How to "Moneyball" Your Named-Account List to Win Better Business

Tweet

Send To A Friend

Send To A Friend

Ardath Albee, CEO, Marketing Interactions, Inc.
Author of eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale

B2B companies have been defining their markets with the same types of characteristics for years. Although the means for pursuit have shifted, the basis for it has not. We tend to approach market definition based on surface details such as size, industry, and revenues. Assessing those details is a great filter to start with, but what if we’re missing something pivotal? What if the way we prioritize which accounts to pursue is no longer relevant to our business objectives?

 Moneyball is the story of how Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team overcame budget limitations by focusing on only one statistic for player recruitment—on-base percentage.  His approach caused a lot of controversy with his more traditional scouts who were focused on surface characteristics such as style of play, batting average, steals, and speed. Billy stuck to his plan and the result was a 20 game winning streak in 2002 that still holds the record in the American League.

If we cast marketers as the general managers of the team, then it’s up to them to fill the roster with the right players, or accounts. When defining target markets, it’s natural to look at our existing customers and try to model our pursuit after the characteristics they exhibit. But there’s a lot more riding below the surface that we shouldn’t overlook.

For example, let’s say your highest-revenue customer is represented by a Fortune 500 telecommunications company. Based on looks alone, that company might be the all-star, the Jason Giambi, but as you dig deeper, you learn that this company took nearly four years to close and had two salespeople dedicated to full-time pursuit of the deal. Closing this account also required the concession of a hefty pricing discount. Supporting this customer costs your company the equivalent of three full-time employees.

Getting to Your “On-Base Percentage”

Those big accounts are nice to have in your customer portfolio, but replicating them is time and resource intensive—as well as costly. With fewer salespeople making quota, more players involved, and buying cycle time lengthening, perhaps the criteria for prioritizing account pursuit should shift. Unfortunately, in B2B marketing, it’s unlikely that only one statistic will define your best markets. But, by taking a deeper dive into customer characteristics, marketers can focus on five that will help them find hidden potential worthy of an “at bat” with sales.

Billy Beane’s goal was to win more baseball games with limited resources. Yours is to identify and cultivate accounts that will bring more value to your company. If you were to evaluate your customers by answering the questions below, what patterns would you find?

• Which customers decided to purchase in the shortest timeframe?
• Which customers had the shortest time to deployment?
• Which customers master the use of your solution, requiring less support?
• Which customers paid full price to gain the value you provide?
• Which customers have become company advocates?

From the customer lists you’ve compiled in response to each question, how many of them are on more than one list? How many customers are on all five of the lists?

Of the customers on more than one list, which roles or contacts actively participated in making the decision? If you match these roles up to the accounts your company is pursuing, how many of them show evidence of similar active participation? Given what you’ve learned through this analysis, do you see more opportunities for personalized content that can drive higher engagement in these accounts?

When you look at the overlay of customers across the lists, which combination will deliver the most impact on your company’s business objectives? For example, is a shorter time to decision with a full purchase price the best value for your company? Or, would shorter time to deployment and an advocate willing to be featured in a case study and make customer referrals provide more impact on long-term objectives?

Marketers who are building the account “roster” for the development of a customer “team” have the ability to create much more impact to overall company objectives than they may have thought possible in the past. It takes a directed approach and an analysis of meaningful data to derive a plan and, more importantly, to trust in your choices enough to follow them through.

Persistence Creates the Tipping Point

Even against tremendous pressure, the resistance of his head coach, the discontent of his scouts and the skepticism of the executive office, Billy Beane stuck to his plan. He breathed it and he believed in it. He even went so far as to trade players his coach favored who didn’t have the right on-base percentage in order to keep them out of the lineup. Eventually, the team coalesced and started winning games. The team became unstoppable for a record-breaking number of games. Afterward, other teams began adopting this method and many teams now count statistical analysts among their core staff.

The same must be true for marketing strategy—especially during a complex sale. If you’re going to change your strategy for only a fraction of the buy cycle, then don’t bother because it won’t have enough time to work. If, on the other hand, you’re going to commit to the definition of a sales-ready account based on the criteria identified after strategic analysis, then you have a chance to truly shift your win ratio. Not just in the number of deals won, but in the broader impacts across the company based on the statistics that align best with your company’s overall corporate objectives.

There’s a big difference between focusing on how many clicks and views your content can pull, versus generating those clicks and views from the “on-base” accounts you’ve targeted due to their probability of delivering the most value to your company. What you need is the technology to measure and monitor these quality transactions from a named-account basis, rather than measuring activity in the aggregate.

Identifying which accounts to pursue and then focusing all your energy on attracting, engaging and converting those with highly personalized content and interactions is a much better strategy than pursuing just any lead or prospect that could become your customer. Strategic customer acquisition can impact the top line as well as the bottom by positioning your company to win better business.

Replacing Your All-Star

The telecom mentioned earlier is your Jason Giambi, the all star. The “irreplaceable” player. Billy Beane knew that when he lost Jason Giambi, he couldn’t replace him with one player so he didn’t try. He did it with three. By applying Moneyball theory to your named-account list, marketers can help the sales team discover hidden gems that can be acquired in a fraction of the time, support and cost of “Giambi Telecom.” Not only will your company become more sustainable, but adjusting your criteria for named-account pursuit could help you break revenue records your competitors can’t touch.