A target account is a company you have decided to follow because it has good reasons to need your offer. The term refers to the company; within a target account, you’ll contact one or several people depending on the topic. All your target accounts together form your portfolio, that is, the scope in which you look for reasons to write.
What makes a target account
An account joins the list when it meets the criteria of your ideal customer profile: sector, size, organization, market. You can check these criteria from the outside, on the company’s website, its LinkedIn page or its job ads. An account you would like as a customer, without being able to say why it would need you, doesn’t belong on the list.
Following an account before contacting it
Being on the target list isn’t enough to get a message. First you follow what the account does: its hires, new roles, announcements and its leaders’ posts. Contact comes when one of these facts touches the problem you solve. A sales hire at a target account justifies a question; the same hire outside the target justifies nothing.
Keeping the list up to date
A portfolio ages as some companies grow beyond your target or get acquired. Review the list as soon as a fact calls a criterion into question, without waiting for a yearly review. Also write down why you remove an account, for instance a clear negative reply or an abandoned market.
Example
A sales team sells a prospecting-preparation tool to software companies of twenty to a hundred people. It follows two hundred accounts that meet these criteria. This week, three of them publish an SDR job ad and another announces a new office abroad. Those four accounts are the ones the team looks at first; the others stay on the list, without a message.
See also: Ideal customer profile (ICP), Account-based selling, and Lead scoring.