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
-
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'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
-
Startup Looking To Hire First Sales Employee - And completely lost. Any advice on compensation structure (benefits?), items that need to be in place?
Instead of repeating the wisdom of others, I'll link to it below. Here is a great blog post on hiring your first salesperson: http://tomtunguz.com/when-to-hire-a-salesperson Also, Mark Suster has written a ton of great post on his blog about startup sales. http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/on-selling/CH
-
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
-
How can a small offshore development company find companies/software sales people to sell their service in the US/UK?
My company does a lot of consulting with offshore firms who are looking for a way to generate new business, so I hear this question a lot. My first reaction is that you need to totally reverse your mindset when you talk about your own company. You mentioned that you have: a great software developers team, proven track record, passion, real value But, everyone says that. There a 10,000 companies that have those things, so a customer isn't going to notice it. You need to figure out what your company is best at (doesn't have to be technical) and present it as a solution to a specific problem that clients have. Maybe a speciality, or really good project management, really good communications, a special expertise or experience, a personality, experience with a certain type of client.. really anything.. But, there must be some thing that makes your company 'special' otherwise you will be lost in the mix. Don't worry about things like rates, or the fact that you have 'great' developers. Those are generic. Think about why a client would really choose you, and try to build on that! After you understand your company identity, it gets much easier to identify and engage marketing channels because you understand your target.DH
the startups.com platform
Copyright © 2025 Startups.com. All rights reserved.