2 - Planning and Achieving In Action

How Many Target Accounts Should We Work?

Like most things in life, your account-based marketing strategy will run a lot more smoothly with a little planning and some monitoring to make sure everything’s staying on track. Your Planning & Achieving dashboard will come in handy for annual planning exercises — and for guiding adjustments to those plans all throughout the year so you can meet your goals. Among other valuable insights, the Planning & Achieving dashboard includes priority metrics like:

• Target account volume: How many target accounts you currently have in each funnel stage
• Conversion rates: What percentage of target accounts moves from one stage to the next
• Velocity rates: How long your target accounts spend in each stage before moving on
• Average deal size: How much revenue you can expect out of an average deal with a target account
• Total target account revenue: The sum total of money your target accounts have driven for your company

Let’s imagine for a moment that your company has set an ABM revenue goal of $10 million this year. It’s a lofty goal that’s going to take savvy planning to achieve.

In a perfect world, every target account on your list would want to buy what you’re selling, and they’d want to buy it specifically from your company. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world. If your ABM team wants to reach that $10 million goal, they have to figure out how many target accounts they’ll need to work in order to get there. This process is sometimes called reverse waterfall planning, in reference to the Sirius Decisions demand waterfall framework. With reverse waterfall planning, you start with your revenue goal and reverse-engineer your way to the number of target accounts that can make it happen.

Once you have your ABM revenue target, you’ll need a few other pieces of information to complete your reverse waterfall calculation: Your average ABM deal size, your total number of target accounts, and the conversion rate for each step of your ABM funnel. While you could haul out your calculator and start sifting through old reports, there’s a much quicker option: Those metrics are ready and waiting for you in your Planning & Achieving dashboard! For this example, let’s say:

• Your average target account deal size is $100,000.
• You have 1500 target accounts.
• 5% of your target accounts progress all the way from Detected to Won.

With all that data in hand, now is the time for your trusty calculator. Nothing fancy, though — the math is pretty straightforward.

1. Divide your revenue goal by your average deal size to determine how many wins you’ll need.
   $10,000,000 / $100,000 = 100
   You will need to win 100 deals with target accounts to reach your $10 million goal
   
2. Divide the total number of target accounts (in the top left-hand corner of your Planning & Achieving Dashboard) by your Won % (in the top right-hand corner of your Planning & Achieving dashboard) to determine how many target accounts will yield those 100 deals.
   1500 / .05 = 30,000
   You will need to work your ABM strategy on 30,000 accounts to yield the 100 won deals you need to achieve your revenue goal.

Now that you’ve got your plan, it’s time to implement it — and make sure it’s going smoothly. To do this, you’ll need to monitor your target accounts every step of the way through your ABM funnel. The good news is that you already know exactly how to do this! Repeat Step #2 above to determine the funnel volume goals for each ABM funnel stage. Then, to make your life even easier, take each goal and plug it into its corresponding gauge component on your Planning & Achieving dashboard so you can get an at-a-glance view of how close you are to hitting the target volume for each stage.