What is a decision maker and why are they important?
In the B2B world, a decision maker is the one who holds the pursestrings and ultimately makes the final decision on whether that business is going to invest in your product or service.
In a small business, it would be either the C-suite or the financial team you’ll seek in order to get that vital ‘yes’ after a sales pitch. They’re important because they’re the only people who can say ‘yes’ – everyone else only has the authority to say ‘no’.
Key influencers are important as they’re the ones with the challenge you’re there to solve. Pitching to them will get you further into the sales process, but if you’re solely targeting the key influencers, you’re effectively relying on them to work with the decision makers to come to a final decision.
Sourcing the decision maker before you’ve approached the prospective company can save a whole lot of pitching and ‘decision making’ time. Whether you’re trying to solve a company-wide challenge or it’s specific to only your key influencer, the decision maker will always have the final say in the matter. Either way, your solution is an investment for them that has to prove ROI – whether that be saving the team time or increasing revenue through streamlining operations or upskilling the team.
Why finding the decision maker has its challenges
Research shows that there are now up to 10 decision makers in B2B so the need to scout them out from the beginning is a necessity. That’s a lot of research time – job titles differ depending on the company industry, size and structure. And they also don’t tell the whole story – in a start-up people take on many roles, meaning that one person could be HR, operational lead and finance.
Cutting through the noise of the competition amid other solutions being pitched has always been there, but in today’s world of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and other as-a-Service based cloud solutions, companies are being targeted more. Decision makers are more likely to be cutthroat when considering new technologies because of the barrage of solutions that can support their needs, meaning that whilst it’s difficult to find decision makers, it can be even more difficult to pitch.
That’s why you need to identify them quickly so you can effectively adapt your pitch to draw them in. Targeting them with the information that they need to make that financial decision is what will reduce prospecting time and get to the end of the sales process faster.
How to Identify Decision Makers
- Companies House
To get a real-time view of who is your decision maker the best place to start is Companies House. Company information is in abundance here for limited companies – financial records, sales information, strategic reports, and who are your financial employees. Running through Companies House manually means you have to have a company in mind before you search online, and the manual process can be exhaustive on your time as a sales rep.
Sales intelligence tools make this process a lot less laborious. The Zint platform takes the guesswork out of turning data into insight and presents pure insight into your prospects through combining data from Companies House and your own CRM data to match companies to your ideal customer profile – even targeting companies with specific decision makers.
Linkedin is a powerful social selling tool; that is, it’s not just a social media platform, but a prospecting tool. By its nature, you can look up people who work at a specific company and narrow down to those crucial decision makers by searching per job title. To qualify that person you believe to be the decision maker, there’s often job descriptions (if they choose to add a little info about their role) and contact information.
Better yet, Zint brings in information from Linkedin of the decision makers of a business, so you can use sales intelligence to initially find those prospects, then venture onto the Linkedin site to gather more information. To book in a demo, scroll down to the bottom of this page. For pricing info, click here.