Do you sell into companies which are are Salesforce.com customers? If the answer is yes then I can relate to your need to build a database of very specific contacts who are directly responsible for managing Salesforce.com for their companies in order to get any traction with sales and marketing campaigns. While the higher level Vice President of Marketing or Vice President of Sales are usually the final decision makers for salesforce.com application add ons and related products, the sales operations or SFDC manager is the person who often makes a great point of contact to start selling. It is this contact which is a perfect example of some of the valuable role-based contact discovery we have done here at Ready Contacts.

While building a target list for companies who sell into Salesforce.com companies there are two universal questions they need to know about each account they plan on selling into:

• Does this company use salesforce.com as their CRM?
• If yes, who is the person directly responsible for salesforce.com operations and managing the use of SFDC within this company?

While in some companies Salesforce.com is directly overseen by a VP, Marketing in others it can managed by a Sales Operations Director, CRM Manager, Salesforce.com Manager, Marketing Manager or others based on the structure of the company. In certain cases this person could also be within the IT department and directly oversee Salesforce administration and day to day operations related to the CRM. Knowing who is the best person within the organization to speak to discuss Salesforce.com related requirements is essential to approach these accounts and locating these contacts and building your lead database can be a time consuming task but should be worth your effort. A consistent effort of navigating marketing departments at target accounts and qualifying them to understand whether they use Salesforce.com will help build a steady pipeline of leads and then talking to folks within marketing and sales will really help you determine who to sell to within the organization and give you that dependable database on which you can build an effective sales effort. So if you sell into Salesforce.com customers focus on building a great list. The rest will follow.