Place Your Bets: Account Prioritisation in a Micromarketing World

8 August 2005—As the account-based marketing (ABM) trend picks up speed, ITSMA is seeing more and more of our members allocating resources to marketing plans for individual clients. Along with these investments, however, comes a very real issue: Where do you place your bets? ABM is too expensive to do for all your clients, so how do you decide which ones are worth the time and money?

One thing is certain—the answer to that question is almost certainly not the clients your account teams feel most comfortable with today. This is a question of potential future growth, so the best investments may not even be today's highest-earning accounts. So how should you decide? We recommend using a prioritisation tool to objectively score and rank your target accounts based on your strengths and what's important to your company.

Use a Prioritisation Tool

There are many prioritisation tools around, but my favourite is the GE/McKinsey matrix. Developed in the early 1970s, the matrix was originally designed to differentiate the potential for future profit in each of GE's strategic business units, therefore indicating resource allocation priorities. The great thing about the matrix, though, is that you can easily adapt it to plot potential for future profit in each of your target accounts, thereby indicating where you can most confidently invest your ABM budget.

The first thing you need to do is develop a list of criteria for prioritising accounts that suits your company, grouped into two categories:

• The attractiveness of the account
• Your potential competitive strength within the account

To ensure that you're selecting the right criteria, be sure to get input from your key internal stakeholders. One of the most effective ways to do this is to organise a workshop in which you'll decide together what makes an account attractive to you and where your competitive strengths lie. This way, you'll focus objectively on the criteria and agree on which accounts to score before you do all the analysis.

What Makes an Account Attractive?

When you're considering what makes accounts attractive, you may use these criteria, among others:

• Company size
• Company growth rate
• Size of technology infrastructure
• Current and/or future spending on technology services
• Propensity to outsource
• Blue chip/marquee name
• Centralised purchasing policy

The trick is to get your list down to the three or four criteria most important to your business and then allocate points to them to show their importance relative to each other. In Table 1, for example, company size, technology spend, propensity to outsource, and a marquee name are the four most important criteria. By weighting each of the criteria, it becomes apparent that company size and technology spend are more important than the propensity to outsource or the blue chip name.

Next, you'll need to define what you mean by high, medium, and low scores for each category so that you can rate actual accounts against them. For example, will you give $1B+ companies a score of 10, $500M–1B companies a score of 5, and those under $500M no points at all?

To reach an overall attractiveness score for each account, you'll multiply the account's score for each criterion against the importance weighting you each one. The result is a quantitative measure of the attractiveness of each of your accounts for executing an ABM strategy.

Using this example, a $1B+ company that spends $75M on IT each year, has outsourced "other" functions, and is a top 5 name will receive an overall attractiveness score of 75.

Table 1. Weighting and Scoring Account Attractiveness Criteria

What Makes You Strong Competitively?

To assess your competitive strength regarding each of your accounts, you'll want to look at criteria such as:

• Depth and breadth of existing relationships
• Track record in this sector or with this account
• Presence on the preferred vendor list
• Cultural fit

Once you have identified your top three or four criteria here, the process of weighting and scoring each account is the same as it was for account attractiveness.

What Does the Prioritisation Look Like?

By plotting each account on a matrix with the two axes of attractiveness and competitive strength, you get a clear view of where you should place your bets for investing in ABM: with accounts that rank high in both categories! One trick I’ve learned is to plot your accounts as circles (see Figure 1)—the bigger the size of the account, the bigger the circle. For example, GE would have a huge circle and British Airways a smaller one.

Figure 1. Weighting and Scoring Account Attractiveness Criteria

Once you've completed this process, you'll have a scored and prioritized list of accounts that will allow you to confidently invest time, money, and effort in the accounts that can provide the greatest returns. When you share the list with your colleagues, there may be some shuffling in terms of the order of prioritisation, but rather than simply arguing from gut feelings about the accounts, you'll have the scores for the criteria you all agreed to work from.

Finally, we suggest making this an annual process because both you and your target accounts will no doubt change your performance in at least some of the criteria during the year!

—Bev Burgess, info@itsma.com

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ITSMA specializes in helping companies market and sell services and solutions more effectively. As a membership organization, we provide research, consulting, and training to the world's leading technology, communications, and professional services providers to generate increased demand, strengthen customer relationships, and improve brand differentiation. ITSMA is based near Boston, and has offices in London and Tokyo. Learn more at www.itsma.com.