Target Account Selling (TAS)

How It Works & How to Get It Right

In the world of B2B sales, the method of casting a wide net to acquire new customers is becoming less effective by the day, and sales teams are feeling it.

The fight for buyers attention has reached new heights, and AI in sales is accelerating the issue at an alarming rate.

Some companies are responding by dramatically increasing the volume of automated and AI-generated emails they send.

Others are taking a more selective approach. They’re focusing their prospecting efforts on a smaller group of carefully chosen accounts and spending more time understanding how to win their business.

This approach is known as target account selling (TAS).

In this article, I’ll explain what target account selling is, who it’s for and how it works, with practical advice to help you introduce it to your sales team.

Table of Contents

• What is Target Account Selling?
• The Benefits of Target Account Selling
• Who Target Account Selling Is For
• How Target Account Selling Works
• Final Thoughts
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Target Account Selling Sales Workshop

What is Target Account Selling (TAS)?

Target account selling is a B2B sales strategy where salespeople focus on specific accounts that align closely with their company’s ideal customer profile (ICP).

Instead of working through hundreds or thousands of leads with little understanding of their potential, you identify specific companies worth pursuing and develop a deliberate approach to engaging them.

The focus shifts from individual leads to entire accounts.

That means understanding why a company could benefit from your solution, identifying the people who might influence a purchase and finding opportunities to start relevant conversations.

For sales leaders, target account selling also provides greater control over how their teams prospect.

Instead of simply measuring how many calls or emails people make, you can understand which companies they’re pursuing, why they’ve selected them and whether their efforts are producing worthwhile sales opportunities.

The Benefits of Target Account Selling

Target account selling gives your team a clearer direction for its prospecting. Done properly, it can improve both where your salespeople spend their time and the quality of the opportunities they create.

More Time Spent on Accounts Worth Winning

Your team only has so much time to research companies, contact buyers and follow up.

Selecting accounts based on their fit and commercial potential helps your salespeople put that time where it has a better chance of producing worthwhile business.

It also makes it easier to stop pursuing companies that don’t deserve further attention.

More Relevant Conversations

When your salespeople understand why they’ve selected an account, they have a stronger starting point for their outreach.

They can approach the right people with a clear reason for speaking, based on the company’s circumstances and the problems your solution could help solve.

That gives buyers a better reason to respond than another generic introduction to your business.

Stronger Coverage Within Each Account

Relying on one contact can leave your team stuck if that person goes quiet, changes jobs or cannot get a purchase approved.

Target account selling encourages your salespeople to identify several relevant people within each company.

That helps them understand different priorities, find potential supporters and avoid depending on a single relationship.

Better Decisions About Where to Focus

A defined account list gives you a clearer view of what your team is pursuing and why.

As results come in, you can compare which types of accounts generate qualified opportunities, convert into customers and produce worthwhile revenue.

Over time, that helps you make better decisions about where to invest your team’s prospecting effort.

Who Target Account Selling Is For

Target account selling is particularly useful if you lead a B2B sales team selling products or services that require more than a quick conversation and a credit card.

Your buyers might need to involve several stakeholders, build a business case, compare suppliers or wait until an existing contract approaches renewal.

In those situations, your salespeople need to understand the company, reach the right people and stay involved long enough to have a chance of winning the business.

TAS gives that work a clear focus.

The approach can also suit a relatively small market where there are only so many companies worth winning. You cannot afford to burn through those accounts with poorly researched, generic outreach.

However, the potential return needs to justify the effort.

Selling a six-figure software contract can support considerably more research, preparation and relationship-building than selling a subscription worth £50 a month.

And your team needs the capacity to follow through. A carefully selected account list achieves very little if your salespeople contact each company once and then move on.

TAS makes the most sense when choosing the right companies and working them properly can materially improve your sales results.

If you’re a sales or business leader looking to get started with target account selling, book a free consultation to learn more about my practical one-day target account selling workshop.

How Target Account Selling Works

Target account selling starts with choosing the right companies.

But a well-researched list is only useful if your team has the time and a clear approach to work it properly.

The following five steps take you through selecting your accounts, organising your prospecting, approaching the right people and using the results to improve your targeting.

1. Define Which Accounts Are Worth Pursuing

The obvious place to begin is with your ideal customer profile (ICP).

You can use firmographic criteria such as industry, company size, location and turnover, alongside information about the technology a company uses, to narrow down your market.

However, just because a company matches your ideal customer profile doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good sales prospect.

Two companies can look almost identical on paper but offer very different commercial opportunities.

Imagine you’re selling software or services to sales teams.

You find two companies operating in the same industry, each employing 500 people. However, one company has eight salespeople while the other has 60.

If the size of the sales team influences the value of your solution, the second company could be considerably more attractive.

Yet both would appear identical if you were targeting accounts using total employee count alone.

The same applies to other characteristics.

For example, when prospecting companies for my B2B sales training services, I might discover that a business already employs an internal sales enablement specialist.

Some salespeople would see that as a negative signal, assuming the company already has its sales training needs covered.

I see something potentially quite different.

One of the biggest challenges with sales training is ensuring people continue applying what they’ve learnt afterwards. An internal enablement specialist could help reinforce the training and embed it into the organisation.

They could even become an internal champion for my services.

The important lesson here is that account characteristics only become useful when you understand what they mean for your particular solution.

A database filter cannot make that judgement for you.

Your existing customers are one of the best places to investigate which characteristics matter.

But I wouldn’t just look at what those companies have in common today. I’d investigate what they had in common when they decided to buy.

Start by selecting a customer who represents the kind of business you’d like to win more of.

Then build a detailed picture of what was happening inside that company before and during the sale.

Who was involved in the buying process? What were their job titles? How large was the department using your solution? Had the company recently employed a new leader, expanded its workforce or entered a new market?

Perhaps they were approaching the end of a contract with another supplier.

Most importantly, try to understand what made them decide that their problem was worth solving at that particular moment.

I like to approach this exercise by asking one simple question:

What was the story behind this customer buying from us?

Consider the difference between these two descriptions.

The customer was a software company with 200 employees.

That tells you very little beyond some basic firmographic information.

Now consider this:

The company had recently appointed a new VP of Sales who inherited a growing sales team with inconsistent performance. They wanted to introduce a common approach to selling across the organisation.

That’s a much more useful picture.

You now have several characteristics and potential buying triggers you can investigate when looking for similar companies.

One customer won’t give you enough information to draw reliable conclusions. But repeat the exercise across several successful customers, and you may start noticing patterns.

As you develop your selection criteria, separate whether a company is a good fit from whether it has a reason to buy now.

A business could have the right department, relevant problems and plenty to gain from your solution, without having any immediate intention of buying.

If you dismiss every account that isn’t ready to speak today, you could throw away some of your best future opportunities.

I’m not a big fan of overly complicated lead and account scoring systems.

I’ve seen companies spend considerable time developing sophisticated scoring models based on questionable assumptions.

You can give an account 87 points out of 100, but if the criteria behind that score are wrong, all you’ve created is a very precise-looking guess.

I’d rather see sales teams start with a handful of sensible criteria based on what they know about their existing customers.

Combine your general firmographic information with a few characteristics that help explain why a company might need your solution.

Then ask your salespeople to explain why they’ve selected each account.

If they can’t give you a convincing answer, there’s probably more work to do.

2. Build a List Your Team Can Manage

Once you’ve established which companies are worth pursuing, you need to decide how many your team can realistically work.

One of the biggest mistakes I see in prospecting is sales teams building target account lists that are far too large for them to manage effectively.

There’s no magic number of accounts you should be working.

It depends on what you’re selling, how much your deals are worth, how long they take to close and how much prospecting is required to generate an opportunity.

I recommend starting with your sales targets and working backwards.

How many sales do you need to make? How many qualified opportunities does it normally take to achieve that number? How many accounts do you typically need to prospect to generate those opportunities?

Use conversion figures from comparable accounts over a defined period to estimate how many accounts your team needs to work.

Then check whether your team has the time to do it.

Let’s say you decide each salesperson should work 200 target accounts.

That sounds reasonable until you consider that each account might have five relevant people worth contacting.

Suddenly, your salesperson has 1,000 people to research, contact and follow up with.

And that’s before the meetings, proposals and other responsibilities competing for their time.

I prefer to distinguish between the total number of accounts you’ve identified and the number you’re actively prospecting at any given time.

You might have 200 companies on your target account list, but that doesn’t mean you should start contacting all 200 on Monday morning.

Instead, introduce new accounts in manageable batches.

Consider how many calls, emails and LinkedIn interactions your salespeople can realistically handle while giving existing prospects the attention they deserve.

After all, what’s the point of sending 500 prospecting emails if nobody has time to follow them up for another three weeks?

Starting with smaller batches also makes it easier to maintain the quality of your data.

Contact details become outdated. People change jobs, departments get reorganised and business priorities change.

I’ve never understood the obsession some companies have with buying enormous amounts of prospect data when their salespeople barely have enough time to work through what they’ve already got.

I’d rather work a smaller group of well-selected accounts properly than spread my attention across hundreds of companies I know almost nothing about.

3. Identify the People and Plan Your Approach

With a manageable group of accounts selected, the next step is identifying the people worth contacting and deciding how to approach them.

You’re trying to understand who might be involved in identifying the problem, evaluating solutions, influencing the decision and approving the purchase.

Depending on what you’re selling, these responsibilities could be spread across several people.

You might need to speak with the department leader who owns the problem, an experienced employee who understands the daily challenges, somebody responsible for implementing a solution and a senior executive who controls the budget.

Not everyone you contact needs to have purchasing authority.

An experienced employee might give you valuable information about the organisation or help you identify the person you really need to speak with.

Consider what happens when your entire prospecting strategy depends on reaching one person.

Perhaps they never answer cold calls. Maybe they rarely check LinkedIn or simply ignore unsolicited emails.

You could spend weeks trying to reach them without making any progress.

But their silence doesn’t mean the company has no potential.

Identifying several relevant contacts gives you more opportunities to understand the account and find a suitable route into the organisation.

Each person may have different responsibilities, priorities and reasons for being interested in your solution.

Your communication should reflect those differences, along with what you’ve learnt about the company itself.

If you’ve selected an account because its sales team is expanding rapidly, consider how that growth might affect the department and how your solution could help.

If the company recently appointed a new senior leader, think about the improvements that person might be considering.

And if they’re using a competing solution, investigate what circumstances might encourage them to explore alternatives.

I’m not suggesting you spend hours writing completely personalised emails to everyone.

But there’s little point doing all that research if you’re going to ignore it and send the same generic message to every company on your list.

The information you collect should influence what you say, who you say it to and when you approach them.

I also recommend using several prospecting channels rather than relying exclusively on one.

Some people respond well to cold calls. Others prefer email or are easier to engage through LinkedIn.

Your prospecting activities can also work together to make you more familiar to potential buyers.

Imagine a prospect receives an email from you but doesn’t respond.

A few days later, they notice your name on LinkedIn. Then you leave them a voicemail.

None of those interactions necessarily results in a meeting, but together they can help establish familiarity.

When a relevant business problem becomes a priority, your name might already mean something to them.

Of course, there’s a difference between becoming familiar and becoming a nuisance.

Every interaction should have a purpose, whether you’re raising a relevant business challenge, sharing a useful customer success story or responding to something that’s changed within their organisation.

Want Help with Target Account Selling?
Book a free consultation to learn more about my practical one-day target account selling workshop.

4. Work Accounts Around Their Buying Timing

Even with the right accounts, contacts and messages, you won’t always find buyers who are ready to have a conversation.

One of the most important things I’ve learnt from working with target accounts is that your sales cycle and your customer’s buying cycle are two very different things.

You might have an average sales cycle of 90 days, but that doesn’t mean potential customers enter the market every 90 days.

Consider a company that already has a suitable software supplier.

Even if your solution could provide greater value, the buyer may have little motivation to consider switching until their current contract approaches renewal.

That could be months or even years away.

If your entire prospecting strategy consists of sending a handful of emails over two weeks and then giving up, you could miss the opportunity altogether.

I experienced this first-hand while working with a sales team whose typical sales cycle was roughly 90 days.

The challenge was that individual buyers might only seriously consider purchasing a new solution every couple of years.

We could identify attractive accounts, but we couldn’t control when those companies would be ready to buy.

So we developed a longer-term communication strategy.

During the first month, we contacted prospects more frequently. After that, we gradually reduced the frequency until they were receiving roughly one useful email per month.

The communication focused on relevant business challenges, different aspects of the solution and customer success stories.

The entire sequence lasted around ten months. It took roughly nine months before we started seeing the real results.

That experience reinforced something I’ve believed for a long time.

Just because somebody doesn’t want to speak with you today doesn’t mean they won’t want to speak with you tomorrow.

However, you cannot afford to keep every account in active prospecting forever.

I recommend dividing accounts into three practical groups:

• Active accounts: Companies receiving focused research, prospecting and follow-up activity.
• Longer-term accounts: Companies that represent a good fit but have no clear immediate reason to buy. These receive less frequent, relevant communication until circumstances change.
• Removed accounts: Companies where further research or conversations indicate that the fit is poor and continued prospecting isn’t worthwhile.

This gives your salespeople room to approach new companies while maintaining appropriate contact with attractive accounts whose buying timing is uncertain.

If a buyer tells you their contract expires in six months or asks you to contact them at a particular time, use that information to agree a sensible next step.

For accounts where the timing is less clear, monitor changes that could give you a reason to revisit them.

Your earlier customer research should help you identify which changes matter. These might include new senior leaders, expanding departments, entry into new markets or approaching contract renewals.

But a buying signal is a reason to investigate, not proof that somebody wants to buy.

A company announcing a new funding round doesn’t automatically mean it needs your software.

Unless you can connect the planned investment to a problem your solution helps solve, the announcement might mean very little.

Build a regular account review process around the changes that matter to your business. Research and monitoring tools can help you spot them, but judging their commercial relevance still requires thought.

Be clear about why an account should return to active prospecting.

The company has appointed a new commercial leader who is reviewing its sales organisation.

That’s a potentially useful reason to approach them.

It’s been 14 days since we last sent an email.

That might justify a planned follow-up, but it doesn’t tell you whether anything has changed within the account.

And remember, just because someone hasn’t unsubscribed from your emails doesn’t mean they’re reading them.

Long-term communication should help you remain relevant. Silence alone doesn’t tell you whether it’s working.

5. Use Results to Improve Your Targeting

As your team works through its accounts, you’ll collect information that can help you make better targeting decisions.

I recommend dividing your accounts into smaller segments so you can compare their performance.

You might segment them by industry, company size, relevant department size, location or a specific buying signal you want to investigate.

The goal is to identify meaningful differences that help you make better prospecting decisions.

Let’s say your sales team prospects 200 accounts and books eight meetings.

Now imagine that 40 of those accounts belong to one segment, and those 40 generate six of your eight meetings.

That’s six meetings from 40 accounts, compared with two from the remaining 160.

Now you’ve found something worth investigating.

Perhaps companies in that segment experience a more pressing problem. Maybe your value proposition resonates better with them, or the people you’re contacting have greater responsibility for solving it.

Before drawing conclusions, check whether the segments received comparable prospecting effort and whether you’re comparing results over the same period.

Then look beyond the meetings.

I’ve seen plenty of salespeople who are brilliant at booking meetings with companies that never become customers.

Are those meetings turning into qualified opportunities? Are the opportunities progressing through the sales process? How many eventually become customers, and how much revenue do they produce?

One segment might generate plenty of meetings but very few sales. Another might produce fewer meetings but consistently deliver larger contracts.

If you’re only measuring response rates and meetings booked, you could prioritise the wrong companies.

You should also be careful about dismissing a segment too quickly.

A disappointing campaign doesn’t automatically mean the accounts were poorly selected. Your messaging might have been weak, you might have approached the wrong people, or the timing might have been poor.

That’s why I recommend reviewing individual accounts alongside the numbers.

When somebody responds positively, investigate what happened.

What was their role? What was happening within the company? Which message caught their attention, and why were they willing to have a conversation?

As the account progresses, compare what you originally believed about it with what you learn during qualification.

And when you close a sale, examine what actually motivated the buyer.

I like to think of these reviews as mini case studies.

One successful account might give you a useful clue. Several successful accounts sharing similar characteristics can help you identify a stronger pattern.

You should also learn from qualified opportunities that don’t convert.

Losing a competitive deal to an existing supplier around contract renewal is very different from discovering that a company never had a meaningful need for your solution.

Those outcomes tell you different things about the quality of your targeting.

Use what you’ve learnt to review your selection criteria, refine your communication and adjust how you prioritise accounts.

You don’t need to keep changing your targeting criteria. But you should regularly check whether the results still support them.

Final Thoughts

Target account selling starts with a simple decision: which companies deserve your team’s time?

A useful answer goes beyond company size, industry and location.

It draws on what you’ve learnt from existing customers, the problems your solution can solve and the circumstances that might give a buyer a reason to act.

Then your team needs enough time to work those accounts properly.

I’d much rather see a sales team working 50 carefully selected accounts with a clear understanding of their potential than chasing 500 companies simply because they appeared in a database search.

Before adding another company to your target account list, make sure you can explain why it deserves your team’s attention.

Then identify who to approach and what might give them a reason to talk.

Use what you learn from every conversation, opportunity and sale to make your next round of targeting better.

About the Author

I’m David Craig White, a British B2B sales trainer, coach and consultant with more than 20 years’ experience helping sales teams get results.

When I’m not writing B2B sales articles, I’m providing B2B sales training, coaching and sales consulting to B2B sales teams, sales leaders and business owners.

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