Sales plays and ABM · plays for target accounts

Sales play (ABM) is the object where you document a coordinated play for an audience of accounts: objective, steps, channels, owner and status. The ABM & Process screen, under the Sales menu, completes the picture by showing which accounts to prioritize, how closely each account resembles the customers you have won, and where the funnel stalls.

ABM is selling to a short list of hand-picked accounts, with marketing and sales doing the same thing at the same time. That only works if the play is written down somewhere and if the account list is built with judgment. SellioCRM covers both halves: the Sales plays object holds the play and the ABM & Process screen ranks the accounts.

The play · the Sales plays object

Under the Sales menu, item Sales plays. The default view is the board, grouped by Target segment and by Owner.

• Sales play: the name of the play, required.
• Target segment: Enterprise, Mid-market, SMB, Vertical/Niche or Named accounts.
• Objective: what the play is trying to achieve.
• Steps/tactics: the coordinated sequence of actions, one step per line.
• Channels: where the play happens. For example: email, LinkedIn, phone call, event.
• Owner: the person who owns the play.
• Status: Draft, Active, Paused or Completed.

The account list · the ABM & Process screen

Under the Sales menu, item ABM & Process. There are three tabs:

• Target accounts: ranks your companies by priority from 0 to 100 and classifies them into tier A, B or C. The calculation combines the account's score from your scoring rules, the value of open opportunities, the number of activities in the last 90 days, how many people are mapped on the buying committee and how long ago the last activity was. The Why column explains each position.
• ICP fit: learns the profile of the customers you have already won, by firmographics, and scores how closely each account resembles that profile. Without enough wins, the tab tells you there is not enough to learn an ICP from yet.
• Process: mines the funnel from stage changes over time, pointing out the bottleneck stage, high drop-off and too many stages.

How the two halves come together

1. Open ABM & Process, the Target accounts tab, and note the tier A accounts.
2. Create the Sales play with Target segment set to Named accounts, write the Objective and list the Steps/tactics.
3. Fill in Channels and Owner and change the Status to Active.
4. Run the play against the accounts you chose, logging activities and opportunities as usual.
5. Come back to the Target accounts tab a few weeks later: the activities you logged raise the engagement signal and shift the ranking.

Limits and permissions

• The Sales plays object is documentation. It sends no emails, enrolls no accounts in a cadence and does not feed the ranking on the ABM & Process screen. The two surfaces complement each other, they are not wired together.
• The ABM & Process screen respects your role's sales intelligence permission. If the item does not appear in the menu, ask an administrator for access.
• Priority is relative to the set: each signal is normalized against the highest value among your accounts. In other words, the ranking compares your accounts to one another, and nothing ever comes out with everything at 100.
• The Process tab depends on having stage changes recorded over time. In a new organization it comes up empty and says why.

Common questions

• Why is the ICP fit tab empty? There are not enough won opportunities yet to learn a profile from. It fills in on its own as you close deals.
• An important account landed in tier C. Why? Most likely there is no signal: with no recent activity, no open pipeline and no committee mapped, there is nothing to score. The Why column shows exactly that.
• Can I change the weights in the ranking? The weights are the system's: fit and pipeline weigh the most, engagement comes next, committee and recency round it out. What you control is the data that feeds each signal.
• I deleted a sales play. Does it leave the board? Yes, and it goes to the Trash, where it can be restored.

Open this article inside the system →