Inside the Appointment Setting Infographic
As the Senior Director of Delivery Services (and a former ISR), my daily duties place me close to the front lines here at BAO. I work with BAO’s ISRs on training, techniques, best practices and everything in between. I had a few observations as I read through the Year in Review infographic, and I thought I’d share them.
The 5 Toughest Companies to Get Meetingswith in 2014 are listed as the “Un-Closables” for good reason. The organizations included are large, complex organizations where IT responsibilities are spread out and shared across multiple individuals. Titles don’t mean as much as you may think.
Appointment setting and inside sales would be more straightforward if titles consistently corresponded with specific duties across the board. Of course, that’s just not the case. It can be a process to pinpoint the one person you’re targeting.
If you’re trying to get to the person working on a private cloud implementation, you start at the top and first call a VP. But this will often get you referred down a level to the Director of IT responsible for overseeing the project. Success? Not so fast. That director then points you to another person responsible, whose title indicates nothing to do with those duties.
Functional responsibility is king. If you’re struggling to close a prospect, consider targeting titles outside of those you might normally consider.
Remember, appointment setting with IT professionals, not only takes a large volume of calls, it also requires numerous productive conversations to navigate an organization in order to achieve success.
I wasn’t surprised by The Top 5 Companies BAO Clients Wanted to See in 2014.
Included are five multi-billion dollar corporations’ ranked number 61, 92, 205, 248 and 401 respectively on the latest Fortune 500 list. Fortune 500 companies of this size and status are leaders in their industries and as such receive a lot of sales calls. The logic in targeting these companies is easy to understand.
But the mid market represents tremendous opportunity for high-tech vendors. BAO defines the mid market as organizations with annual revenues spanning $100M-$999M and many of those 19,000+ mid market companies are buying a lot of technology.
Plus, BAO has already done market research into the mid market. We’ve published an entire Mid Market Resource Center complete with two infographics and a detailed buying guide to give you a leg up in this market.
I’m not suggesting you quit targeting the Fortune 500, but don’t hesitate to add mid market organizations into the mix. Plus, targeting both the Fortune 500 and the mid market in tandem will allow you to take advantage of the shorter sales cycles down market.
High profile data breaches have become commonplace in today’s fast-paced economy. From Home Depot, to Sony, JP Morgan and eBay, I recently read that “over one billion personal data records were compromised by cyberattacks in 2014.”
When I look at The 5 Companies that Accepted the Most Meetingswith BAO Client field sales reps in 2014, I see the threat of cyberattacks and data breaches.
Thinking security was a driver, I decided to look closer at the data and found, in fact: 51% of the meetings BAO secured with The Companies that Accepted the Most Meetings in 2014 were information security related.
Information security is changing rapidly and organizations count on trusted tech vendors to provide assistance in the education process.
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