Know-How Exchange : Strategy

How about a direct introduction (or even an in-house presentation/seminar)? You want to leverage your company connection to create warm leads. Direct mail/profiling is more suited to cold leads.

See if you can organize an in-house market at your customer. Or an in-house seminar to present the solution you already sold, with the help of your contacts you already have.

Unless your target companies are extremely small, there is an incredible amount of information available on corporations both online and in reference books to the library.

A bit of research can probably gain you a long list of new target names in various departments.

How often is this happening???

I'd be very worried if my product/service wasn't viewed as valuable enough to be recommended internally; more so if customers won’t even furnish a name and number!

I’m biased towards targeted outbound calling efforts, partly because they are highly effective and track-able, and partly because it keeps me employed. Calling allows you to interrupt the natural buying cycle, evangelize your message, and gather REAL market intelligence to shape future campaigns.

If you have the skills, methodology, personnel and infrastructure to provide the focus and effort necessary to run an effective campaign, I would take chorenf’s advice on jigsaw or a similar service (I recommend zoominfo) to find additional contact names.

If you are lacking any of the above, OUTSOURCE. It’s too important to ad hoc or ‘half ass’. Firms, like my own, excel at navigating through large organizations and facilitating the business conversations to fully qualify complex sales. There are plenty that offer simple “appointments” that have little to no qualification info, but allow your staff to introduce themselves and do they’re own investigating. If your comparison shopping, understand: 1) what is the level of qualification, 2) how sophisticated is the methodology and staff 3) do they bring their own data to the table. Make sure you are comparing apples to apples between your needs and their deliverables.

I would however, take a good hard look as to why this is an issue, as it was important enough to you to spawn this post. How frequently does this occur and what is causing this phenomenon? It could be as simple as rigid company information policies, or more nefarious: they’re not happy customers.