Target Account Selling vs Account-Based Marketing

Which Method Should You Use?

If you’re the kind of person who keeps a close eye on developing advertising and marketing techniques, working on always staying up to date with the latest advancements in the field, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll have heard of both AMB and TAS—or account-based marketing and target account selling.

For those of you who have been frantically working on upping your account-based marketing game, nurturing clients and improving your one-on-one, targeted marketing, it may sound like just another trend to keep up with—just as you’ve become used to doing things this new way, there’s an even newer way to do things, and it’s huge! Except, technically, that’s not the case at all.

You see, ABM and TAS are not precisely the same thing. In fact, they are quite decidedly different, with separate motivations, unrelated (mostly) outcomes, and entirely unique approaches. So what are you supposed to know about them, and which one should you be using? We say, both. But before we get into that, let’s chat about what each one is.

Account-Based Marketing

In brief—because we’ve gone into quite some detail about the subject on a few occasions—ABM is a technique used in direct marketing where identified, unique clients receive ongoing nurturing and soft marketing. They will receive product updates and information, tailored to suit their very specific needs, and will also receive interesting news, pertinent information, and ongoing engagement that has little to nothing to do with sales.

Target Account Selling

TAS, on the other hand, is a sales technique, rather than a marketing method. Its focus is on making the sale, not just keeping the relationship going, and it is based on using available information about the customer as well as the seller’s competition to determine the best sales strategy to make sure the client signs with you.

Different Outcomes, Similar Approaches

The similarities between the TAS and ABM approaches are remarkable. Where ABM asks the sales representative to use all the available data to identify the right people within an organization to build relationships with, TAS asks them to data to pinpoint the right people to approach about sales—and the similarity doesn’t end there.

Where ABM requires your account manager to carefully plan campaigns based on the client company, their representative, history, and so on, TAS also involves developing sales campaign strategies, based on similar information.

The most important thing for TAS is building a strategy based on the information you’ve managed to collect, much like with ABM. If you think about it, you realize quite quickly that ABM and TAS are really two sides of the same Data as a Service coin. What this effectively means for your sales and marketing teams is that they need to gather as much information as possible, in order to be able to provide the customer with what they want and need.

Gathering data is becoming more and more critical every day to ensure the success of your business—but it’s not just about gathering information, it’s about collecting the right information, knowing how to use it, and building strategies based on it. It’s not enough to simply have access to data, you need to be able to collate, organize, and effectively use it.

Over the next several weeks, we’ll take a closer look at TAS, its implications, and how to go about implementing it in your business.

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