Why do your target accounts suck

What is the #1 reason that revenue teams don't trust their accounts? It's designed around one hard-to-get data point that is open to all sorts of opinions.

For example,

• a sales tech company builds target accounts based on the # of salespeople in a company. Is a salesperson somebody with "sales" in their title? Is it a long list of possible job titles that nobody remembers?

• a devtools company builds target accounts based on the # of software engineers in a company. Is a software engineer somebody with "software" or "engineer" in their title? How about devsecops?

• (this is the most popular one) a VC backed startup wants to target SaaS - is that other VC backed software startups? Is it any SaaS? How about a large company with a SaaS product?

The fix?

Successful revops teams center their strategy around a handful of data points. Maybe 3, at most 5.

Why does this work?

It gives sellers and marketers more information 'at a glance' to understand why a certain account is in their territory, or deserves a certain grade. It moves away from things being a black box.

For example, you might build target accounts for a sales tech company by considering

• number of account executives
• industry
• funding status
• business model (eg. there is a request demo, there is self service pricing)
• sales hiring

This way, the fit of any account is much more clear, and even if one or two data points are missing/of bad quality, there is enough other information that's simple to understand and gives an impression of how good this account is.