Who do you cold call? The Manager or the CEO?
Cold calling vs products or solutions
After carefully selecting a company as target the next action is cold calling.
In order to generate leads, you can try to call anyone in this organization: from employees, to managers to the CEO.
Much depends on what you are selling:
o Short terms:
– Consumables
– Temporary workforce
o Long terms:
– Investment good
– Durable products
– High level management consulting
If you are selling “Short terms”, then addressing middle management is the best solution. If you would contact the CEO, you will probably not being able to get him on the phone or you might even run into problems as he could ban your company from the vendor list.
If you have “Long terms” to sell, then the higher you can enter the organization the more likely impact you will have. “Long terms” appeal to the CEO and can be important for the near future of the company (and influence his own income).
A problem arises when you are selling goods or services that are not really consumables or not really durable products, like consulting, production materials, production facility or office equipment.
Goods and services that the department manager can’t decide on alone, however these are not interesting or not significant enough for the CEO or COO or CFO.
Thus you probably need to address the middle manager first.
Cold calling vs size of company
In large international companies, you are likely to call the appropriate middle manager.
The smaller the company is, the more the CEO (founder) is involved in day-to-day decisions. Thus the more interest he will show for the “Short term” goods and services.
Especially in the case of the CEO being the founder, they are very interested in every purchase that is going to be made. In many cases these founders still consider spending the money of the company like spending their own money. Thus they want every dime well spend or invested.
Cold calling vs industry
Depending on the margins and the profits a company can make in a certain industry, the CEO will be more or less price conscious.
If the margins are high, there is little competition. The focus is not on keeping gross margin costs or operation expenses low, but on closing more deals or optimizing the use of the available capacity (people or machines). There will be little interest from the CEO as he has other problems to decide upon than spending. Thus you call the middle manager or COO.
If the margins are narrow the company is in a very competing market, thus production and manufacturing costs and expenses need to be under control. The CEO might want to get involved in every larger purchase as the purchase order might even carry his signature. Thus you better call as without his decision nothing will be decided, even if the company is significant in size.
Thus all depends on what type, size and market of company you are addressing.
So who do you call? (Not Ghostbusters)
