Sales is a contact sport, and unfortunately many career B2B sales pro’s are stuck working for organizations that have an “Invent your own success model“, meaning they aren’t going to feed you warm leads to call. Instead you need to generate leads yourself. This naturally means making cold calls, networking (Both Online, and In Person), sending emails, partnering with complementary businesses, etc…
Cold calling can be an effective way of setting appointments for yourself, but without a contact name to ask for it is likely you are going to have problems getting past the gatekeeper.
Here are 3 ways that I have personally used to get contact names at businesses to make a cold call a little bit warmer.
1. Whois.net – Wonderfully useful and involves looking up who the administrative and technical contact is for the companies website you want to contact. Note, this method is not as useful when dealing with companies that have multiple different locations, are large corporate entities, or have elected to make their domain registration private
- Go to http://whois.net
- Type in the domain name
- Boom – You have some contact names and maybe even an email address
2. Secretary of State Business Entity Search – Every state has a Secretary of State that keeps records on local area businesses including owner information, and any associated managers. Go go to www.google.com
- Go to http://www.google.com
- Search for: [YOUR STATE] Secretary of State Business Entity Search
- Google will give you the url
- Simply type in the name of the business you are looking up, and you will see a record of filings for the business including business owner / manager names
3. Search the companies website to get contact information, history, etc. This is usually the easiest method as most businesses especially small to medium businesses have a history page which usually includes a mention of the owners name.
Once you have the contact name you need start dialing!