Wouldn’t it be great if the very first person you reached out to at a prospective customer organization turned out to be the exact – and only – contact you needed?
Unfortunately for most sales professionals, that scenario is more fantasy than anything else.
What’s far more common is hunting around for multiple contacts, reaching out several times to different people, and making as many inroads as possible before securing a deal. People change jobs, misconstrue their purchasing power, or just plain ignore you – so having a multifaceted outreach strategy is critical.
Reaching Out
The trick is conducting effective outreach without being overbearing or even annoying. Prospects often have quite a few people vying for their attention. Standing out from a cluttered inbox or getting past the voicemail black hole isn’t easy. Multiply several contacts at a single organization, and thorough organization of your efforts becomes even more critical.
That’s why a methodical and in-depth approach to selling to an organization is the best route. Often that involves talking to more than one person to an organization until you land on the most effective sales avenue.
Depending on how involved your sales process is, multiple people could be involved in the sales decision, from a C-suite level executive to an on-the-ground director — even the development or accounting team.
Here are some reasons why this deeper approach is more effective
- It helps mitigate any challenges or roadblocks you might face should contact or two change positions or leave the company entirely
- It gives you multiple avenues for sharing the use of your product for a variety of applications, departments, etc.
- It helps create an internal dialogue and familiarity among contacts, which supports your efforts
- It gives you a clearer idea of who the true decision-maker is
Product Complexity
Another factor to consider when infusing your sales strategy with more depth is how complex your product is.
Suppose more than one person or department would ultimately be involved in using your product. In that case, that means you have lots of opportunities to make inroads at several touchpoints within the company.
What your product does for designers, for example, could be vastly different from what it does for project managers, administrators or writers. And, oftentimes, you have to “go through” a particular department or individual (administrative assistants are one such common barrier point, so getting to know them is a smart tactic) to get to the true decider of an organization.
If your first contact doesn’t work out, don’t get discouraged – simply move on to the next, all while keeping a consistent and thoughtful strategy in place for your original and subsequent efforts.
It’s less of a straight line from point A to point B and more of a web of relationships. The most successful sales professionals will take the time to cultivate multiple relationships within one company, thus upping their likelihood of success!
To keep better track of your sales prospects, check out Intelliverse’s sales acceleration tool.