How to Apply AI to Your Account-Based Selling Strategy in 2024

Account-Based Selling (ABS) has become essential in the B2B sector, allowing companies to target high-value accounts with personalized strategies. The introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the mix has transformed account-based selling, allowing sales teams to rapidly amplify efficiency and sales traction while simultaneously conserving resources. This guide explores how you can future-proof your account based selling strategy using artificial intelligence to enhance your team’s performance and execution for better sales outcomes.

We’ve built a specific framework using 6 core pillars, or dimensions, that highlights what you should be on the lookout for when seeking to apply AI to your account-based selling strategy.

1. Establish Sales Traction & Positioning

A solid foundation in ABS begins with establishing strong sales traction and clear market positioning. AI can significantly aid this process in a number of ways:

Identifying Market Opportunities: AI tools can analyze market data to identify trends and opportunities. By leveraging machine learning algorithms, businesses can adjust their positioning to fill market gaps, organize their total addressable market, and understand which accounts are the likeliest to buy.
Competitor Analysis: AI can aid you in conducting in-depth competitor analysis, providing insights into their strengths and weaknesses. This information is crucial for effective positioning.
Unifying Your Value Proposition: Using AI to scrape, categorize, and
Granular Mapping of Your ICPs and IBPs: By creating detailed and highly enriched descriptions of your Ideal Customer Profile and your Ideal Buyer Personas, you can help create a granularized model of your ideal customers that can help you truly nail your positioning for all your sales outreach.

Our Calibrate suite leverages AI to turn a Large-Language Model (LLM) into a hyper-personalized, uniquely tailored Customer-Centric Model (CCM) that is built to specifically target each ICP’s pain points, frustrations, and most relevant considerations through AI. This ensures your account-based selling strategies are always aligned with the most relevant and up-to-date information and can be applied to the most relevant personas to the buying process.

2. Build a Customer-Centric Sales Framework

Transitioning to a customer-centric sales framework is crucial in modern account-based selling. AI facilitates this shift by providing deep customer insights and enabling personalized sales approaches in a couple different ways:

Data Collection and Analysis: AI systems enable you to collect data from various customer touchpoints, building a 360-degree view of the customer. They can also process scraped data exponentially faster than humans can, identifying relevant patterns and enriching your personas.
Personalized Sales Strategies: AI segments customers into detailed profiles, allowing for tailored messaging that addresses specific needs and pain points.
Enhanced Customer Engagement: AI-driven chatbots and virtual assistants engage customers in real-time, providing immediate responses and personalized recommendations.
Intent Signal Based Data: AI can analyze intent signal data at scale, connecting to various data sources to analyze publicly available information such as investor reports, expansion plans or recent job openings to personalize sales outreach in new and improved ways.

Evergrowth's Prioritize suite enriches accounts and contacts with relevant intent signals and hooks, prioritizing these accounts based on their likelihood to convert. This allows sales teams to focus on the most promising leads, optimizing their efforts.

3. Enhance Team Efficiency with AI-Enabled Sales Teams

AI redefines sales roles, enhancing efficiency and productivity through predictive analytics and automation:

Predictive Analytics: AI uses historical data to predict future sales trends and customer behavior, allowing sales teams to focus on the most promising leads.
Automating Repetitive Tasks: AI automates routine tasks like data entry and scheduling, freeing up time for high-value activities.
Improving Pipeline Predictability: AI provides insights into the sales pipeline, highlighting potential bottlenecks and areas for improvement.

Evergrowth's Enable suite equips sales teams with hyper-personalized insights derived from AI analysis, turning prospects into AI co-pilots that assist in generating customer-centric interactions. These can be used to train your salespeople on customer-centric frameworks, practice pitching, ask questions, or even prepare your Customer Success Managers for renewal and upsell opportunities.

4. Categore & Enrich Total Addressable Market (TAM)

AI enhances the process of identifying and prioritizing high-potential leads within the Total Addressable Market (TAM):

Lead Scoring and Prioritization: AI algorithms score leads based on their likelihood to convert, helping sales teams prioritize their efforts.
CRM Data Enrichment: AI enriches CRM data with new insights, ensuring up-to-date and accurate information.
Targeted Vertical Creation: AI segments verticals within the TAM, allowing you to segment your TAM and target account-based selling efforts on the specific industry, ecosystem, or vertical that the ICP belongs to.

Evergrowth's Organize suite provides a comprehensive view of the TAM by consolidating data from various sources. It employs AI-driven workflows to manage and enrich the TAM, ensuring all key accounts and ICPs are accurately categorized and maintained.

5. Implement Data-Driven Reporting

Data-driven reporting is crucial for refining sales strategies and making informed decisions. AI enhances this process:

Unified CRM Data: AI integrates data from various sources into a single CRM platform, promoting collaboration and consistency.
Real-Time Reporting: AI provides real-time reporting, allowing sales teams to track performance metrics continuously.
Informed Decision-Making: AI-generated insights help sales leaders make data-driven decisions for effective action.

Our platform leverages advanced AI to deliver deep, actionable insights, integrating seamlessly with CRM systems such as Hubspot and Salesforce, as well as popular sales and marketing intelligence tools to combine the unique qualities of AI with advanced data. This ensures comprehensive and accurate data analysis for informed decision-making.

6. Optimize the Sales Toolstack with AI

The sales toolstack is crucial, but it should complement the strategic work done in earlier dimensions. AI optimizes the use of these tools, enhancing overall sales performance:

AI-Powered Sales Tools: Integrating AI into sales tools enhances their capabilities, including CRM systems and sales enablement tools.
Seamless Integration: AI facilitates integration, ensuring smooth data flow between platforms.
Tool Utilization and Adoption: AI tracks tool usage, providing insights into how sales teams use various tools and identifying areas for improvement.

Our comprehensive AI powered account-based selling suite covers all the bases required to optimize the performance of every team involved in the account-based sales process. If you’re curious about what sort of effect AI can have on reshaping your account-based selling strategy, feel free to request a demo or take a look at our Sales Team ROI Calculator or our Sales Ops/RevOps ROI Calculator.

Conclusion

The integration of AI into Account-Based Selling is revolutionizing the B2B sales landscape. By understanding and implementing the six key dimensions—sales traction and positioning, customer-centric sales framework, AI-enabled sales teams, TAM categorization and enrichment, data-driven reporting, and optimizing the sales toolstack—sales teams can enhance their efficiency and effectiveness. This strategic use of AI not only improves sales outcomes but also ensures optimal resource utilization.

Evergrowth exemplifies the future of ABS, where technology meets strategy, and efficiency meets effectiveness. Their suite of AI-driven tools provides the insights and automation necessary to optimize sales processes and achieve business success.