Finding ways to seal the deal with your high-value prospects is a constant challenge for any sales team. Getting the right prospects in the door for sales to talk to is a critical task for marketing departments in any organization.
One way to improve sales results is to employ an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy that focuses on targeting companies from the start of the marketing funnel. An ABM marketing and sales strategy helps improve B2B sales team results by bringing them the right accounts that are ripe for closing deals with rather than relying on the sales team to sift through a broader database of prospects that they then need to refine.
But, how can sales and marketing identify the right target accounts to make their ABM strategy effective? For HubSpot users, there’s a convenient tool for ABM built right into the platform: The Target Accounts Index page.
What is this tool? How does it integrate with your ABM strategy? What can you do with it? Most importantly, how can your sales and marketing teams use this critical resource? Read on to get the answers to these questions!
What Is the Target Accounts Tool?
The Target Accounts Index is a tool under your Contacts tools in HubSpot that allows you to see so-called “high priority” organizations that you’ve identified in your HubSpot portal which your sales team needs to follow up with.
What makes a good “target account,” you ask? That depends on your business’s ideal customer profile as outlined in your buyer persona documents.
For example, if you’re a B2B business that specializes in selling high-end 3D modeling software to large companies, you might identify businesses in industries that you know have a high degree of reliance on 3D modeling software—like manufacturing companies that need to work out how the parts for complex devices will fit together prior to creating tooling and dedicated assembly lines for the task.
You can find the Target Accounts Index by clicking on “Contacts” in your main HubSpot navigation, and then clicking on “Target Accounts” from the dropdown menu.
Follow along with this quick guide for where to find the Target Accounts Index.
Who Can Use the Target Accounts Index in HubSpot?
The Target Accounts feature is restricted to the following HubSpot subscription types:
- Marketing Hub. Professional ($800/month) or Enterprise ($3,600/month).
- Sales Hub. Professional ($450/month) or Enterprise ($1,500/month). *
*Prices listed are for when the account is billed annually. HubSpot subscription prices are subject to change. Please refer to HubSpot’s pricing page for current subscription rates and included features.
Don’t see the “Target Accounts” option in your “Contacts” dropdown or don’t see the “Contacts” option on your HubSpot nav menu at all? It might be a permissions issue.
Contact your system administrator to verify that you have permission to view the Contacts tools and that your HubSpot subscription is current. You may also want to check that you have edit access to:
- Companies
- Deals
- Tickets
- Tasks
- Notes
- Invoices
- Account Numbers
- Workflows
- Lists
- Forms
- Campaigns
- Email
- Forecasts
- Playbooks
Having access to these HubSpot tools can help you make the most out of the information you capture from your Target Accounts Index.
How Target Accounts Integrates With Your Account-Based Marketing Strategy
So, how does the Target Accounts Index fuel your ABM strategy? It helps you the four critical steps of your account-based marketing strategy:
- Building a List of Target Companies. The Target Accounts Index is a collection of all of your top companies to target for your ABM strategy. Simply having this index satisfies the first step of an ABM strategy: building a target list.
- Diving Deeper on Target Companies. The index, when combined with the Companies tool, gives you easy access to the data you need to perform a deep dive on your target accounts. This information is critical to the rest of your ABM strategy.
- Mapping Out Your Content Strategy. The more data you have about the companies you’re targeting for your marketing, the more effectively you can tailor your marketing and sales messages to them. Using the data from your deep dives and using it in conjunction with your Conversations tools helps you create and send more effective communications that arrive at the perfect time to move your customers along the sales funnel.
- Executing and Analyzing Results. From the Target Accounts Index, you can launch your communications with targeted companies, review the current number of open deals, the value of those deals, issues with those accounts, and more. By diving into the individual company profiles and comparing your targeted companies to the results driven, you can see how your strategy is progressing and whether any course corrections are necessary.
What Can You Do in the Target Accounts Index?
So, what can you do in the Target Accounts Index? What are the specific features of this tool that you can use to get things done for your marketing and sales strategies that make it a useful addition to your HubSpot portal?
Here are some of the things that you can do in the Target Accounts Index:
Track Key Metrics in the Target Accounts Index
In the main screen of your Target Accounts Index, you get presented with a few key statistics to help you assess the health of your account-based marketing strategy:
- Target Accounts. A simple count of how many companies are currently being targeted for your ABM strategy.
- Accounts with Open Deals. A count (and percentage assessment) of the number of target accounts that have an open deal. Individual accounts will also have a column showcasing how many open deals are associated with that account.
- Open Deal Value. The value in dollars of all the open deals you have with targeted accounts. This number is rounded up to the nearest thousand. So, if you had $13,747 of open deals, the open deal value estimate at the top of the index would read $14K. Individual target accounts will have an “open deal value” column in addition to the summary at the top of the index.
- Missing Any Buying Role. A count of how many target accounts lack a “buying role” among their associated contacts. Examples of buying roles could include blockers (people who block access to decision-makers), budget holders (people in charge of the budget for the target account), and decision-makers (those who have ultimate decision-making authority in the organization). Knowing who in the organization has what buying role is critical for informing your communication strategy with each account.
- Missing Decision Makers. This is a count of how many accounts in your index don’t have an associated contact with the “decision maker” role. It’s separate from the “missing any buying role” statistic because it’s important to be able to specifically distinguish target accounts that lack this particular buying role. Without an identified decision maker to contact, it’s nearly impossible to close a deal under your ABM strategy.
- Contacts Count. A column of information listing how many contacts are associated with a given target account.
- Last Touch. This is an account-specific metric that lets you know when the last time someone reached out to a contact from that organization, who reached out, and what the contact method logged in your HubSpot portal was.
- Last Engagement. Another account-specific metric that notifies you of the last time a contact from a target account engaged with a piece of outreach from your organization. For example, “2 days ago, [account] opened an email from Jane Doe.”
- A log of what the next scheduled event with a contact from the target account is—such as a meeting, workflow, or email sequence.
Add Target Accounts
So, how can you add a target account to the index? It’s actually pretty simple:
- Navigate to the Target Accounts Index
- Click on Contacts in the main HubSpot portal nav menu
- Click on Target Accounts
- Click on the “Choose target accounts” button
- Choose accounts to add from the menu that slides in from the right by clicking on them
- Click on Choose target accounts in the bottom of the slide-in to finalize your selections
Want a step-by-step guide with pictures? Check out the guide we made in the Guide Creator tool (now in beta for HubSpot users). Or, check out the video below:
Identify Potential Accounts
When adding companies to your Target Accounts Index, how do you know which companies to add? Normally, you would want to take a look at all of the prospective companies in your Companies tool, assess which ones best fit your ideal buyer personas, and then add them to the list.
However, there’s an easier way to narrow down which companies to add to your built right into the index page: the “Recommendations” button under the “Find target accounts” header in the left menu bar on the page. Here’s a Guide with images that breaks the process down step-by-step.
Filter and View Target Accounts
Want to restrict which companies appear in your target accounts list so you can focus on the ones that are the most relevant to your goals? Don’t stress, just use the filters built into the index to narrow down which accounts appear in the index!
You can filter target accounts by several criteria, including:
- Account Owner. Use this view to narrow down your view to the specific companies you (or another team member) are registered as the contact owner of.
- Use this view to filter target accounts by the specific internal teams they’re associated with.
- Ideal Customer Profile Tier. Want to focus on just the accounts that most closely match your ideal customer profile? Consider using the “Ideal customer profile tier” filter. Tier 1 filters would be the accounts that best match your ideal customer profile, while tier 3 would be the ones that have the weakest match to your profile. However, to use this filter, you need to assign these tiers to your companies. This can be done manually by editing the “ideal customer tier” property value for the company record or by using a workflow to assign tiers based on specific company records and activities.
- Industry Filters. This lets you filter company records in your Target Accounts Index page based on which industry they belong to in your HubSpot portal.
- Lifecycle Stage. Filter your target accounts by the lifecycle stage that they’re currently in.
Check a Target Account Overview
Want to do a deep dive on a specific account in the Target Accounts Index page? Simply hover over the name of the account you want to take a closer look at and click on the “Account Overview” button.
What happens from here may differ depending on your HubSpot subscription and whether you have a paid seat:
- If You DON’T Have a Sales Hub Professional or Enterprise Seat: The company record will open up in a new tab—similar to how it would appear if you accessed it from the Companies tool.
- If You HAVE a Sales Hub Professional or Enterprise Seat: The account overview will slide in from the right in a panel on the same tab. This view will include:
- Activity Records: a list of page views, number of new contacts, emails, meetings, and logged calls.
- Contacts List: a list of all contacts associated with the company record (for whom that company is listed as their primary company).
- Internal Stakeholders: users in your HubSpot portal who have been involved with activities associated to the company.
- Deals: a list of deals currently associated with the company record.
- Page Views: a list of pages viewed by contacts associated with the company record.
Here’s a quick video showing what you would see if you had a paid Sales Hub Professional or Enterprise seat:
How Sales and Marketing Can Use Target Account Tools
So, how can your sales and marketing teams work with target accounts to achieve their goals? Just click on the “Actions” button that appears when you hover over a company name in the index!
Clicking on the “Actions” button will display a dropdown with a few preset actions you can take:
- Create Task. This will immediately open the company record and start the task creation tool in a new tab. From here, you can create a task name, set a due date, choose whether the task should repeat, assign a task type (to-do, call, or email), set a priority level, choose a queue, assign the task to a specific HubSpot user, and jot down task notes.
- Create Note. This will open the company record in a new tab and open the note feature. Often useful for after a contact with the company completes a specific action or when you discover something new about the company. For example, you could make a note that “Jill” expressed an interest in a specific service feature during a meeting or that “Bob” changed departments in the organization and may need a new buyer role assigned to his contact profile.
- View Company Record. This opens up the company record in a new tab without doing anything else. Useful for when you simply want to review the company record in depth or need to access a specific tool in the record that isn’t assigned to one of the “Action” button choices.
- Remove Account. Removes the company from your Target Account Index page. This can be useful for reducing clutter if an account proves to be less than ideal on further review or the lifecycle stage progresses to “Closed/Lost” and the contacts in the company want to break off contact.
Uses for the Sales Team
Some of the key benefits of using the Target Accounts Index for your sales team include:
- Helping Sales Reps Focus on the Highest Value Accounts. By using the target accounts tools—particularly the industry, team, and buyer persona tier filters, sales reps can quickly generate a list of high-priority accounts that are a good fit for them. For example, if Bill specializes in dealing with customers in the agriculture industry, he could use the industry filter to find all of the target accounts that are part of that industry and start creating tasks to reach out to each of them.
- Tracking Progress Towards Sales Goals. How close is your sales team to closing the right amount of revenue to meet goals? The “Open Deal Value” estimate in the index provides a great “at a glance” estimate of how successful sales efforts are.
- Getting Around Blockers in a Company. By calling out which contacts are registered as “blockers” in a company, the account overview tool in the index makes it easier for sales reps to identify these individuals and send them messaging tailored to get through their blockade or, once contact is established with a decision maker, find that person quickly and avoid spending too much time on less productive communications.
- Identifying Unresponsive Companies. Sometimes, it’s just as important to identify companies that aren’t engaging with your messages (and the potential reasons for a lack of engagement). For example, has it been more than a week since the last time a contact engaged with an email or other communication tracked in HubSpot? That might be due to a lack of communications sent to that lead or the communication sent not being a good fit for that prospect. Seeing what activity was recently tracked in the “last touch” column and whether or not the prospect engaged with that touch can help sales reps improve their communications with prospects.
How Can Marketing Use the Target Accounts Index Page?
While the Target Accounts Index is primarily meant for sales teams to use, your marketing reps can also leverage the tool.
Some of the things that a marketing team member might do in the index include:
- Adding Companies That Are Sales Qualified to the Index. To help fuel sales team efforts, the marketing team should periodically review company records and add them to the target accounts list if they meet the criteria to be considered sales-qualified leads (SQLs).
- Reengaging Inactive Target Accounts. If a target account hasn’t engaged with your brand recently, a marketer might want to add that company to a re-engagement campaign to try to warm that lead back up for future sales efforts.
- Closing Information Gaps in Target Accounts. Are companies listed in the target accounts page lacking contacts with a defined buyer role (or, more specifically, a decision-maker)? With a glance, marketers can check the index’s top report to see how many companies are missing this information—giving them a chance to correct the information gap so that sales reps can be better prepared for their interactions with contacts in that account.
The HubSpot Target Accounts Index is just one of the many tools available on the HubSpot CRM platform. If you need to learn more about this and other HubSpot tools, reach out to the experts at Bluleadz to learn!
Key HubSpot Resources to Read
Drive ABM Results Using HubSpot Target Accounts
The HubSpot Target Accounts Index is an essential tool for managing account-based marketing efforts. By using the filters built into the index, teams can narrow down their view to the most relevant companies that align with their goals. This allows them to focus their resources and efforts on high-priority accounts that have the highest potential for success.
As a HubSpot Elite Solutions Partner, the Bluleadz team is well-equipped to assist teams in developing their ABM strategy and executing it within the HubSpot platform. With our expertise and knowledge of the HubSpot tools, we help businesses effectively leverage the Target Accounts Index to drive ABM results and achieve their sales and marketing goals.
Schedule a meeting now to get a complimentary HubSpot ABM tool assessment so you can develop a comprehensive action plan that drives results.