The difference is I’m not just working on a list of people; I have a list of companies, and I need to map out the companies. Even if they’ve got 100 or a few hundred people, each company might have different divisions or different buying groups within the same company. It could be totally different depending on what you sell because sometimes what you sell could be useful to various groups.
For example, Salesforce.com or a workflow or forms development platform could be used by many different people. In HR, it’s just used by one group sometimes. So what you have to do, is maybe one company, ATT or Orange, mapping out the different teams and divisions. Sometimes this is by different international geographies, because the Netherlands division may run totally separately, for example. But it’s that whole process of mapping out a company and all the different buying opportunities within it.
Then you methodically work through that company to cross them off the list; determining the ones that aren’t a fit and finding the ones that are. It’s kind of like when you have an archeological dig, and you rope off all these squares so that you can go through each square; so they know they haven’t missed anything. That’s (account-based prospecting) a really different approach than list-based.