Advanced Account Research

In this article, we’re diving into advanced account research strategies that you can use to start conversations with your top accounts.

Account research traditionally is fairly limited to the same set of activities - visiting prospects’ social profiles, reading 10Ks, listening to podcasts/YouTube interviews. The challenge with this is that every rep who is looking to get in touch with that account is doing the same thing.

New Intelligence to Supercharge Research

As we discussed in our first section on the warm outbound mindset, Koala gives you a new intelligence layer to understand exactly how your accounts and prospects are engaging on your website and in your product.

This information gives us another tool in our toolkit to engage with our prospects. Before we dive into a few examples of how you can conduct world-class account research on the platform, let’s review a few platform areas:

All Accounts View

See all of the accounts that you’re currently working. You will be able to see the accounts that are showing the most interest and use that information to prioritize who you reach out to.

All Visitors View

See the specific prospects that are engaging. Similar to the account view, you can use the information to better prioritize who you reach out to (the benefit here, however, is that you know who exactly is taking those actions).

Account View

As we outlined in the warm outbound mindset, this is really the story of the account. You will be able to see all the visitors within this account (both identified and anonymous) and use this information to drive how you engage.

Visitor View

When you click into a specific visitor, you will be able to see everything that specific person is doing. Hugely valuable as you’re driving net-new outreach or working a deal to see how that prospect is progressing.

On both the account and visitor view, there are a couple of concepts to understand to help your prioritize - intent score, fit, and trend. Here is what they mean:

Fit Score

Based on the enrichment characteristics of the company. We analyze the Closed Won accounts in your company’s CRM instance and assign a letter grade:

A: Great ICP fit; deserves attention, outbound efforts, and multithreading.
B: On the fringe of ICP; should be taken seriously but qualified carefully.
C/D: Likely not a fit for a sales-led deal (prioritize your efforts elsewhere, though there are exceptions).

We recommend focusing your time on A fits – the top 25% of companies.

Intent Score

Intent is a real-time score (0-100) based on the number of visitors, active time spent on the platform, and recent intent signals. More activity increases this number, but it decays rapidly if intent dies down:

80-100: Very High intent
50-80: High intent
20-50: Medium intent
0-20: Low intent

Trend

This indicates how intent is trending in the past month, with special emphasis on the past week:

Surging: Intent is rapidly increasing, likely due to many new visitors or more time being spent on the platform.
Heating: Intent is rising but not as quickly as Surging.
Neutral: Intent is staying the same.
Cooling: Intent is declining.
New: This is a new account we haven’t seen before.

See Account Research in Action

In this video, we navigate through the account and visitor views, taking you through what we look for as we’re conducting account research on accounts:

Now, let’s dive into a few real-world examples with sellers from our Path to Pipeline series:

In this episode, Shane Taleisnik, AE at Segment, talks through the account research process that he undertook to find his biggest deal of the quarter.

Read the full article!

Matt Nadler, BDR at Retool goes into his account view and what he looks for on a daily basis in order to understand who to target with his outreach.

Read the full article!

Josh Kim, Head of Growth at Mintlify, talks about the value of people visiting tech docs and how they use this to drive their outreach strategy.

Read the full article!

Want more inspiration? Check out our Path to Pipeline series here!

World-class account research is all about taking a prospect-centric mindset and using those data points to deliver value as they navigate their journey.

In our next article, we’ll dive into the specific types of signals and patterns to look out for that can make for opportune moments to engage with your prospects.