Fortune 500

 

If your organization is selling into the Fortune 500 companies and the leads you generate through online and other inbound channels are not enough to fill the lead pipeline thats probably because the Fortune 500 companies have turned a bit cautious in the down economy and active buying or exploring buying options in this phase would be lower than ususal. When the companies are not coming after you, the best response is go after them and sell proactively.

Having access to a lead database like the Active Contacts Fortune 500 Lead Database can be a great source of leads for cold calling, tele prospecting or other outbound campaigns. Supplementing the lead funnel with leads from a database subsciption could give you that additional push into cracking some of those larger deals in the Fortune 500 and help expand the flow into the lead funnel.

So if the fortune 500 is  where you have your sales sights set, then having a look at the ActiveContacts database is a must to explore.  

 


Salesforce.com Companies:Who is Your Decision Maker

 The rise of Salesforce.com as the CRM of choice amongst tens of thousands of companies also triggered the market for salesforce add on applications for salesforce automation, document management, analytics, security and a lot more. With over 800 such applications which can switch your salesforce.com capabilites to nitrous oxide mode, its given companies that use salesforce.com a plethora of applications to choose from but at the same time with that many applications, several companies wouldn’t be completely aware of all these options. This is where the marketing and sales teams for these companies face their challenges and compete for a piece of that SFDC pie.

Whatever the application and fuction of the product they have to sell, there are two factors that every appexchange product marketing team needs to start with:

  1. A list or databse of Salesforce.com Customers
  2. Identified decision makers or business contacts within those accounts who are involved with SFDC
The first point is really the key qualifier for any company selling a salesforce related product or service into a company. If the company is using Salesforce.com within the company or some part of their operations then it becomes a target account. The second requirement is where it can really change from company to company depending on the nature of your product. While most companies target the head of sales and marketing or the person responsible for sales operations, depending on the nature of the product, the right decision maker can differ. For example a company that sells a security application for SFDC users, the key decision maker or influencer may be within IT Security or a more technical contact. If the product is about document control, the decision maker maybe from the compliance side.
So while the best contacts to have are those who work directly with the salesforce application within the company, the best decision maker for your product will depend on what has worked best for your product and may need that extra effort locate. Once you have your target companies and decision makers in place, the rest will fall into place.
 


Anybody who has experience selling technology into IT organizations of large companies within the Fortune 500 companies will tell you that IT or technology decision makers within these companies are amongst the most difficult professionals to reach especially on the phone. If navigating through the fortune companies and finding someone within the IT department was not already hard enough, business contacts within the IT organization are usually away from their desk, busy and not the most likely people to pick up the phone on your first attempt to call them. Many a salesperson has had stressful days trying to get to someone within these companies to pitch their offering and its tough to break into large companies unless you have a good number of contact points within them to start off with.

Having a few options for business contacts within these companies will give you a better chance at being able to connect within these IT departments and get started with the process of selling into them. We built the ActiveContacts Fortune 500 IT Business Contacts Database keeping in mind that if you have quick access to a range of contacts within each of these accounts it provides more options or doorways into the technology departments of the F500. So whether you build your own database, use a custom business contact list service or subscribe to a database like F500 IT Database always have your contacts ready before you start selling and those voice mails and dead ends won’t seem as bad.