One of the questions I get asked all the time is “How do I find the right contact? Who is the right person for us to speak to?”.

We can speak to the purchasing department, we can speak to the engineering department, and we can speak to the sales department. But we should be trying to speak to as many people as we possibly can. Now we have many tools available that can help us find the right contact person. 

The first one is LinkedIn. At the push of a button, I can go onto LinkedIn, type in a company name, and it will list all of the employees under that company. It will show you their position, their experience, and it will help you identify any connections to your existing customers. LinkedIn is widely used, but we can’t rely upon on that as our only option.

In the past, we’ve got quite creative when trying to find the right person to contact and if you call these potential customers, and be open and honest, they will often give you the information you require.

For example: In the past, we’ve called potential customers and have told them that we are new to the market, we’re updating our system and would like to know the name of person in charge of buying their printed circuit boards. It’s quite direct, but you’ll find that not many other people are doing this. Often, they happily give the  name, and even on some occasions they will also give you an email address for that contact as well. So let’s be bold and ask the questions that we really want them to answer: who are the people that buy their printed circuit boards?

So what do you do on those other occasions when they won’t give you a name? Well, in those instances, we should rely on our network. Most electronic industries are quite small. Many times there are commonalities between networks with people moving between companies. So if we’re struggling to identify a person to contact, I think it’s important that we reach out to our network to see who the right person is to contact. Maybe they’ll even set up an introduction!