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:

1. The difficulty of penetrating new accounts requires tremendous focus and consistency
2. The activities & skills required to win new business are very different from those required to manage an existing account
3. Expecting a rep to be a top performer at both hunting and farming is unrealistic because of these differences

What does this mean for your organization? To borrow from Salesforce.com’s wildly popular “End of Software” marketing slogan, it means the End of Hybrids. Creating specialized account acquisition roles is the first key to accelerating new account revenue, but it doesn’t just mean that everyone gets new business cards. Organizations that really want to accelerate new account revenue should:

1. Create clear and differentiated roles and expectations for account acquisition and account development reps
2. Leverage personality, competency and attribute based hiring and screening approaches to get the right people in these roles
3. Put in place specialized compensation, metrics and coaching for account acquisition reps
4. Create specialized enablement programs for account acquisition reps that are focused on addressing the specific challenges of the acquisition role
5. Provide organizational recognition for top account acquisition reps at every available opportunity

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

Happy Hunting!