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 to us that can help us find the right contact person.

So the first one would be 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 will help you identify any connections to your existing customers. LinkedIn is widely used but we can’t rely on that being our only option.

In the past, we’ve got quite creative when trying to find the right person to contact and actually if you phone up companies, potential customers, and be honest, they will often give you the information you require. So for example, in the past we have phoned up companies or customers and have told them that we are new to the market, we’re updating our system and would like to know the person in charge of buying their printed circuit boards. It’s quite direct, but actually you’ll find that not many other people are doing this. Seven times out of ten, they happily give a name and on many of those occasions they will also give you a contact email address. So let’s be bold and ask the questions that we really want to ask: who are the people that buy their printed circuit boards?

So what should you do on the three other occasions when they don’t give you a name? Well then we should rely on our network. Most electronic industries are quite small. Many of the times there’s a lot of crossover between networks i.e. with people moving between companies. So if we’re struggling to identify a person to contact, now I think it’s important that we ask our network whether they know who the person is that they should contact.