How Many Prospects Should each AE have?

Only add new prospects when they’ve made contact with their existing prospects

I need more accounts.

Why? We just gave you 200 accounts last month.

I know, but my SDRs and I just reached out to all of them and didn’t get any response so I need some more accounts.

This was a conversation I had with an AE on my team. Or I should say this is a variation of a conversation I have had with multiple AEs.

AEs want more accounts - this is not going to change. Accounts are like options and they want more options that could potentially cash in later.

Firing off generic emails to one or two people at a company, hoping for a meeting is not an effective way to develop new opportunities. And if these are within your ICP, you were also burning through the best potential opportunities.

Assign 50 Accounts at a time

If you know your ICP and you have a compelling message that is very effective as long as you can have a conversation with them, assign 50 accounts at a time. But there’s a catch…

Accounts cannot be swapped out until some sort of contact has been made with them.

The AE will only get a new account if they can show that they talked to someone at that account and it was clear that they don’t have the problem that our solution solves or it’s not a high enough priority at the time.

That means that the sales team has to be more creative in their type of outreach and have a more targeted message. Instead of just sending someone a sequence of unhelpful and generic emails that don’t rise above the noise, they may take a different approach like using warm introductions or having an executive reach out. I’ve seen AE send a box of golf balls to an executive who was an avid golfer to get that meeting

It encourages quality over quantity.

Who knows the ICP better?

Let’s say you have a list of 2000 accounts who could be potential customers that you want to target and try to develop and opportunity. You need to start somewhere so how do you decide which ones are going to be the 5, 10, 50 accounts that you reach out to first?

Who is better able to prioritize that list of accounts to reach out to first? Is it the AE or the company? The company is going to have much more and better data determine which accounts are most likely turn into to good customers. It’s not saying that the AE don’t have that intuition. It’s just that the intuition of all the AE on what makes a good customer could be combined with the hard data that the company has to prioritize accounts to prospect to.

This doesn’t mean that you should exclude the input of the AE. If they have some sort of relationship or see some sort of signal, those accounts should be added to the list. But it’s unlikely that they are going to have some intuition about every account on the list that is going to be superior to the data that the company has.

What about hot accounts?

There are going to be hot accounts – those that have given some signal and should be reached out to because they could be a good prospect. There should be room on the account list to add those as they come in.

I was talking to someone recently who talked about an ICP account coming in via their self-service mechanism. While they tried to set up a meeting with that individual (who wasn’t ready to meet yet), they never assigned the account to the Sales team for them to try and get access to others at the account. This was a wasted opportunity.

How often are new accounts added?

I think it makes sense to swap out and add new accounts on a quarterly basis with early stage companies. The profile is going to change and new information is added so that gives you more flexibility to do it on a quarterly basis as opposed to a yearly basis.

And if you assign 50 accounts, I think five accounts a week to target is the right number. That gives the AE 10 weeks to reach out to five accounts each week with some overlap in the prospecting.

Help the Team Out

This isn’t met to take away the autonomy of the Sales team - it’s meant to help them out. The company is going to have a better perspective of what makes good accounts to target. Help the AEs by giving them the list of best accounts to focus on first.