I usually work as a Temporary Export Manager for industrial SMEs that are dimensionally limited and wish to acquire customers from multinational Organisations, especially OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers).
I admit that I always have a bit of fear in such projects as it is difficult to penetrate large Organizations and to generate their interest in Companies that are at least an order of magnitude smaller, and moreover unknown.
In this post I address the problem of identifying the name of the persons of interest and collecting their contact details; I don't deal with how to contact them or how to get their attention, another very complex topic.
Especially after Covid , relationships between companies have become highly digitalised . If it is true that in the digital world the focus is - or should be - on the Person, then whoever reaches the target people first or in the most effective way (the so-called Leads) in large Organizations could be in a situation of competitive advantage .
even before Covid it was like this but today it is a must
There are two steps to take, in relation to the companies targeted for sales:
to identify the people of interest (the Leads)
to obtain their email address
Why the email address and not simply the telephone contact? Because today having many company figures available by telephone is difficult - especially in large Organizations - and can become an unacceptable waste of time. Better then to start communicating via email to establish initial contact and get initial feedback.
we are talking about valuable, personalized, one-to-one emails, not newsletters
Naturally, the two steps mentioned can be done by contacting the target company by telephone. However, there are cases in which this may not be simple or even impossible:
when working with countries with which telephone contact, for various reasons, is not easy
when there are barriers to the switchboard, making it impossible to obtain the names, much less the email addresses, of the company professionals being analyzed
in many cases the switchboards don't even know who to call because they don't know the roles of their colleagues
Lead identification
It is the most important step, even more than obtaining their email addresses.
Naturally, it is necessary to be clear about the type of professional profile or function to be sought: purchasing managers, technicians, quality, IT, HR etc
In complex organizations it is necessary to reconstruct the function diagram well : for example it is necessary to distinguish between Purchasing, Procurement and Supply Chain, between local and global commodity managers, between Managers and Directors etc.
If you get the wrong person and they are not relevant, you risk sending empty emails.
If you work with countries in which there is culturally the use of professional social networks, you are at a great advantage, just to have an account on those social networks: this is the case of Xing for Germany and Viadeo for France. Then there is obviously LinkedIn, the most important platform.
In addition to social media and before social media, there is the mother platform of all searches: Google.
if you use Google it is important to do so in the version and language of the target country
For example, in the case of Germany you can search for a Purchasing Director of a company as indicated below, using google.de and the query in German. Just put 3 words, not one more:
If the German person you are looking for is registered with Xing, his name will appear, otherwise other profiles from the same company may appear.
If the search on a social network fails, we try again with Linkedin but using English , since in LinkedIn the profiles are usually in English:
To be honest, it is not strictly necessary to add the name of the professional social network, as the search engine puts it as the first result if the person is registered in that social network, as they are indexed (Facebook, however, is not!). So typing "rolename, companyname" should suffice.
Obtaining personal emails
Once we know the name of the person of interest we can virtually use the company's general email and write to that person, relying on the good will of the person receiving the email. In Germany for example it is mathematically forwarded.
what we need to find out is the structure of the Company email
Often in Google typing "manager, company name" various types of results are returned: it may happen that you find the names of employees of that company if it exhibits at trade fairs, if the people are interviewed in articles on sector portals, if they are members of some organization etc, sometimes including the personal email address : the structure of the email is known.
If that's not enough, there are email structure search directories , including email hunter , the one I usually use. Once a domain is assigned, it returns the "most common pattern"
Another powerful tool is the FinalScout LinkedIn extension
In summary, there are tools that allow us to find many of the emails we need in just a few steps: the important thing is to make good use of them and not be spammers.
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