Targeting mid-level managers is much more effective than going after top-level management. Top-level managers (C-suite, VPs) are often unreachable, too busy or not interested in hearing about new products or services. In contrast, mid-level managers (typically, directors up to senior managers) are high enough in the corporate hierarchy to be decision-makers themselves (or have substantial influence on the corporate buying process), while still being focused enough to understand how your product or service can help solve their organization’s problems.
Furthermore, mid-level managers are more likely to respond to emails and phone calls. According to data from our customers, mid-level managers are nearly twice as likely to respond to emails and cold calls than top-level managers. When contact is made, the mid-level guys are also more often happy to hear about solutions and services that can make their lives easier.
However, targeting mid-level management is more challenging, for a couple of reasons:
Firstly, in most large companies, mid-level management consists of a fairly large number of people, making it much more time-consuming to try find the right person (or much less likely that just a few calls will reach the person to whom you need to speak).
Secondly, mid-level managers typically have relatively broad and/or generic titles, making title-based prospecting difficult and frustrating. The fact is that most job titles don’t provide any indication regarding a person’s specific role in the company (his responsibilities, the projects in which he’s involved, the technologies in which he’s interested, the products he uses, etc.). While it’s terrific when you come across a job title like Director of Enterprise Mobility or CRM Development Manager, there’s not a lot of information in the more common titles, such as “IT Manager” or “Director of Engineering.”
For example, when I searched for “IT Manager” at Bank of America using LinkedIn, I got 229 results – how will you know which are the most relevant ones to call?
We refer to this as a “precision problem” – without sufficient precision in your prospecting search, you have to wade through a lot of junk to find the gems. The opposite case, the “recall problem,” is when you search for titles so specific that you almost never get any results. For example, you might love to find someone with the title of “Head of Mainframe, Middleware and Storage Systems, Asia Pacific” or “Core Infrastructure, Virtualization & Private Cloud Group Manager.”
However, to uncover these kinds of titles requires complex search queries which are beyond the available tools, and the skills of most inside sales reps.
You need to use what you know about your ideal sales prospects to define the “professional DNA” of a perfect prospect. In other words, you want to create a list of the factors that characterize the types of prospects you want to call. This should include items such as:
Then, take advantage of the vast amount of information available in social networks and the Web to find prospects who closely match the professional DNA profile you defined. The result will be a list of super-targeted B2B sales prospects, far more relevant than a list based on only generic elements such as title, industry and company size.
When you, as a sales professional, spend more of your time selling to highly-relevant prospects, you will enjoy increased close ratios, sales volumes and overall productivity.
Happy hunting!
