Guides
Use a community-conscious approach to account-based selling
Introduction
There are various approaches to using Orbit for sales. In this playbook, we’re talking about how to use Orbit for account-based selling (ABS).
If your company already uses an account-based approach to sales, we have a great surprise for you: you might have stakeholders from target accounts interacting with your community! 😲
For example, let’s imagine you have 100 accounts that match your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
So you look at the top of your list of target accounts and the company at the top of the list is Medicspot.
But here’s the problem:
- Do you know anybody at Medicspot?
- Why would anyone at Medicspot respond to a cold email?
With Orbit, you can find out if any Medicspot employees are already members of your community.
What’s more: you can find out exactly how those employees have interacted with your community.
And those interactions tend to be excellent conversation-starters for the sales process.
Account-based selling involves pursuing high-value accounts (often called “target accounts”), hence the phrase “account-based.”
We’re going to assume you have some familiarity with account-based selling, so we won’t get into the finer details.
In this playbook, we’ll walk through how to use Orbit to:
- Discover target accounts in your community
- Identify stakeholders at those target accounts
- Gather context from community interactions for warm sales outreach to those stakeholders
Don’t worry, we know a community isn’t the place for a sales free-for-all.
A good community is a magical thing 🦄 and you don’t want to ruin it with unwelcome sales outreach.
On the other hand, we believe there’s an opportunity to do sales better than it’s ever been done before, with a community-conscious approach.
In order to maintain that balance, this playbook includes “safety measures” to make sure the magic of the community is respected.
Step 1: Find target accounts in the Organizations tab.
- Go to the Organizations tab on the left sidebar.
- Search for one of the Organizations on your list of target accounts.
- Click on the Organization name in the list of search results.
- Once you’re on the Organization’s page, you’ll be able to see a list of Member Activities and Members.
Step 2: Review member activities to find context for warm sales outreach.
As you scroll through the list of Member Activities, you want to look for three things:
- Members that might be decision makers for the product/service you’re selling.
- Activities that indicate a high level of interest or buying intent.
- Both.
#3 is ideal. If you have a decision maker who is interacting with your community in a way that indicates buying intent, that’s an ideal opportunity to start a sales conversation.
Here’s how this looks in the Orbit app:
- Scroll through the list of Member Activities to find context for warm sales outreach.
- If you’re interested in a particular member, you can click Member Info next to their name to see their location, Love score, and Tags.
- If you want to see more info, you can click on the member’s name to see their profile preview.
- From the preview, you’ll also be able to scroll through all the activities that this individual member has historically performed in your community under the Activities tab.
- If that feels like too much clicking and scrolling and you just want to see job titles for each community member who works at the target account to quickly find a decision maker, you click on the Members tab on the organization’s page.
Step 3: Choose a method for contacting the member.
Within Orbit, you have a ton of options for contacting a Member:
- Once you’re on the Member profile, you can find several options for how to contact them in the Actions drop-down.
- You can send a Twitter DM from the Orbit app without logging in to Twitter or switching windows.
- You can send the Member to HubSpot as a contact or to Salesforce as a lead and then choose from the suite of contact methods available in your CRM.
- You can click on any of the Linked Profiles & Emails listed on the Member’s profile and that will either copy the Member’s email to your clipboard or open a new tab in your browser and take you directly to the Member’s profile on any of the various platforms.
- You can click on the link in an Activity and that will take you to the conversation wherever it’s happening in the community.
Step 4: Draft a message with context from the member’s community interaction.
In this case, we’ve identified a Member of our community named Kayce Koelpin (fictional name) who works at Medicspot and recently sent a support request.
In our experience, sales outreach is most effective when it doesn’t feel like sales outreach. In this case, it feels like answering a support question.
Here’s an example of what the message could be:
Kayce might click on the documentation link and never book a meeting. That’s okay.
If Kayce does book a meeting—boom! You got a meeting with a decision maker at one of your target accounts while also offering a helping hand to a member of your community.
Sales outreach using Orbit is higher-converting because it’s contextual.
It’s way better than a random cold email.
You can meet your prospects wherever they are in your community.
- Use a community-conscious approach to account-based selling
- Introduction
- Don’t worry, we know a community isn’t the place for a sales free-for-all.
- Step 1: Find target accounts in the Organizations tab.
- Step 2: Review member activities to find context for warm sales outreach.
- Step 3: Choose a method for contacting the member.
- Step 4: Draft a message with context from the member’s community interaction.