30 May Executive lead generation vs. regular lead generation: Forget about climbing the ladder, jump right to the top

Posted at 02:30h in Blog, Blog Post by
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In the B2B space, what’s your offering to other companies? If you’re selling them toner, you’ll need to speak to the office manager or whoever handles supplies to get leads. But, if you’re selling big ticket products that’s not going to fly. Executive lead generation is what you need.

The problem with regular leads is you’re usually getting into a company too far down the ladder of decision makers to make a sale happen. You want someone with the authority and control over budget that you can close a deal with, but what you get is middle management.

They might be the user of your offering, but they don’t have the power to spend money. You have to convince them that they need to take whatever it is you’re selling to their superiors.

You’re going to have to spend a couple of weeks getting up one level, then two weeks getting up the next. Now, you’re a month into your prospecting because of a lead that came in that was too low level. The whole sales cycle for your organization slows to a crawl. 

In an ideal world you’d go in at c-suite, shrinking your sales cycle, often by months. That’s exactly what we do using cold emailing. In fact, we specialise in c-suite executive meeting setting via email. You can check out our blog on cold emailing here. 

You won’t get c-suite on the phone because they don’t take cold calls. They’ve got an assistant to deflect them. That’s not the case with cold emails. You go right to their inbox.

The quality of the conversation you can have with higher ups, especially CEOs and other c-suites is clear from the get go. You can talk to them about revenue and what your offering will do for their bottom line, not just what it’ll do for the user. Your pitch becomes a business message not just a technical message.

You can talk about the operational advantages – savings in time, money and risk. You just can’t do that with a middle management person.

Exectutive lead generation will cost you more in the short term, but even if it costs more it really costs less in the long run. You’ll close more deals, more quickly. Sales teams can be more productive and more powerful. 

It’s really hard to get right though, and you have to articulate messaging perfectly to get c-suites’ attention. Most of all, you need to understand their psychology.  We’ll save that for another blog.