Your sales effort to companies becomes successful only if you can identify the person with whom you’re speaking is the right person and he has got the authority to make a purchase. Most of the time, marketers spend their time approaching to wrong person, who doesn’t have any authority to purchase. The same is true when you are pursuing your product and services by email marketing to companies. You have got email database of 100,000 people from different organizations, but you don’t know who reads your emails. Did you check your response rate? How genuine the responses are? What per cent of responses turned into deals? I am sure, your answer is “very few”. So why you send sales emails to someone who can’t make the purchase decisions?

If you are planning for product or service campaign, the very first task in your list should be the preparation of contact list of CEOs or Chief Procurement Officers (CPO), who are involved in the daily operation of the organization. If not, contacts of VPs also ok. Contacts of board chairman or board members are not much effective. Most of the marketers feel comfortable contacting operation level staffs and they are more accessible. In some cases discussions of sales with those staffs work but in my experience bottom up approach is too lengthy for making sales and in most of the cases end up with no sales. When I check the list of contacts my marketers send me for review, I scan the list on the Designation column. Most of the time my predictions been proved true, when my marketers start the sales initiations from top, the deal is materialized.

Top level executive of a company like CEO, President, CPO or VPs can take self decisions to make almost any purchase. It’s true that they also follow the ladder down to get the consultations from other staffs. But the process becomes shorter because he/she knows who to consult or at least the purchase case will be directed to right person in the company making the deal easier and processing time shorter.

If you meet, meet the CEOs or top level executives. If you are collecting mails, collect their mails. If you are making calls, ask for the CEOs or VPs. Find out their proper names. Know a little more about them upfront. Make a follow-up with direct phone calls.

If your target buyer is a specific department or individual within the company, it is usually best to contact directly to the manager of the department.

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