The quality of your offer matters less if it reaches the wrong audience.
Enterprise buying decisions rarely sit with one person.
Budgets, risk, technical fit and strategic priorities are often shaped by several stakeholders across revenue, operations, finance, procurement and leadership.
In other words:
The person who responds first isn’t always the business decision maker.
This article explains how to find, identify and engage the people who actually shape business decisions.
Prefer a video? Here we go:
So, how do you reach B2B decision makers? We’ve narrowed down six tried and proven ways:
You’ll want to start with the right tools to find business decision makers.
These are typically sales intelligence platforms because they can save your sales team days of prospecting to the wrong contacts. And with advanced company and contact filters, you can easily build account lists that match your ideal customer profile.
One example is Cognism. Its sales intelligence makes it easier than ever to find company decision makers.
The tool brings Cognism’s trusted data and signals directly into the workflows that sellers and marketers already use, helping both teams to act with better timing, relevance, and focus.
And what’s more, as the leader in European data, there’s 90% coverage for EU decision makers, so you don’t need to worry about missing records.
The job title and seniority filters help you find prospects responsible for making business decisions at a company.
How does it work?
Take a look at the platform below.
Gone are the days when you had to spend hours manually researching company websites.
Instead, you can use browser extensions to view key account and lead information, such as decision maker contact details, their company details, and the technology they use, without leaving your browser.
Take the Cognism extension, for example. It allows you to tap into your prospect’s network, surface key stakeholders, and close multithreaded sales deals. Plus, its B2B data integration helps you export your research directly to your CRM.
Extensions are a quick and accurate way of sourcing information about key business decision makers.
The alternative is scouring the company’s website and social media profiles, which is long and time-consuming.
Did you know that there is a huge percentage of B2B decision makers on LinkedIn - approximately 65 million (LinkedIn)!
So if you’re looking for decision makers in business, utilising the platform is a good idea. Start by looking at the company’s LinkedIn page. There, you can find a list of employees and search it until you find the decision makers you’re after.
But again, this is a very time-consuming procedure.
As a sales manager, do you really want your reps wasting hours doing this?
The Cognism Browser extension doesn’t just work on company websites - it works on LinkedIn profiles, too! Simply install the extension, click on any LinkedIn page, and you’ll get critical intel such as:
Tracking sales triggers is one of the best strategies for reaching B2B decision makers.
You can track job title changes and new hire events to know immediately when a company appoints a new executive to a decision making position.
This means you can start building relationships with them from day one, outpacing your competitors.
Here’s a stat to remember:
On average, new executives decide where to spend 70% of their budget within their first 100 days. So the sooner your reps get them on a cold call, the better.
You need to speak with the top decision makers in a company. The best way to find them is with intent data.
Intent data tools monitor the online content that individuals within an organisation consume and their social media engagement. They are some of the best tools to find company decision makers because they provide insights into a prospect’s level of buying intent.
With intent data, you can identify which prospects are actively researching your products or services or those of a competitor. These insights allow your sales team to call those people and qualify them.
And when you use intent data and buying signals together, your team will know exactly who is ready to buy and when to reach out.
George McKenna of Ultima told about his experience combining Cognism’s database with intent data to identify decision-makers:
No prospect list is perfect on the first try.
After you’ve constructed the first draft of your list of decision makers in a company, spend some time on lead enrichment.
It can save your sales team from wasting hours on dialling the wrong numbers, speaking to the incorrect people, or emailing outdated email addresses.
Then use a B2B data enrichment tool like Cognism to clean and update your prospect lists:
And that should answer the question:
How to find company decision makers.
When it comes to finding and identifying decision makers in a business, the key is to do your research first. Just one hour of preparation can save your sales team from hours of misdirected prospecting.
But instead of manually researching the company’s decision makers, use Cognism! Our sales intelligence platform provides up-to-date, high-quality data for the companies and decision makers who matter most.