Targeting New Accounts
I spent 15 years in enterprise sales before I understood what was wrong with how we targeted accounts.
I was good at my job. I hit quota. I won President’s Club. I closed a $1.6M deal at Salesforce by sitting across from a CFO and showing him exactly what his outdated system was costing him in overtime. I knew how to sell. What I didn’t know — what nobody had ever told me, and what I didn’t figure out until I started building StrikeZone — was that I had been flying blind on targeting for most of my career. Not because I was lazy. Not because I didn’t have data. Because I was looking at the wrong data.
The Meeting That Changed How I Think About This
A few years ago I was sitting in a conference room with the VP of Sales at a regional industrial distributor outside Pittsburgh. Solid company. $45M in revenue. 8 reps covering a three-state territory.
I asked him a simple question.
“Which of your customers generates the most gross margin?”
He didn’t hesitate. He named three accounts. Big logos. Names his reps had been managing for years. Companies they’d fought to keep, cut price to retain, spent hours servicing. We pulled the data. Those three accounts ranked 11th, 19th, and 31st in gross margin contribution. His actual top three margin accounts were companies nobody was calling on strategically. They were just buying. Quietly, consistently, profitably — and completely ignored by the sales team because they didn’t look impressive on a revenue report.
He sat back in his chair and didn’t say anything for a long moment.
Then he said: “We’ve been working for the wrong customers.”
The Problem Is Not That Sales Leaders Are Careless
I’ve had versions of that conversation a dozen times now. And every time, the VP of Sales in the room is smart, experienced, and genuinely good at their job. The problem isn’t carelessness. It’s visibility.
Revenue is visible. It shows up in your CRM, on your dashboard, in your QBR. Your biggest revenue accounts are impossible to ignore — they’re the ones your VP is asking about on Tuesday morning calls, the ones your reps talk about at SKOs, the ones that define how your team thinks about success.
Margin is invisible. Unless you’ve specifically built a report that shows gross profit by account — and most companies haven’t — it just doesn’t exist as a number anyone sees on a regular basis. So decisions get made based on revenue, which is available, instead of margin, which matters.
This is not a small error. In the data we’ve analyzed at StrikeZone, the top 20% of accounts by gross margin generate somewhere between 60% and 70% of total profit. The bottom 30% of accounts, on revenue terms, often generate negative contribution margin once service cost is factored in.
Your sales team is probably spending a meaningful percentage of its time on accounts that are costing you money.
What I Wish I’d Known Earlier in My Career
When I was carrying a bag, I targeted accounts the way everyone does. My manager gave me a territory. I looked at the list. I prioritized the biggest names, the warmest relationships, and the accounts where I thought I had the best shot.
I was doing it the way it had always been done. Gut feel, dressed up as strategy. What I know now is that the data to do it better almost always already exists. Every company I’ve talked to that’s been operating for more than three years has transaction history sitting in their ERP that would tell them, precisely, which customers are worth fighting for and which ones are quietly draining margin.
Nobody has looked at it.
Not because they don’t care. Because pulling meaning out of four years of order history isn’t something you do on a Tuesday afternoon. It requires a specific kind of analysis — comparing what your best customers look like against what your average customers look like, across every measurable dimension simultaneously — and most sales leaders don’t have the time, the tools, or the analyst to do it.
So they keep targeting the way they always have. And the invisible accounts keep buying quietly while the sales team chases logos.
The Moment the Data Makes It Real
There’s a moment in every ICP analysis we run where the client sees something they didn’t expect.
Sometimes it’s a geography — Ohio companies underperforming by 60% against the average, which means a rep with half her territory in Ohio is fighting uphill every single day. Sometimes it’s a company size — the sweet spot turning out to be 30-80 employees, which means every enterprise account the team has been chasing is outside the profile of every customer that’s ever been truly profitable for them.
Sometimes it’s a product category — one line that drives disproportionate margin in the top accounts but that nobody has ever specifically targeted because it looks like a commodity. Every single time, the response is the same. The VP of Sales looks at the output and says some version of: “I knew something was off. I just didn’t know what it was.”
They knew. They just couldn’t see it.
What Changes When You Can See It
The sales motion doesn’t change. The product doesn’t change. The team doesn’t change. What changes is what the team aims at.
When a rep knows that a metal fabricator with 35 employees and a purchasing manager is four times more likely to become a top-margin account than a large manufacturer with centralized procurement, they make different decisions every day. Which calls to make first. Which deals to push hard. Which inbound leads are worth a follow-up and which ones aren’t.
That clarity compounds. It doesn’t just improve one rep’s decisions on one day — it improves ten reps’ decisions every day for as long as they have the framework.
That’s the shift. Not a new product. Not a new sales process. Just the answer to a question that should have been asked years ago:
Which customers actually make us money, and what do they have in common?
About StrikeZone
StrikeZone is an ICP platform for industrial companies. We turn ERP transaction data into a data-defined Ideal Customer Profile and a prioritized list of lookalike prospects — in six weeks, at a fixed fee, with no new software required.
