Another week, another best practice for “Increasing New Account Sales”! This week, we will share with you the third best practice as discovered through a series of interviews with top account acquisition reps. Best practice #3 is: Top Hunters use insights to generate interest with target accounts.

Based on the Harvard Business Review article “The End of Solution Sales” there has been a ton of buzz in the marketplace about insights. It seems like every sales executive that I speak with mentions something like “Our people need to use insights when selling.” However, like most buzz-worthy topics, many organizations have a very difficult time figuring out what they mean for them and how to apply them in a way that leads to improved results. The Top Hunters that we spoke with provided some great, practical tips for using insights to generate interest that you can apply within your organization.

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We’re back again to continue our blog series on how to increase new account sales. This week, we share with you the second best practice which is that top hunters maximize their prospecting time.

Top hunters value their prospecting time and make the best use of it by focusing on best fit accounts. As we spoke with top performing account acquisition sales people, the topic of effective time prioritization came up repeatedly. One particularly eloquent sales person put it this way, “All I have is my time. I can’t make up for time spent with a low quality prospect. Spending time with the right prospects can make or break me.”

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In this part of the series on Best Practices of Top Sales Hunters to Increase New Account Sales, we share the first of seven best practices: Top hunters focus on acquiring new accounts. As we interviewed the top hunters, we kept hearing one word over and over again: Focus. Top hunters consistently mentioned focus as a key to their success. As one of our interview participants put it, “For me, it is all about focus: focusing on the right accounts, focusing on the right activities, focusing on consistency and focusing on winning business.” One of the other things that we noticed as we dug deeper was that none of the reps were in hybrid roles, having a mix of hunting and farming responsibility. We realized that a large portion of the success of top hunters could be attributed to their clear role definition. Their job role, expectations and compensation were all focused on a singular purpose: winning new accounts. While there are volumes written on job roles and compensation, it is especially relevant for new account acquisition because:

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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:

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