It’s a struggle as old as the profession of sales – how can you find the right person to sell to? You know, the one who has the ability to give you that “yes” you’ve been looking for.
And when you want to sell to enterprise-size companies, it gets even more complicated. Because here’s the thing: the bigger the company, the more people you need to convince. There’s not just one person who holds all the reins – there’s a whole bunch of them.
So, uh … how do you find ‘em?
The challenge of finding B2B decision-makers in enterprise companies
It would be nice if there was a well-organized buying committee behind every B2B purchasing decision, all ready to hear your pitch at the same time. Unfortunately, the truth is a little less neat.
On a webinar with Lusha about selling to complex organizations, Brian Burns, host of the podcast The Brutal Truth About Sales and Selling, says “It is everything but a well-organized, structured process…it’s very much ad hoc.”
Pair that with the fact that 63% of B2B purchases involve more than 4 people – and of course, the larger the company, the larger that number probably gets – and it’s hard to know where to even start.
Start with one person
Ok, so, there’s a lot of people who need to get on board to sign off on a complex sale. But don’t stress yourself out trying to find all of them at once.
Ever heard the phrase that the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time? Disregarding the weird concept of trying to eat an elephant in the first place, it’s good advice. When you’re trying to find the decision-makers at a large prospect company, start with finding just one.
Once you make a meaningful connection with one person at your target organization, you can learn more about their particular trail of approval and what other decision-makers you’ll need to meet with.
Ask the right questions to find the rest
After you’ve got in touch with one person, it’s a lot easier to open up the door and find the other decision-makers. In your conversations with your first contact, ask them questions that will reveal more about their buying process and stakeholders.
Think of questions like:
- Who (or what team) will be the end-user of this product?
- What’s your company’s typical purchasing process for a product/service like this?
- Who else will be involved in this decision?
- In my experience, customers often include (job title) in this conversation to help with the decision. Will that be the case for you?
- Aside from the use case we’ve discussed here, are there other departments that will use or benefit from this purchase?
- What is your role in this purchasing decision?
- Who else should be on our next call/ hear the presentation?
How to find a specific decision-maker
All right, now you know you just need to find one person in a chain of decision-makers to get the party started. How do you do that?
There are a lot of ways to go about it, but we’re gonna tell you about five of our favorites.
1. Use a sales intelligence platform for prospecting.
At this point, sales intelligence tools are basically a must-have for prospecting. They’re the best way to save your team hours (or even days) spent hunting down the right contacts.
Using something like Lusha, you can find enterprise contacts you need at scale. Using the advanced company filters on a sales intelligence platform, you can find companies that fit your ideal customer profile (ICP) by narrowing down by company size, revenue, location, industry, and even the tech they use.
Couple that with filters for contacts like job titles and seniority levels, and you can find exactly the kind of decision-maker you’re looking for. And it’s not just getting their name – you can get direct contact information for them too, saving even more time.
If you use Lusha for prospecting, you’ll get data that’s up to date and complete (no empty profiles). And with our focus on direct dials, it’ll be that much easier to get in touch with the person you want to reach.
2. Take a look at job changes.
People are changing positions at your target company every day. That means new decision makers are being promoted all the time.
And it’s not just the position that flags them as a good potential contact. There’s also the fact that new execs are going to decide where they want to spend most of their budget within their first 100 days. So it’s best to get your hat in the ring ASAP and get that conversation started.
Using Lusha and other B2B databases with regularly refreshed data, you can narrow your search to include people who’ve recently entered a new role. Or you can set up job change alerts to know when a target prospect has entered a new role or switched companies.
3. Do some LinkedIn research.
Ok, so doing your searching on a prospecting platform is probably the most efficient, but chances are you also spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. So go ahead and put that time to good use. There are a lot of ways you can prospect on LinkedIn. You can:
- Use the LinkedIn search function to find job titles that fit your personas
- Look at the “People” section of a fave target company to find people in key roles
- Sift through the comments section of relevant discussion posts
- Keep an eye out for “congratulations” posts to see who’s got a new job
- Browse through recommended contacts that show up on a favorite customer’s profile
No matter how you’re prospecting on LinkedIn, you can immediately find a way to reach those decision-makers by pairing with an extension like Lusha Everywhere to get added information – including direct contact details.
4. Go straight to the company’s website.
A lot of websites don’t really give you much to work with when it comes to finding actual people to contact instead of a switchboard number and info@ email address. But sometimes, you can get lucky with a company’s About Us page, or they’ll have a page on their leadership or even departments.
Either way, you can use Lusha Everywhere on a company’s website, too. With the extension enabled, you can find key contacts at a company right when you’re on their website researching them.
5. Enrich your data
As part of your process of trying to reach decision-makers, you may incorporate some legacy sources that need updating. Or maybe you got some interesting leads, but there’s no phone number or email address.
You can update your information – and get more information – by spending a little time on lead enrichment. By either connecting your CRM or uploading your CSV document, you can get the freshest information about your target company and contacts. That means you can prevent your team from wasting time reaching out with the wrong information.
Once you find that first decision-maker you’re looking for, learn as much as possible about the company and how your product can help. Decision-makers at big companies get a ton of outreach, so make sure you lead with value and capture their genuine interest as soon as possible. Then once you’re in, keep learning about the company and their decision-making process. And of course, do what you do best – sell!
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