What Are the Best Ways to Identify Business-to-Business Decision Makers?

It is essential to identify and understand how decision-makers and influencers within a company think. To successfully sell a solution to a company, learn to frame yourself and identify B2B decision makers. When you identify and frame yourself as the decision-maker, you will empathise with the potential client and better understand the company’s pain points and how your solution can ease the company’s problems.

Let’s look at what a B2B decision-maker is and learn how to identify b2b decision-makers.

What Is a B2B Decision Maker at a Company?

A decision-maker for a company is usually a C-suite-level executive or high-level individual contributor who makes critical decisions on how a company operates. The decision-maker understands what is necessary to resolve company problems with critical thinking and analytical skills.

The decision-maker may make these critical decisions alone, by committee, or with input from trusted company influencers. Therefore, discover and understand the role of the decision-maker. If you can identify the different purposes of the decision-maker, your sales success dramatically increases. For example, if the decision-maker is the director of finance, their goal may be reducing expenses, while the marketing director may be more interested in increasing revenues.

Key Takeaways:

1. Decision-makers for B2B purchases may be one or more executives.
2. If you can frame yourself as an executive, your opportunity to close a sale is much higher.
3. Your presentation should address all the pain points found in the discovery process.

How to Identify B2B Decision Makers?

It is essential to identify a B2B decision-maker to assure sales success. Although using job titles is an excellent way to identify decision-makers, it has become more challenging to use job titles alone. There can be lost sales opportunities when relying on a job title alone. There may be different job title responsibilities or the decision-maker may not actually approve your solution in some companies.

To have the best opportunity for success, understand the roles of each decision-maker and what their authority is. Then, when you discover the appropriate decision-makers, frame yourself in their position to understand and identify their goals to increase the sales opportunity.

Key Takeaways:

1. Do not rely on a job title alone to identify the decision-maker.
2. Once the decision-makers are identified, frame yourself in their position to better understand what problems they desire to resolve.
3. Once you know the decision-makers goals, tailor your presentation to show how your solution meets those goals.

How to Discover the Company’s, Decision-Maker?

Learn how to ask a decision-maker to discover that person within an organization. These are some suggestions for finding the company’s decision-maker successfully:

• Understand the company’s organization to know if the company shares decision-making or if a select few make most of the decisions.
• Review the company’s regulations and standards to know who may typically be the decision-maker.
• Know the company’s size as large companies of 500+ employees have multiple decision-makers, while smaller companies of 50 employees or less may have only one or two.
• Develop a buyer’s persona for decision-makers and stakeholders to better understand their position within a company and purchase objectives.
• Enlist sales prospecting tools to speed the discovery process, such as Clear Bit Connect, Zoom Info, or Prospect.io.

Every company has different roles or job titles. Job titles may have specific responsibilities at one company and other duties at another. The finance executive at a large company may be able to sign off on your project, but it usually requires the owner to sign off at a smaller company.

Key Takeaways:

1. Understand the company’s hierarchy, frame yourself as the targeted executive then identify the b2b decision-maker.
2. Know the company size and understand the corporate or company hierarchy and how many decision-makers may be in the approval process.
3. It is essential to identify the key decision-makers who can sign off on your project before the sales presentation.

How to Use LinkedIn to Identify B2B Decision Makers?

Frame yourself as the decision-maker and understand the buyer’s persona. Then find more prospects by leveraging LinkedIn on how to identify a B2B decision-maker that fits the buying persona of your existing customers.

The LinkedIn Sales Navigator is one of the best tools available for B2B salespeople. This tool creates a profile based on LinkedIn’s filtering to generate decision-makers and contacts of companies ideally targeted for your sales solution.

The LinkedIn Sales Navigator advanced filtering generates suggested leads based on your search criteria. This information will allow you to spend more time selling to the correct decision-maker and less time wasted with the wrong people.

Key Takeaways:

1. LinkedIn services can generate a list of potential decision-makers and companies that match your buyers’ persona.
2. LinkedIn Sales Navigator develops a contact list based on your buyers’ persona.
3. The Sales Navigator advanced filtering feature allows the discovery of companies by both size and job titles.

Understanding the Company Buying Process

Frame yourself as the decision-maker going through the buying process. When you understand a company’s buying process. For example, if your product requires a higher-risk investment, the buying process requires buy-in from a higher-level decision-maker.

As a good rule of thumb, when companies spend less than 5% of their annual budget on similar products or services, classify that as a low-risk investment. Conversely, if your offer is over the 5% threshold, classify your product as high risk, which typically requires different levels of approval.

How to Ask for a Decision Maker?

It is critical to ask some key questions to find the right decision-maker to be most effective. These questions include:

1. Who will all be involved in this decision?
2. Who will be the end-users of this product?
3. Besides yourself, who will be interested in this decision?
4. What are the criteria for this product to be approved entirely?
5. What departments will benefit from this product?

Conclusion

Information is critical in successfully selling to company decision-makers. Your sales success dramatically increases when you have the information necessary to bring all the required decision-makers to your side.

Some organizations provide high-level access to information to increase sales success, such as Biz-Buzz. This tight-knit community of B2B-like minds collects relevant data for sales processes through paid surveys. Surveys often trigger thought strategies that sharpen your focus to increase sales, and critical subjects are added to the sheet.