Our Blog: Roles NOT Titles

Finding very specific role based contacts at deeper levels within an organization structure can be critical to connecting with the right people for your sales. While you can start building a list of higher level contacts like CIO’s, CTO’s and some of the top VP level contacts using ready lead databases like Hoovers, Onesource and ActiveContacts, purchasing ready lists from vendors or using search engines to dig them up building a list of help desk contacts who are responsible for issues regarding email security is a lot more specific in nature and needs a completely different approach.

Research using search engines and most databases wont turn out great results for such specific contacts at this level. Calling into the target account and navigating via phone till you find the right person by role will ensure you have a much stronger list. To find these help desk contacts who look after email security:

• Call into the company and connect to the CIO’s office and ask to be connected to the IT help desk or the person in charge of the IT help desk
• Using reference contacts which you get from the Admin to the CIO or the CIO’s assistant who generally know the IT organization structure very well find your way to the IT help desk or a more general contact within the IT department
• Once you’re connected to someone at the IT help desk ask for the person within the help desk who is generally responsible for handling issues related specifically to email security. If you can’t connect to anyone at the help desk but can manage to speak to someone within IT who may know the right person to contact for any issues related to email security, possibly at the It help desk.
• Once you have the persons name and role confirmed you can check back with the CIO’s office for any specific details like an email address which you can use to get in touch with the contact

In depth contacts like this can provide you with great leverage in the sales and make a good starting point for any sales person but there are no easy short cuts to building a great b2b lead list of operational level business contacts. If you need to get to the root of this, you have to dig deep!