What would a 10% increase in new account revenue mean to your business? How about 20%? Imagine that for a moment. You’re probably thinking about the great sales rewards trip to Hawaii that you could throw, the organizational awards you might receive and certainly the big bonus check that might result from such a jump. It turns out that you aren’t the only sales executive focused on acquiring new accounts.

Our firm hosted a round table discussion with sales executives from Fortune 1000 companies, and a majority of the group said increasing new account revenue is their top priority. That a majority of the “type-a” personalities at the table would agree on anything is shocking, so we decided to take a deeper look at this topic. When asked why this was their top priority, the group shared several drivers:

• Saturation of existing accounts
• Spending reductions within existing accounts
• New product/service launches
• Changing customer landscape
• Increasing revenue quotas

While the group was very clear on why they needed more revenue from new accounts, they were not as clear on how they were going to achieve their goals. When we asked the group how they planned to increase new account revenue, the only common answer we received was: “That’s a good question!”

Our firm studies sales force productivity, so we couldn’t help but dig deeper into this issue. We wanted to understand how top performers acquired new accounts, and how their approach could be scaled across an organization. So, we interviewed more than 20 top performing “sales hunters” and asked them how they win business.

The Interview Process

We reached out to several of our customers and asked to interview their “top sales hunters”, which we defined as sales reps who consistently outperformed their peers when it came to acquiring new accounts. We asked them a series of questions about how they win new business and aggregated their responses. Finally, we reviewed their answers and analyzed the responses to identify patterns that could be leveraged by sales organizations to increase their revenue from new accounts.

The 7 Best Practices of Top Hunters

There are some specific things that top sales hunters do that enable them to consistently win new business accounts. As we reviewed the insights that the top sales hunters shared with us, 7 best practices emerged as the keys to their success:

1.    Focus on acquiring new accounts

2.   Maximize prospecting time

3.   Develop insights about target accounts and share these with target contacts

4.   Build compelling value propositions and emphasize them when prospecting

5.   Understand the buying team and buying process for their target accounts

5B. Align selling efforts with the buying process for target accounts

6.   Develop “multi touch” prospecting strategies

7.   Be tenacious and relentless in executing their prospecting strategies

Over the next few months, we will be publishing a series of posts that will go into greater depth about each of these 7 best practices. Stay tuned and happy hunting!