Building Your Target Lists

Your Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy is only as good as the target account list you build it around. Without the right account list, even perfectly executed ABM tactics will fall on deaf ears. 

What is a target account list? It’s a curated list of qualified accounts you will be targeting with your ABM campaign. 

Unlike many Top of Funnel (TOFU) marketing strategies, ABM is not a spray and pray approach. Instead, you pick the most ideal accounts that look exactly like your best customers and focus on winning their business. 

So, naturally, the first step in building out your ABM campaign is to build your target account list. 

Interview your sales team

Your sellers are a wealth of knowledge when it comes to understanding who your best-fit buyers are and what they care about. After all, your reps are talking to these people for hours each day. 

Where do you start? It’s best to start with your more seasoned reps, the ones that have experience selling to all types of buyers. You’ll also want to seek out the reps that are open and cooperative. The kind that are always eager to share feedback. 

Go on your own internal interview tour to get feedback from 3-5 of these reps, focusing on interview questions like: 

• What does our ideal customer look like? Describe them to me. 

• What does the typical buying process look like? Who is involved?

• What makes a lead a “good” lead?

• What is the most common objection we get from our best-fit customers?

• What is your pitch? What words do you use?

• What words are these customers using?

• What are a few of the most commonly asked questions?

• What are some of the biggest, most promising accounts you are prospecting right now? Or which have the most long-term expansion potential? 

Duplicate the worksheet below and follow the recommended questions to gather important information about who your should be targeting. 

Sales Interview Questions Worksheet

The end goal of interviewing your sales team is to build a strong understanding of the ideal prospects they get most excited about. 

This will also form the beginning of your target account list, built from the best-fit accounts that your reps are currently trying to prospect. 

From these interviews you’ll not only have a preliminary list, but insights to help you better identify your ideal buyer. Build your own customer profile, including notes around their primary pains, how they describe the value of your solution, messaging that resonates, and how they buy.  Tip: One great way to supplement your sales interviews is to listen to call recordings using something like Gong or Chorus. Look for calls with prospects that match what you’re hearing in your sales interviews. This is a great way to validate what you’re hearing from your sales team while also filling in some of the gaps and gathering specific messaging examples

Cross-reference with your CRM

While your seller feedback will mostly be qualitative, your CRM is full of quantitative data to help you validate your assumptions and build your target account list. 

Assuming you have reliable data to work with, your CRM can tell you a lot about who your best customers are.  

To keep your research focused and avoid going down a rabbit hole of CRM data analysis, start by looking at your current customer list. If you have hundreds of customers, consider refining the list down to those that purchased in the last 6-12 months. 

If your customer list is less than 100 accounts, consider broadening your search to include accounts that became a qualified deal in the last 6-12 months. 

Once you have your list of accounts, start comparing them to find patterns across key characteristics like:

• Industry

• Employee Size

• Revenue

• Technology Used

• HQ Location

• Contacts per deal

• Personas

Duplicate this worksheet and follow the steps to cross-reference your seller feedback against your CRM data. 

The end goal of this step is to cross reference what you’re hearing from your sales interviews and build your ideal customer profile, in addition to generating a report of existing accounts that meet that criteria, which we’ll talk about more in the next section.

Build your account list

Now that you can confidently describe your ideal account, the next step is to build your account list. 

In simple terms, this list should be a CRM report or spreadsheet listing all of the target accounts and the important account data you need to personalize your content and messaging effectively. 

Click here for a sample Target Account and Contact List including some of the common data points you should be including.

You can leverage multiple data sources to build your list, including your initial seller feedback, CRM, and third-party customer data platforms like:

• Clearbit

• 6sense

• Demandbase

• Zoominfo

Build your contact list

With your target account list in hand, you can now start to build your target contact list. These are the individuals within your accounts that you’ll be targeting in your ABM campaigns. 

Based on your analysis so far, you should have a solid understanding of who your target personas are within these organizations. Your contact list should include the names, contact information, and any important characteristic data needed to target them effectively. 

Click here for a sample Target Account and Contact List including some of the common data points you should be including. 

There are a number of data sources to help you build your list, including:

• CRM

• Third-party customer data platforms (Clearbit, 6sense, Crunchbase)

• LinkedIn

• Relevant customer communities

Need more inspiration?

Looking for more resources to help you build the perfect target account list? Here are some additional posts for more inspiration:

• Conversion Secret: How Snowflake runs ABM at Scale

• 3 ABM tactics to do when you only have an hour (or less) to spare

• How to build a revenue generating ABM program

• The ABCD Framework for Effective Account Based Marketing

Your list is built, nice work! 🙌

Now it’s time to select your first segment and start building your first campaign. 

Continue to the next chapter to get started.