Target Account Selling

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Target Account Selling (TAS) is a sales process training workshop developed in 1988 by Target Marketing Systems, an Atlanta-based sales training company, which merged with The Sales Consultancy in 1998, before being acquired by Siebel Systems in 1999, and auctioned to software company The TAS Group in 2006.

At its peak, TAS was one of the world's most popular sales processes, earning more than half a billion dollars in revenues during the 1990s, mostly from customers in the booming IT industry.^{[citation needed]}

TAS was one of the first training programs to treat selling as a prescriptive process that could be applied across a salesforce. It taught 20-questions for qualifying the validity of pursuing one sales opportunity compared to another. Five military strategies were taught to assist making decisions about how to deal with competitors during a sale, based on the writings of Chinese general Sun Tzu in the book The Art of War. The effect of relationship dynamics, politics and personal influence between buyers were also in the curriculum.

Students spent two days in a classroom environment learning the theory and planning how to apply it to current sales projects. They then attended a third day Test & Improve session in which peers critiqued the quality of their 10-page sales plans in reviews that lasted 90 minutes each. A separate one-day manager's workshop, called Managing TAS, taught a system for analyzing each page of the sales plan, and gave a framework for staging the Test & Improve sessions.

Freelance trainers were hired to teach TAS. The difficulty of policing their use of the intellectual property on a global scale has led to TAS becoming one of the most imitated sales training workshops, along with another popular training program, Huthwaite's SPIN Selling.

TAS declined from market leadership in the five years 1998-2003, during which time the company representing TAS changed names from Target Marketing Systems in 1998 to OnTarget in 1999 to Siebel MultiChannel Services in 2001 to Sales Methodology Experts in 2003, then back to OnTarget in 2005. TAS received no significant update during those years, and began to be considered obsolete as salespeople moved to sales planning processes more contemporary than one developed in the late 1980s.

As a landmark in the sales training industry, TAS provided structure to the selling process, and was a contributor to the industry's evolution.