How to Penetrate a New Account: 4 Sales Tips for 2023

Your business likely has big goals for growth in 2023. Unfortunately, without the right sales strategies, you could be left in a stagnant state. Many businesses are turning to account-based selling and seeing good results. Understanding how to penetrate a new account is crucial for reaching your goals this year.

Explore what account penetration is and some actionable strategies you can start using today.

Key Takeaways

• Calculating your account penetration rate can give you an idea of how effective your sales and marketing strategies are.
• Use cross-selling to increase your sales and improve your account penetration.
• Working with multiple stakeholders for each account ensures your sales efforts won’t be wasted when you lose a contact.

What Is Account Penetration?

As a sales metric, account penetration is how much your customers engage and spend with your business compared to what their total spending is with other businesses in your industry. You can use this metric to determine how effective your sales and marketing strategies have been.

Use this simple formula to calculate your account penetration for each of your customers.

For example, let’s say you’re a company that sells gourmet peanut butter, and your average customer spends $100 every year on your products. However, the average customer in your market spends $500 a year total on peanut butter. This is how you would calculate your account penetration:

Account Penetration = (Generated Revenue/Customer’s Total Spend) x 100

Account Penetration = ($100/$500) x 100

Account Penetration = 20%

By calculating your account penetration, you can help build your long-term account-based selling strategy. This metric is also helpful in showing how loyal your customers are to you.

Another way to measure the effectiveness of your account penetration is to consider how many accounts you have and how much penetration you have with each account. Ideally, you want many accounts with a high rate of penetration. 

The following chart is a good visual of where your efforts fit.

How to Penetrate a New Account: 4 Key Strategies

Account penetration is best viewed as a long-term strategy that takes consistent work. When done correctly, it can lead to impressive results that can help increase your revenue and grow your market share.

1. Focus on the “Right” Accounts 

Before they reach your desk, potential customers have typically gone through the lead generation and lead qualification stages. Your marketing team should have narrowed down the list to give you only verified leads. From here, you need to choose the best leads that are closest to making a purchase decision.

This can be difficult to do on your own. There are numerous advanced tools available that can help you with this process, specifically AI-powered lead qualification and scoring tools. 

These tools can:

• Determine if a lead needs your products or services
• Connect you with contacts who have purchasing power
• Prevent you from wasting time on leads that aren’t ready to buy

Once your leads have been qualified and scored, start with the best lead, and work your way down. To improve your chance of success, before you approach them, answer the following questions:

• What problem does this customer have that we can solve with our products/services?
• Is this business going through any organizational changes (outsourcing or downsizing) that could put a stop to new business purchases?
• What is the risk of the customer making a change to another business?
• How simple or complex is the buying decision for this customer?

2. Double Down on Cross-Selling 

Cross-selling is selling more products and services to your existing customers. This strategy works best when recommending products that are similar to or complement what your customers already use.

For example, if customers are already buying your peanut butter, you could sell them your new line of exotic jams. These products go well together and make sense to buy at the same time. Or, if your business offers a CRM solution, suggest your automated email marketing add-on package.

3. Create a Personalized Experience for Each Account 

One of the leading sales and marketing principles in the 2020s is undeniably personalization. Customers of all types want and expect a personalized experience when doing business.

For account penetration, this means treating each account as a unique entity with distinct needs. To learn what those needs are and what makes each account different, you’ll need to spend time researching them. This will help you create a personalized message that speaks directly to their needs.

4. Consider Multi-Threading Strategies

When trying to close deals, especially with larger organizations, your sales team likely works hard for weeks and sometimes months to build relationships. Unfortunately, there will be times when those relationships fall through – perhaps your contact leaves on an extended vacation, gets severely injured, or even leaves the company.

When situations like those arise, if you were only working with one contact, you may have to start the deal over from scratch with someone new. However, if you use a multi-threading approach, you can build on the work you’ve already done by reaching out to other stakeholders. This is one of the most important principles of account-based selling.

This video explores how multi-threading works and how to use it in real-world sales situations.

With a multi-threading strategy, it’s important to:

• Start the process early: Instead of waiting until your deal starts to fail, reach out early in the discovery phase.
• Find similarities: As you talk to a contact in one department, you can point out that decision-makers in other departments might also find this information valuable. Ask to be connected to them and draw connections between departments and priorities.
• Continue conversations: Once you make multiple connections, don’t stop the conversation after one interaction. Continue reaching out to build a stronger relationship.
• Focus on priorities: You’re not in the business of selling products and solutions. You’re really in the business of solving problems. Make sure you present your solutions effectively by focusing on your contacts’ priorities. If you skip this step, they won’t see your solutions as worth their time and money.
• Know when to move on: There will be times when your solutions aren’t a good fit. Perhaps accounts aren’t concerned with what you see as a problem. When this happens, it’s time to either move on to the next stakeholder in your thread or move on to a new account. Don’t waste your time on deals that aren’t ready to close.

Improve Your Account Penetration Results with Televerde

If your sales team has been struggling or you need to expand to new markets but don’t have enough resources, Televerde can help. We offer expert sales solutions for every stage of the customer journey. 

To help with account penetration and account-based sales, we offer audience and marketing insights, demand generation, engagement insights, and sales qualification. Our expertly trained associates can dedicate themselves to your company’s unique needs.

Ready to see how Televerde can transform your account-based sales strategy? Give us a call today.