Loading...
Answers
MenuOnce your ideal client profile is established, how do you find the company's decision maker and how to reach out to that person?
Once you identified ideal client profile (companies based on revenue, geography, etc.), how do you find the decision maker within that Company? How do you reach out to offer your services?
Answers
There are excellent answers here already, my comment is to add to those: network amongst your clients, before your peers and competitors.
Join the associations your clients join, attend the events your clients attend, learn through the same channels your clients use. This is how you will know who to target and how.
Network and ask the correct questions. If you find them interested in what you have to offer, simply asking a question like, "what would it take for us to move forward?" can be very powerful.
I'm specialist in Sales excellence and had been worked for Monitor Deloitte for 7 years on this topic. Depending on your business, I'd suggest you not to define your client profile based on volume, geography size or segment. I'd rather to defening it based on purchase behavior(But it depends on your business). You are probably having hard time to identify the decision maker because of an inefficient segmentation criteria(ideal client) Once you review your segmentation, your will look for company contacts on you CRM, if you don't have one yet. do implement one. If there is no contact on your CRM, ask people of your company to find people from the prospect company (supposing you already have, at least, the company name) on linkedin, if not, ask you contacts, that you know have relationship with anyone on that company on linked in to introduce you to them. I hope it helps. If still you do not find anyone, let me know about your business so that I can go a little further on this topic and help you out.
The answer is a question. What departments in your prospect companies does your product or service touch? Are you providing a high-performance sales product or service? Identify the head of sales, head of development or customer relationships. Often company leadership can be found on the website, Crunchbase or Google. Always establish relationships by phone and schedule an appointment. If your company is a startup and your prospect is an established company, don't treat the director or vice president like a peer. Emphasize the value that your product or service represents to each company succinctly and specifically to gain the appointment and close the sale. Follow up your scheduled appointment with a snail mail thank letter along with a two-page prospectus outlining what your company will accomplish for their company. Cheers! To finesse pitching your product's value proposition simply schedule a call.
You ask two questions:
1. How to find the "decision maker"
You make a potentially dangerous assumption here. Understand that there may be many "decision makers". Most of them can say no and nix the deal, but (usually) only one of them can say "yes" and the sale will happen.
Is your sale simple or complex? If simple, i.e. there is only one person involved in the buying process, then all the answers here are correct. If your sale is complex, i.e. there are many people involved in the buying process then you have a very tricky problem as each of them may have a different perspective on the business problem, the way to address it and how important it is.
2. Ideal Customer profile
What you describe, "companies based on revenue, geography, etc" is the target market, it is not the ICP. The ICP talks more about the issues and problems that you solve. So, an ICP within a target market would include factors like:
- Companies who are growing rapidly and who struggle with communications among remote employees
- Companies who require up-to-date information to employees while out of the office
- Companies who face tremendous pressure to grow despite a down market
About me:
I deal only in the world of complex sales. If you want to talk about selling this this world, then contact me. If you are in the simple world (not that that is a bad thing) then one of the other experts will be able to help you much more.
Related Questions
-
Best sales funnel to scale $47 fitness infoproduct?
Scaling with paid/cold traffic is a very different kind of beast. Depending on your paid traffic source their motivations and behavior is different than that of a house list or affiliate / JV traffic. Usually paid (cold) traffic is more difficult to convert with a $47 initial offer. I've had success warming up this type of traffic, with clients of mine, before asking for that level of sale. There are some exceptions to the rule depending on how rabid your market is to buy, but the fitness niche is usually more skeptical. You can warm them up by starting with an email opt in to a lead magnet then present them with your $47 sales offer, theres a side benefit to this as well. The other way to warm them up is to start with a survey leading them into a customized VSL to your $47 product. There's also some major benefits here if you segment your traffic right. As far as after the initial sale in regards to the backend funnel itself my typical flow looks like this: Sales page > Up Sell #1 > Down Sell #1 > Up Sell #2 > Thank you page. However some of my clients have much more than 2 up sells in place in some funnels. The trick is that your up sells should flow logically to each other. Meaning make your first up sell a product that gets your target market to their desired solution faster and easier with the up sell. For your down sell, you can keep the same product / offer but lower the price or offer a payment plan. Hope this helps, let me know if you have any questions.BH
-
Whats the best way to find commission sales reps?
This is not my specialty, however, I have been in your position many many times -- maybe this will help. If the product is in-tangible, then look for JV partners on the Internet. Try to find an expert that deals with these JV opportunities (like me). If the product is physical, then look for sales organizations that have networks of sales people across the country. You do the deal with the organization and the independent network of sales people sells your product. It's a sweet setup if you can negotiate a margin that works for everyone. Hope that helps - Cheers - NickNP
-
What would be a good answer for describing the size of your company to a potential prospect who might consider you too small to service their account?
What an awesome question! Businesses are running into this issue more frequently that ever, good news is, it can be done. Having worked on projects with oDesk, Fox Television and Wikipedia and having a very very small staff, it's certainly possible. Here's how I say it in our pitches to larger organizations: "Tractive West provides tailored video production services to organizations of all sizes. We have developed a distributed workflow using the latest digital tools. We leverage our small creative and management team with a world wide network of creative professionals, that means we can rapidly scale to meet the demands of any project while keeping our infrastructure and overhead lightweight and sustainable." Cheers and best of luck.SM
-
What should my consulting rates be as a freelance developer who can also do SEO, social media optimization and other marketing services?
Pricing for different tasks that require the same amount of time from you tells the Customer (and your subconscious) that you're working at a 5 on task x, but working at a 9 on task y simply because it costs/earns more. That seems to be a disconnect. Your time is your most precious asset, and I would charge for it whatever you're doing. If you build a site, and they are happy with your dev fee, but feel like you should charge less for SEO, simply let them find another SEO guy. That's their choice, but YOU are worth $xx.xx, no matter what you're doing. Also, in general, take whatever you're charging and add 10% to it. If you're still busy, add another 10%. Let the demand level determine how much work you do, and at what cost.SL
-
What's a reasonable profit margin on merchandise?
Are you the manufacturer or reseller? If you are the reseller, typically about 40-50% above cost. Use the MSRP as an indicator.ZR
the startups.com platform
Copyright © 2025 Startups.com. All rights reserved.