Reaching Out to Decision Makers
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This question was posed to us by a customer and ISJ listener who runs an agency in Manhattan.
The question surrounds who you should be targeting when doing outbound prospecting for your agency.
Most companies will break down their internal structure into a marketing team, a sales team, and the executive team. There will be other teams as well but these are the three to primarily focus on.
The question is which team is the best to reach out to when trying to engage with that company about hiring you for inbound services?
In this episode, we share our thoughts and what has been successful for us at GuavaBox. If when reading and listening to this episode you have any other opinions please share those in the comments sections below.
Outbound Prospecting
Decision-makers are not always where you want to start. I know that sounds counterintuitive to what you may assume but it is true. Decision-makers are often extremely busy people who get blasted with “spam” every day. They are not very easy to get ahold of and their time is their hottest commodity.
Decision-makers are not always where you want to start, but they always need to be where you end up. The people in an organization that works directly below the decision-makers are often much easier to get a hold of and always want to come up with great ideas to impress their boss.
They will be much more receptive to an idea they think is worthy of hearing. I recommend starting with these people. Impress them with your sales process and they will have the ability to get the decision-maker on a call with you more effectively than you trying to go directly to them on your own.
If you are unsure who reports to the decision-maker, try getting an understanding of their team structure via sites like LinkedIn. Job titles will help to point you in the right direction.
Marketing, Sales, or Executives?
Assuming that your target companies are large enough to have all three departments and that those departments are comprised of more than one person, I recommend targeting marketing.
The reason is that historically for our agency, the marketing departments are the most responsive to our message. It is their job to create qualified leads for sales and to report that data to the executives. If you create a compelling enough message, the marketing team will be inclined to hear it.
The sales department is something that should be considered, especially if you offer sales enablement services at your agency. More and more agencies are heading down the road of productizing services that they offer surround the HubSpot CRM. If that’s the case with your agency, I recommend trying to reach out to the sales team at these companies as well.
Executives are a great target if the prospective company is small enough. Ultimately they are the ones who are responsible for revenue for their company. If you can add enough value to them during your outreach efforts.
If you have any additional thoughts we would love to hear them below!
