10 Strategies for Breaking Through to Unresponsive Decision-Makers

• You’ve worked with your marketing team to develop your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
• You’ve built a database of target companies that match your ICP characteristics.
• You’ve researched to identify the key decision-makers of your target prospects.
• You have a great solution that has helped other similar companies.

You have a great story to tell.

Now you have one last problem. You need a chance to tell your story.

You can’t sell anything until you first talk to a decision-maker. But you can’t get a decision-maker to pick up the phone or even open your emails.

How do you break through to seemingly unresponsive decision-makers?

1. Provide Prospects with a Valid Business Reason to Meet

Everyone knows why a salesperson wants to meet with a prospect—you want to sell them something. But do you know why the prospect would want to meet with you? What’s in it for them? Why should they care?

Being able to answer these questions will help you clarify your messaging and ultimately cut through the noise in the market.

2. Be Relevant

Know their business model and industry. Use their language, terminology, and acronyms. Speak as they speak.  

Communicate in a way that demonstrates your experience in their world. Your communication should be personalized and customized for each individual decision-maker.

3. Demonstrate Empathy

Show them that you understand their business challenges and that you can help them achieve their desired business results.

Do this by sharing results—not product features and functions.

4. Demonstrate Expertise

“I’m familiar with the problems you’re facing and have experience helping companies facing similar challenges successfully address.”

5. Don’t Sell

If you are pushing products and solutions out of the gate, you’ll get blocked out or shut down pretty quickly. No one likes being sold.

Instead, focus on educating, informing, and guiding.

6. Always Add Value

Share insights, ideas, and resources that educate and inform. Tell the prospect something they don’t already know. Position yourself and your company as a valuable resource.

Do this by sharing relevant resources created by your marketing team.

• Blog articles
• eBooks
• Whitepapers
• Case studies  
• Recorded webinars
• Podcast episodes (or snippets)

7. Be Concise

Don’t bore them with multiple-paragraph emails or 3-minute voicemail messages. Keep all your communications short and to the point.

• Emails should have 5 – 15 lines of text or 50 – 150 words.
• Your voicemail messages should be less than 30 seconds.

8. Don’t Give Up

There isn’t any definitive research to indicate the number of attempts it takes to reach a decision-maker. But it’s likely to be more than two. I can’t tell you how many salespeople I talk to who tell me they give up after one voicemail and one email.

• The best approach is multiple (5 -10) attempts in a relatively short time span (7 – 21 days).  

9. Use Multiple-Channel Communications

Email and voicemail are great, but don’t stop there. Mix in LinkedIn messages, videos, and even “snail mail” (USPS).

• Don’t discount the power of a handwritten note.
• Don’t say the same thing in every email or voicemail, but integrate your valid business reason in each.    

10. Deploy Inbound Marketing Strategy

All the above points are geared toward outbound prospecting. Outbound is the salesperson reaching out to them. Inbound is the prospect reaching out to you.

Be easy to find online and easy to interact with digitally. Inbound marketing leverages a strategy to write about topics that are relevant to your target prospect. They can find these published resources when you optimize them for SEO and promote them with social media, email campaigns, and ads.  

Conclusion 

Deploying these principles will help you break through, get more appointments with decision-makers, more conversations with prospects, and more chances to tell your story.

And that, in turn, will lead to increased sales performance and revenue growth.