase win rates and drive revenue.

Here we’ll take a deeper look at target account selling, explore the pros and cons, and share ways you can supercharge your TAS strategy with relationship insights.

What is a target account?

A target account is a company that you’ve identified as a match for your ideal customer profile (ICP) and one that has a high potential to convert into a customer. 

Essentially, it’s a prospect that you’re actively building a relationship with and pursuing with the use of target account selling strategies, in order to move the deal—and account—through your pipeline.

Which leads to the question…

What is target account selling (TAS)?

Target account selling (TAS) is an enterprise sales approach that enables organizations to redirect their sales and marketing efforts to qualified, target accounts. With TAS, the goal is to build relationships and deliver value to key prospects in order to maximize sales efficiency. 

While TAS is a sales strategy, the relationship-first methodology means that activities and responsibilities aren’t just limited to sales teams. Successful TAS requires organizations to take an all-hands-on-deck approach to create a personalized sales experience for every account and buyer.

For example, sales reps are generally responsible for moving deals through the pipeline. But when employing a TAS strategy, senior executives might play a role in initiating relationships with high-level stakeholders, while marketing teams might be tapped in to create personalized content and resources for each target account.

Target account selling is similar to account-based marketing (ABM) and account-based selling (ABS) in that they all prioritize the customer relationship in the sales process. However, the biggest difference is that TAS differentiates accounts down to the individual stakeholder versus simply the account level. And with deals often involving 68% more stakeholders than sellers think, the buyer-level focus can quickly offer organizations a competitive advantage. 

However, with significant overlap, you’ll often see sales organizations use the terms interchangeably. 

Read more: Account planning: How to grow key accounts and increase revenue

When should your sales team use target account selling?

At face value, target account selling seems like a valuable strategy for any sales-driven business. You should always prioritize the highest-value deals, right? 

While that’s true for the most part, TAS goes beyond prioritization. When employing TAS strategies, organizations invest in a significant amount of research and resources to create a highly personalized sales experience. TAS is similar to key account planning; however, it focuses on conversion rather than retention. 

As a result, TAS is considered to be a good fit for larger, more complex sales funnels. Common use cases for using target account selling in B2B sales include:

• Complex products and industries: When deals have many moving parts and multiple stakeholders are required to make decisions, TAS can help personalize the buying journey so every individual involved is able to extract value from the deal.
• Big-ticket items: The personalized, research-heavy nature of TAS means that organizations typically invest significant resources into every account. Larger deals make it easier to offset the costs required to close the deal.
• Subscription-based B2B products and software: Similarly, subscription-based products with high customer lifetime value (LTV) can improve the return on investing in a TAS strategy.
• Products and services that can be upsold or cross-sold: While TAS is generally used to close initial deals, the relationship-driven approach lays the groundwork for a long-term mutually beneficial relationship. This builds trust and loyalty before a customer is even won, making it easier to upsell or cross-sell offerings in the future. 

Pros and cons of target account selling

When done right, target account selling is extremely effective. It’s why it’s a popular approach among teams in high-touch sales industries.

The pros of target account selling include:

• Accelerated sales cycle: By redirecting resources to specific key accounts, sales reps can shorten sales cycles and close deals faster.
• Boosting brand reputation: Increased personalization elevates the buying experience for prospects and differentiates your brand from the competition. 
• Maximized deal and lifetime value: By nurturing long-term relationships, sellers can deep dive into the challenges and opportunities for each account and identify solutions and offerings that meet their needs.
• Increased win rates: By only chasing the most qualified leads, salespeople waste fewer resources and are more likely to close deals in the pipeline. 
• A network of brand champions: By building relationships with decision-makers, you gain a network of influential individuals in the industry who can generate referrals and advocate for your brand.

However, like most account management strategies, TAS isn’t perfect. There are risks that come with implementing TAS—particularly when the approach isn’t the right fit. 

The cons of target account selling include:

• Requires significant resources: It takes time and resources to execute the research and personalization needed for effective TAS.
• Higher risks: Not all target accounts will materialize into closed deals, meaning organizations can experience high losses when deals don’t come together. 
• Slower return on investment: TAS is a long-term strategy. By prioritizing relationships over sales, it can take time before the benefits of your efforts are realized.
• Potential missed opportunities: When aggregating all resources to a few key accounts, there is the risk of missing out on potential revenue opportunities that may not have initially been perceived as a good fit.

Key elements of target account selling

Effective target account selling relies on a personalized sales process and experience that’s tailored to every account. So while no sales cycle will look the same, there are some common elements that make up a successful TAS strategy.

Ideal customer profile (ICP)

Your ICP paints a detailed picture of who your perfect customer is. A clear, well-documented ICP is critical in accurately identifying potential target accounts and disqualifying companies that may not be a good fit for your offerings. 

Your ICP might identify characteristics of potential customers such as:

• Industry and business activities
• Company size and number of employees
• Budgets or revenue size
• Geographic location
• Size of customer base
• Financial stability and future growth

An ICP should factor in your business goals and offerings, so you can determine the characteristics that make up the picture-perfect customer for your business. 

As TAS also requires significant cross-functional collaboration across teams, having a defined ICP keeps everyone on the same page and ensures efforts are aligned.

Buyer personas

In B2B sales, companies are your customers. But the people who work for those companies are the ones who make those purchase decisions. 

Buyer personas or customer personas provide dealmakers with insight into the people behind the companies that fit your ICP.

What is their background? What is their role within a target company? What challenges do they face on a regular basis? 

The goal of a buyer persona is to understand the different archetypes of potential buyers and key decision-makers. They're typically documented as fictional buyers to help sellers understand exactly who it is that they should be selling to and how they can best sell to them.

While every target account is still going to need a slightly different approach, comprehensive buyer personas provide sales reps with a framework for effective messaging and sales tactics.

Target account list

Your target account list is a list of companies that meet your ICP and buyer personas. 

These are accounts with a high likelihood of closing and generating significant revenue over time. If you’ve done the research and have clear ICPs and buyer personas, creating a target account list should be a relatively straightforward process.  

This list then informs your sales and marketing efforts.

But a target account list isn’t just creating a list of companies. It should also include information about key stakeholders, decision-makers, and potential champions. It should identify paths of warm introduction that can take accounts from just a number on the list to an actual prospect.

Your target account list may also be broken down into tiers based on buyer intent data, how closely a customer aligns with your ICP, and potential deal value. The higher the tier, the more time and resources your team will dedicate to pursuing the account. 

A strong target account list should lead to accelerated sales cycles, higher-value deals, and more closed deals.

Personalized outreach

A TAS strategy is only successful when sellers engage with prospects on a personal level. 

To authentically build those relationships, you need a complete understanding of your target accounts’ pain points, challenges, needs, and business priorities. Fortunately, when a target account is the right fit, the research process should have uncovered the data and insights needed to tailor the buying process to each account and stakeholder. 

Platforms made for relationship-driven sales, such as Affinity for Salesforce, make it easier to conduct TAS by centralizing relationship insights and enriched data in your CRM—making it easy to personalize engagement at scale.

Understanding the TAS sales methodology

Now that we’ve covered the key elements of TAS. Here are a few steps for how the target account selling sales methodology works in practice. 

1. Account selection 

The first step in using TAS as a selling strategy is determining the accounts that make up your target account list. These should be accounts that potentially fit your ICP and buyer personas.

Here’s where having enriched CRM data can come in handy. Instead of wasting precious time researching potential target accounts, a robust and comprehensive data set can speed up the qualification process.

Specifically, platforms like Affinity for Salesforce, automatically enrich profiles with proprietary data and relationship insights so sellers can make informed decisions throughout the account selection process. Custom data fields such as employee growth, investment stage, and last engagement date make it easy to understand the full potential of every account in the pipeline. 

2. Client research

TAS is a research-based strategy. To make the most of your sales efforts, you need to ensure your team is equipped with all the necessary insights about potential accounts before they enter your sales pipeline.

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Once you’ve shortlisted potential accounts, additional research can help validate that they’re the right match for your business objectives. You can further qualify prospects through primary research, prospecting calls, or through data enrichment tools. The more research and data you have access to, the more accurately you can qualify targets and tailor your sales approach.

Beyond basic demographic data, the client research phase of TAS should help you: 

• Identify key stakeholders and decision-makers
• Pinpoint objectives, priorities, and challenges
• Determine financial viability
• Identify future projects and potential
• Understand the company’s competitive landscape

Sales qualification strategies, such as MEDPICC can also help streamline the client research process. 

Even well-capitalized organizations have finite resources. So it’s important to be ruthless when narrowing down your target account list throughout the research process. When resources are spread thin, it decreases the efficacy of TAS. 

That being said, not all target accounts have to be the perfect fit today. TAS is a long-term strategy and it takes time to nurture the relationships that turn into deals. So don’t forget to evaluate long-term potential throughout the client research process.

3. Relationship building

Your target account list is only as strong as the relationships you build with the companies on it.

TAS is a bit of a misnomer as selling takes a backseat to building relationships. While the hope is that your efforts lead to a closed deal, the primary goal should be to establish yourself as a trusted partner. 

So, where do you start?

Sourcing a referral to the right person at a target account can go a long way in establishing a strong relationship from the get-go. Rather than relying on cold outreach, relationship intelligence can help identify paths of warm introductions—which have been shown to accelerate deal closing by 25%. 

Once you’ve established that partnership, you can start to share personalized resources and seed value to position yourself as a trusted advisor. 

While building relationships requires a flexible and dynamic approach, relationship-selling tactics like TAS should still be data-driven. Activity tracking can help sellers stay on top of every interaction and track context, so they can engage authentically—and effectively—every time. 

4. Effective sales and marketing strategies 

Finally, once a relationship has been established, you need to build on it with the right sales and marketing initiatives to close the deal. TAS is still a sales strategy after all. 

Sales and marketing teams should work closely together to use relationship insights to customize a buyer journey that feels like it’s helping the buyer reach their goals.

With more decision-makers or even buying committees involved in B2B purchases, TAS often means nurturing multiple stakeholders at once, creating the need for highly individualized and specific sales strategies to get the deal done.

Remember: don’t forget to continue to nurture your relationships. Use tools like Affinity’s automated triggers to set reminders when a relationship score drops below a specific threshold so you know when to follow up and stay top-of-mind. 

Make your mark with relationship-driven selling

TAS might be its own sales methodology, but let’s call it what it is: relationship selling.

And in the modern sales environment, relationship-driven selling is most effective when paired with the right relationship intelligence tools. Affinity for Salesforce provides sellers with the relationship insights needed to qualify, manage, and close better deals by: 

• Sourcing paths of warm introductions: From inferred connections to shared relationships, Affinity automatically maps and assesses your entire organization's network to map out paths of warm introductions that close deals 25% faster.
• Providing a complete history of every relationship: Affinity takes the guesswork out of relationships by capturing and displaying the complete history of a relationship with every contact, so sellers can show up authentically every time. 
• Automating record creation: Build personalized relationships at scale with automated record creation. Affinity analyzes your team’s inboxes and calendars to create a record of every interaction, saving over 200 hours of manual data entry per employee every year, while enriching target account profiles. 
• Bringing CRM and relationship data right to your browser: Whether you’re searching LinkedIn or browsing a company website, source and qualify target accounts faster. Affinity’s browser extensions provide access to company data and relationship insights wherever you work. 

See how Affinity for Salesforce can take your target account selling strategy to the next level with industry-leading relationship intelligence and insights. 

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Target account selling FAQs 

What are the benefits of target account selling?

There are many benefits to target account selling including:

• Accelerated sales cycles
• Higher conversion rates
• Increased deal size
• Less wasted resources
• Stronger customer experience
• Elevated brand perception

Target account selling also positions you as a long-term partner, laying the groundwork for account planning strategies that drive retention and increased customer LTV.

Why is target-based selling important?

Target-based selling is important because it helps organizations focus their resources and efforts on qualified, high-value accounts. When strategies like target account selling are done right, they reduce wasted resources and accelerate deal velocity, all while maximizing revenue.

How does target account selling impact the sales cycle?

When implemented effectively, target account selling should accelerate the sales cycle, improve win rates, and drive increased revenue. 

Target account selling empowers sales professionals to fill their pipeline with the most qualified prospects and execute a highly personalized sales strategy that builds better seller-buyer relationships and elevates the customer’s buying experience. 

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