Your product might be the most innovative thing in your field for years, but unless you can get to the people who want to buy it (though they may not know it yet!), you might never find the potential of your market.

Since sales has become more aggressive and all pervasive, we have seen a rise in the number of emails, phone calls and mail shots. For many it seems that their efforts should be well spent by avoiding receipt of all but essential communications. How many of us have filed things, un-opened in the bin, deleted emails, unread, or declined to have a call put through?

Who is the decision maker?
Before you can get your message out to the decision maker, you need to identify who they are.

On the face of it, all you have to do is buy a list of qualified decision makers from a directories company, but you may soon find it doesn’t meet your needs as well as you hoped and that you actually didn’t need to spend that money at all…

The chances are very good that you will have a lot of latent information about decision makers in your company. Schedule a meeting with your team and compile a list of your best customers, based on their likelihood to buy into your new product or service. You should be able to come up with the criteria for this yourself, as you will how to judge your own customers. If you have a large company, you may want to brief your team leaders to gather as much detailed information as possible before the meeting. who have people spoken to? What switched them on? Do they have any valuable past ‘form’?

Using this information, you can optimise your chances of getting an interested prospect. you already have their business, they will be more open to your new ideas.

You may also find it useful to compile the 10 worst sales prospects and analyse the data to find out why you have not been successful in selling to them. What have you missed? Did you talk to the wrong person?

Once you have found out all you can through your own resources, you should go out and gather additional information from wherever you can.

This might be a good moment to reflect on the way that sales practices have changed over the years and to refresh your ideas about what works. Once upon a time, the purchase decision was made by an individual in the company, and the role of the decision maker was occupied by one person. they may have been informed by other people, but they had the decision making power. Nowadays, decision making is frequently done by committee. This can make it more difficult for you to sell to them, as it may not be obvious who you need to talk to, but on the other hand if you can’t influence one person, you may be able to influence another.

On top of this, each company may have a very different buying process. It’s up to you to match your selling process to their buying process and that means doing some research.

If you start getting nosy you may well shut down the person you are talking to. It’s worth trying some some open-ended questions, as it’s harder to avoid answering them.

What’s the procedure for buying in your company?
Who is involved in buying?
What’s the best way to approach the decision making committee or person?

You can also benefit from delving into the target company, the internet is very useful here, it’s surprising what you can find! Make a note of contacts, names and numbers.

It might well be worth your time to find out who already has a foot in the door with your target company. If you are trying to sell to car mechanics, who supplies the parts? The tyres? The oil? Who does their advertising, their uniforms? Their accounts? If you can form a working partnership with local companies, you could get a valuable personal introduction, and find out a lot more about the target company, who makes the decisions?

It’s very important to make sure you go for quality over quantity where sales contacts are concerned. You need to get several people in the company talking about what you are trying to do. As I mentioned before, not only are the decisions often made by committee, you can bring pressure to bear on the committee from several angles. If you only have one person onboard, the sale will be difficult.

You will also find that if you can switch on to changes in the company, office move, merger, new management, promotional drive etc, this is the time when people are open to trying new things.