The following post is excerpted from a webinar ( How to Market and Sell to Sales Directors (Watch the Webinar Recording)).
At a recent webinar, during the Q&A session, I was asked:
Question: Do you have any tips for understanding who on the team has purchase authority? (Or, in other words, how to identify the decision maker?)
Answer: That is a great question. And the answer and approach vary tremendously depending on the company size.
If Sales Director Steven is in a 300-person company, you're in a Goldilocks scenario; you're not really in an enterprise; it's not a small business anymore.
It's a really large small business or a small mid-market account.
And more than likely, Sales Director Steven has a VP of sales and a chief revenue officer that control large budgeted items.
But for modest budget items, he may have some limited purchasing authority.
Here are a couple of ways to think about identifying the decision-maker:
(1) LinkedIn Sales Navigator
If you don't already have a LinkedIn Sales Navigator account, it's one of the best $ 90-a-month investments you can make.
~$90 is the base, and premium editions are above and beyond that.
But LinkedIn Sales Navigator will help you figure out who works in the sales function in that company.
And it can even help you get a handle on the hierarchy within a particular company.
In its B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, LinkedIn, in partnership with Edelman, concluded that “thought leadership remains critical to customer engagement, but breaking through the noise is harder than ever.”
(2) Create and Promote Your Own Educational Content (Thought Leadership)
The second thing: by more aggressively creating and promoting your thought leadership content, you'll be in a position where your Sales Director Stevens are much more likely to share your content among their team members because it's much less risk on their part to say,
"Hey, this is a great ebook. These are some great templates. This is a great webinar," to their coworkers rather than having to make a recommendation that they should specifically hire a (your) company.
So using content gives you an active role in the earlier stages of the buyer's journey and encourages people to share that content with others in their team.
And it's far more likely that if other people are going to be involved in that research and decision-making process, that by intercepting them early with an ebook, or a downloadable report, or a video or podcast or a webinar, that Sales Director Steven shares it with the rest of their team.
(3) Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
So one, get a Sales Navigator account, and two, invest in content because it helps to get the attention of clusters of people within the same company, even on a relatively small scale. (Account Based Marketing/ABM 101)
With our webinars, for example, it's very common that I'll see two, three, or four different clusters of registered people from the same company.
So they're responding to the email that goes out to them after registering, "Hey, Joshua, who else on your team should attend this? Who else should be at this?"
Everyone that's at this webinar knows that because you got that message.
And you wouldn't believe how effective that simple email message is at getting people to pass your content information around and start talking about your company.
Also, see How to Sell Sales Software to Sales Directors.
Learn More When You Watch the Full Recording
How to Market and Sell to Sales Directors (Watch the Webinar Recording)
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