Strategies for Reaching Out to Executives:
- Learn the language.
Prepare as much as possible in understanding business acumen and business strategy, what they’re trying to do and how they’re trying to grow the company.
You want to focus on the top level so you have to increase your competency in business and financial acumen, which means understanding financial documents. Learn the difference between a balance sheet and the profit and loss statement, or an income statement. How can you speak with an executive who is focused on that? This increases your confidence so you won’t be a fish out of water when they start talking to you about that.
Especially if it’s a publicly traded company, you can look into their website and check out their balance sheets, income statement, profit, and loss. Look at those things to learn some stuff. You can also check out YouTube for some tutorials on how to read a balance sheet, etc. Your goal here is to increase the quality of the story to make it more compelling.
- Bring value to the table.
Use social tools that you may introduce into their company. Try to find a way that you can bring in your product or service.
- Talk about the things that managers talk about.
Look at the company responsibilities of a manager on LinkedIn and instead of talking about those things, talk about it and they may just refer you to their executives.
- Practice.
Do some role plays within your company or with someone as you’re trying to have those executive conversations. If it sounds like you’re only speaking to a manager, tweak yourself and improve. Make a bunch of phone calls and try to speak to these executives so you’re able to practice it.
Today’s Major Takeaway:
Find ways to have more strategic conversations and this will lead to more discussions and eventually to conversations about your product.
We’re doing an online workshop next week, 5 Simple Strategies to Increase Your Win Rate, where you will get specific takeaway actions you can readily apply to your own sales process.
Episode Resources:
Join the TSE Hustler’s League!
TSE 575: Executive Language Part 1
The Science of Selling by David Hoffeld
Get a free audiobook download and a 30-day free trial at audibletrial.com/tse with over 180,000 titles to choose from for your iPhone, Android, Kindle or mp3 player.
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