Top-Down Targeting

Aim for the highest person in marketing in the organization whom you can find. If it's someone in marketing you want to speak with, but you don't know who, then reach out to the vice president (VP) of marketing or the chief marketing officer (CMO). You should very briefly introduce your product or product area and then ask to be introduced to the appropriate person. Below is an example of such an e-mail.

Subject: Appropriate Person

Or Subject: Referral Request

Hi [First name],

I see you work at [company] and was wondering if you could put me in touch with the person responsible for [X product value].

Many thanks for your help,

[Your name]

A last-ditch effort can be made to reach out to the chief executive officer (CEO), but it's best to start with the highest person on that individual silo within the company.

This tends to work for two reasons:

1. The person you are e-mailing is not responding to you; the person is introducing you to someone who will. The work on this person's part is minimal. Make the e-mail very short and to the point. The point is getting the introduction, not pitching the product.
2. When the recipient receives the introduction, it's coming from the recipient's boss. Usually if the boss tells the recipient to do something, he or she will do it and won't even ask for context most of the time.

This tactic and e-mailing have been used widely, so be aware that they may be losing their effectiveness. This tactic also is not very empathetic. You'll need to find ways to be more creative when using the top-down targeting approach. We'll dive into this topic in more detail in Chapter 8, “Outbound E-Mailing and Messaging.”

Bottom-Up Targeting

If the organization is large, you can come at it from a different angle. Lists are so easy to build these days that it's worth sending a couple of templated e-mails. This approach only works if you have a product that would be used company-wide or with somewhat junior people, like in software sales. If it's a product like Domo, a business management platform made for the CEO, it's probably not going to work.

Start by targeting a few junior employees and selling them on the fact that they can be champions for the product. They'll out-perform their peers, and when their boss asks how, they can plug the product to the team as the fastest way to earn a raise or promotion.

Farlan Dowell, head VP of sales at Rainforest QA, spoke about this at a recent Sales Hacker Series event. He calls this the act of “becoming a hero maker,” meaning make the internal champion a hero by being the guy who brings on the amazing new product and proves it out for the team.

You can think of bottom-up targeting almost like entering a parasite that infects the rest of the organization. I've heard sales reps say things to their bosses like, “If the company doesn't pay for this, I'll come out of pocket and buy a one-seat license myself.” In this case, the sales rep knows that it's helping her or him close deals, hit quotas, and make more money. If it costs the sales rep $39 per month out of pocket, it's definitely worth it.

If you can do a good job at turning these reps into your buying champions, the odds are that you'll have the full attention of the right decision maker in no time. It's a lot easier to get these junior employees started on free trials than it is to get in immediately with the VP.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

I had a premium LinkedIn Sales Plus account and recently moved over to the LinkedIn Sales Navigator account. I use LinkedIn to get insights on company information and then to drill deep into job titles and employee backgrounds. For example, it would be great to be able to quickly find the profiles of all employees who are at the director level, are in sales, have been more than four years with the company, and are located in Dublin.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator finally gives you, the LinkedIn user, an experience that those who are involved in sales prospecting have been looking for. I have a team of virtual assistants who do my LinkedIn sales prospecting for me based on the direction I provide them, and this new format of lead searching should increase their numbers dramatically.

Another new feature is adding potential targets to a leads list, as opposed to starring the contact as you would have previously on LinkedIn. Once there, you can go back and InMail them or export their e-mail using Datanyze or Salesloft and then contact them in multiple different ways over time.

LinkedIn is still the number one source for up-to-date information, so these new features go a long way toward making it easier to search and sort through it all. I don't know why LinkedIn didn't do it sooner. It's just one more step in LinkedIn's march to become your one and only customer relationship management (CRM) tool.

A few other companies go even further technologically to help you connect with your ideal customer profile (ICP).

Node.io

Node.io understands and triangulates the relationships between people, companies, and keywords on the Web, with the goal of connecting interested parties. They do this through an account-based sales intelligence platform that acts as a personal sales analyst, recommending which accounts to break into, which contacts at those accounts to engage, and personalized account plans with guidance on how to close.

DataFox

DataFox enables the creation of targeted lead lists with accurate buyer contact information through suggestions of new companies that resemble your best customers and the surfacing of conferences attended by your prospects, and then DataFox alerts you when new prospects enter your territory.

DataFox provides highly curated and customized buying signals—such as new patents filed, office openings, Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) document filings and management changes—for an entire territory in real time. These customized buying signals help hunters and existing account managers with large account bases to prioritize accounts that are more likely to buy and focus conversations on the pain points that customers care about, increasing cross-sell revenue while reducing the time taken to run through the deal cycle.

Sales reps can use DataFox inside Salesforce as part of their day-to-day work flow or through the DataFox user interface (UI).

Growbots

Growbots allows you to set up targets based on criteria such as market vertical, location, size, Web traffic, technologies used by the company, and job title. For example, Growbots can search for CEOs of San Francisco software companies with 11–50 employees who use HubSpot. Growbots is among the 1 million highest trafficked websites on the Internet.

Growbot's tool automatically gives you a list of people matching criteria with verified e-mails, and all contacts are de-duplicated with your CRM system, meaning that you only get prospects you never contacted.

Spiderbook

Spiderbook helps identify prospects and leads, and lives in your sales stack pre-CRM. Other than using Spiderbook for lead generation, you can also use it to identify companies that will partner with you in the sales process, people to use for references, and what your competitive landscape looks like.

Spiderbook takes your seed information, such as current customers, partners, suppliers, and product profiles, and matches it with customers online. Aman Naimat, CEO of Spiderbook, says:

No matter how good the leads are that we generate, you still need a four- to eight-touch sales process that is efficient and personalized. Even the perfect lead will fail if you don't follow a rigorous process and don't utilize relevant content to personalize the messaging.

RainKing

RainKing is a database that surfaces not only information about potential buyers but also details on when they're supposed to buy and how much money they have to spend. For example, RainKing can provide a public report that says how much a large company will spend on CRM in the next 6–12 months and what type of budget it has to spend on CRM. This is super valuable information if you're selling CRM systems.

SellerCrowd

SellerCrowd is an anonymous forum that allows people in advertising technology to exchange information to target companies and accounts. For example, if you're looking to sell digital media to Nike, you can ask the forum whom you should speak to at Nike. You should get back an informational response. You may even get contact information. We're still waiting for someone to do this for SaaS (software as a service)—could it be you?

Socedo

Socedo integrates directly with Marketo and Salesforce to track leads that are generated from social media further down the pipeline. Socedo also recommends using a social media management tool like Buffer, Hootsuite, or Sprout Social to track conversations.

The team at Tallwave, for example, is using Socedo with an individual business development representative to look for start-up founders on Twitter and then is using the automated messaging to ask if the prospect is interested in sharing more about his or her business. From there a call is set up, and the representative can fill his or her day with qualified warm sales calls. The reps are setting up meetings this way more than through their outbound e-mail campaigns.

Visit www.SalesHacker.com/library for more information on finding your total addressable market (TAM), ICP, and contact list building.