Your Top Five Accounts – Where Do They Come From?

Where do your best accounts come from?

It’s important to think about this from time to time and I was thinking about it today.

Take the company’s top 5 accounts and, of course, that brings up another question; based on what? Volume? Profit? Potential? Relationship? Leverage? Ease to Work With? Let’s set it up this way:

You may not agree with the weighting and you can feel free to change it but we have to begin somewhere.  Now, based on the score that you assign to your accounts, take your top 5 accounts.

For my sales development company the top five accounts would be:

Company 1 – Cold Call From a New Salesperson
Company 2 – Introduction from a VP at Company 1
Company 3 – Introduction
Company 4 – Introduction
Company 5 – Found us via the Baseline Selling Web Site

For my assessment company the top five end user accounts would be:

Company 1 – Introduction
Company 2 – Introduction
Company 3 – Introduction
Company 4 – Introduction
Company 5 – Introduction

…and the top five resellers would be:

Reseller 1 – Introduction
Reseller 2 – Relationship
Reseller 3 – Introduction
Reseller 4 – Introduction
Reseller 5 – Found our Web Site

As you can see, most of the best accounts come from introductions.  What does that tell you?  What were your results? What are the two lessons associated with cold calls?