If you want to engage CEOs and leave an impression, you've got to think like them. CEOs are bombarded with sales emails on an hourly basis. They spend their days scuffling through important issues just long enough to address them before moving on to the next task. So, how can you best utilize your list of CEO email addresses to prospect, engage and entice these busy execs?
After hearing from CEOs directly, here are our takeaways to improve your traction with them:
Marketers working in B2B marketing understand the advantages of contacting the CEO instead of a middle management team member during the targeted sales process. CEOs are the key decision-makers within organizations and their job title (Chief Executive Officer) contains evidence of their expertise and high rank.
However, sales and marketing teams struggle to find the CEO’s contact information in their databases. This type of data is highly protected, so, Google searches of their name and company details likely won’t reveal their email addresses.
For this reason, you must take specific strategic approaches and tactics to heighten the opportunities for having discussions and building rapport with the highest-ranked executives. This article discusses methods to scale email efforts and provides techniques to maximize email effectiveness when contacting CEOs in different industries. It focuses on improving communication and establishing strong connections and explores ways to escalate email open rates.
Although manual research actions may result in discovering the company’s products, operations, goals, or objectives, it won’t reveal the CEO’s email address. However, with the help of sales intelligence tools, you can fill your email lead list with accurate information.
Sales tools offer various benefits and upgraded features, including integration with CRM systems, insights into the leads’ interests, and an opportunity to develop efficient plans for building valuable relationships and turning CEOs into interested buyers.
These analytics tools track sales opportunities, schedule tasks, automate sales processes, and escalate revenue by converting contacts into customers. This strategy makes the lead generation concepts easier to manage and optimize, increasing the chances of developing interactions.
Many people, including lead generation teams, turn to search engines to get directions and discover techniques for finding the email addresses of important people with whom they want to have conversations. This is perfect for organizations that don’t have a large budget to invest in upgrades or marketing tools.
Luckily, you don’t have to use Google the regular way. There are many advanced features for finding the CEO’s email addresses. The most effective one includes utilizing refined search operators by typing the following quotations: “Name and Surname of the CEO email address/contact information.”
If the company of the CEO you are looking for has a website, start by paying attention to the URL. Most businesses use common email structures for all their representatives, including the CEO. Although this type of guesswork may not result in finding the CEO’s email address, it may lead you to an account this executive controls. Take this generic structure as an example: [email protected].
Then, email this address, even if you are unsure if it’s the right one. Chances are, someone in the company team will see the email and forward it to the CEO, who might read it if it sounds engaging and personalized enough. Remember, how an email to a CEO ends is as valuable as its subject line and hook.
Email finder tools and permutators help sales and marketing teams guess email addresses based on collected data and elevate their messaging tactics. These perfected solutions offer reliable information for your email campaigns, personalize messages, and reach CEOs using their correct email accounts.
An ideal platform or tool offers strategies to grow CEO email lists, suggests upgrading email personalization, and aims to improve ROI on email campaigns. This way, you can ensure your email marketing vision becomes a reality and raises your company's wealth.
Bookyourdata is one of those platforms. It provides elevated real-time email verification and direct work and personal email access. In addition to email contacts, it offers mobile direct dials and highlights the need to expand email reach.
Most CEOs have LinkedIn and Twitter profiles they use for networking. You can search these social media platforms to find their email addresses. Their company likely uses social media marketing campaigns to promote its services to their target audience through optimized content, often including the CEO’s contact information.
If you can’t find the needed information on their accounts, try sending them a direct message. If the CEO is active and interactive on their platforms, they will likely reply and give you their email address. This method seeks to boost engagement with CEOs through content marketing.
Also, remember that many companies use influencer marketing in their advertising campaigns. Influencers advertise their services on social media, and their enhanced posts often include contact information of key executives for reference.
Search the “About Us” or “Contact Us” section on the company website to find any team member’s email address. This way, you will discover the email structure the company uses for their representatives and take a guess on what the CEO’s address would be.
You can also use the company website's live chat option on the landing page to connect with a customer service representative and ask for the CEO’s email address. This digital marketing option is free and easy to use but can also provide accurate information.
Have you had no luck finding the CEO’s email address so far? Another approach you can take is to find the company’s general email address and send a message. This increases the chances of someone coming across your email and redirecting it to the right person.
If you decide to use this strategy, make sure your email is polished, well-structured, simple, and not too intrusive to catch the attention of a company representative. While this tactic doesn’t always result in a reply, it is worth the shot.
Also, the company might have left a phone number for questions and inquiries from website visitors. This allows you to call the company and ask for the necessary information, hoping to get the CEO’s email address.
Reaching out to former company employees may lead to them sharing the CEO’s email address. They likely know the contact information of these high-ranked executives because they have previously worked for them and probably messaged them many times before.
They also know the expanded business operations details and can offer valuable pointers for contacting the CEO. However, there is no guarantee that these alumni networks will reply to your message.
Many fine-tuned web directories organize websites into categories by topic or industry. If businesses have established an online presence and created a website to promote and present their products or services, their information becomes available to all users.
These online directories often include business listings with contact information of people’s full names, email addresses, phone numbers, and the names of the companies they work for. Browsing through these lists may lead to discovering a CEO’s email address.
Suppose the CEO you are trying to reach has established an amplified reputation in the industry by helping the company scale. In that case, they participate in press releases, give interviews, and are featured in news articles. They also often engage in conducting surveys and hosting webinars, which are great resources for finding new information on the CEO and the company.
Sometimes, their email addresses are included somewhere in this published news. But if they are not, you can still monitor what the target audience reads and gain valuable insights into the business’s objectives.
After hearing from CEOs directly, here are our takeaways to fine-tune your traction with them:
Let's go back to Sales 101. You want to make a sale? You need to intrigue your buyer. Bombarding them with an overflow of emails asking them to commit to you without addressing a problem of theirs will get you nowhere. When drafting your emails, ask yourself, how am I adding value for the prospect? What solution am I offering?
Pro Tip: If you're starting with an intro to your product, you're doing it wrong.
Don't waste a good list of CEO email addresses by failing to properly segment. With CEOs and executives generally, you need to personalize your emails as much as possible. Of course, with an expansive list of prospects to reach out to, you don't have time to “do your homework" on every one of their companies. Segment by sector, industry, company size, revenue, and anything relevant to your product. Research common pain points within each segment, and tailor your emails to their specific needs. Otherwise, they'll see right through you.
Pro Tip: Start by building out your personas based on pain points. You may talk to energy and construction companies, but their challenges will vary.
For your ideal customer, you gotta pull out all the stops. Go beyond segmenting, and refine a short list of the crem dela crem execs you want to target. (We call them High Value Targets, or HVTs). Research their individual backgrounds. To spark their interest, speak to their past accomplishments that have landed them in the chief executive chair. This will show them you genuinely seek to speak with them personally - and that you are not undermining their value and wasting their time with copy-paste or mail-merge prospecting.
Get to the point. Speak to their unique problem, and deliver an immediate solution. Executives don't have time for you. They barely have time for their own employees. In fewer words than it takes to scroll, you have to convince them that you understand their unique needs and have a solution worth their time to consider.
Pro Tip: Keep the email as short as possible. You can always end with further background information below the signature.
You have the green light to celebrate your wins. Create social proof wherever you can by acknowledging other trusted businesses using your product (of course, make sure you have their permission first). The main takeaway here is to minimize the effort on behalf of your prospect… especially for busy executives who don't have the time to weed through your website to decide whether or not you're a credible company worth their investment. Clearly define your solution and value proposition as it is relevant to their business.
Pro Tip: Add a link to your website, not just your homepage. Create persona-specific landing pages that speak to their unique challenges and interests to increase your conversions rate for those who click through.
Time is money, and CEOs are busy, so they'll see right through you. Follow these steps above to enhance your prospecting efforts with executives of all kinds.
Get started by prospecting CEOs with quality data.
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