Please don’t pay attention if there’s some grammar mistakes in my post or something like this, ENG isn’t my native language. And I’m posting this question here, because I think it’s more related to business than web-developing.
So, I’m new to selling / offering anything for money and I never done this nor I never tried to get contact with CEO of big companies to offer them something better than they have. And I’m getting really hard time to understand how the whole hierarchy works there.
The thing is, I know a company(big company) that offering some offline solutions/products and they have a web-site. The very, veeery ugly website. With all what is related to it. And I can offer them very professional way of making all of it to one big working and efficient place. The problem is, I don’t know how to get this information to them! Or more precisely - to him - to CEO.
You see, I’m not living in some awesome place with lots of companies like this, and obviously for this reason I want to be sure in the path for contacting and delivering this information to CEO, because he’s the only one who’s gonna truly care for his company - not the secretary or someone else - they can simply through away the email for any reason(they can think it’s spam for example), or do something else - because there’s no one watching them and they are not that care too much for the company they work for.
I tried twice contacting two different companies and failed: with a first company I tried to reach the CEO directly via the phone and been told it’s impossible and I must send email firstly for the secretary and she will transfer it to the CEO. I did. And never heard from them since. The other way I tried to reach the CEO by getting the phone number in some crazy ways, and then when I did call him and reached him, he thought I’m a kind of selling agent probably and told me “no, thanks. not interested” and probably put me to blacklist, because I’m getting a machine.
Anyway, the thing is I’m really afraid to fail again this time, because I know what can I offer and I’m sure in 100% I’m gonna do this in the best way they can find, but getting cut on the first step like before is so painful. I really need your advice of how to get the message to the right hands in the right way.
P.S. I forgot to add that I’m sure in 100% that they want the site to be working platform for the company. Just in case
If a company is big enough to warrant a CEO, then they’re too big to be handling the day to day minutiae of things like websites. A CEO is a “big picture” type of role who provides general guidelines on how things work. Daily minutiae on how to accomplish that falls under managers or perhaps up to a Vice-President, depending on the structure of the company.
You’re going to find corporate entities are less likely to have outside individuals do work on things like websites - they’ll more likely do the work in house OR work with agencies to do the work for them. But if you’re going to attempt to contact them (you better be prepared with samples, a portfolio, references, etc), you’e going to find the corporate structure and look for the marketing department, and start there.
But you better have more than “your website sucks”. You better have financial numbers on why their website isn’t performing as well as it can, different approaches on how to improve, what ROI they’ll get from your services, etc. If you don’t have all that and a good sales pitch, you’re not going to get any further than you already do.
No, what you need is a great sales pitch email that will HOPEFULLY get you an in person contact. You need to find an innovative way to show how your services can improve sales, have high ROI, etc.
Are you sure I need to speak about ROI in the email?! Because it’s not a direct dialog, you know… And also I find almost everywhere that it’s a big no-no to speak about money(ROI is about money, because you must describe how much its gonna cost to them) in emails or in phone or other not face-to-face way.
BTW: Is that a bad way to speak directly to the CEO as I tried before? Can you explain why, please?
No, not directly but you do have to show how your services can increase sales or improve retention or whatever. You have to hook them on WHY they should talk to you. Just saying “you need to talk to me to improve your business” doesn’t work.
Yes, and I did in my first post - the CEO is almost always NOT involved in the day to day operations on their company. They are the high level thinkers - they set goals and directions and let the people below them determine the common tasks to meet the high level goals.
From my experience CEO’s care about every aspect of their companies, even when it’s big companies. Even if they will not handle the email themselves, they will read it, they will look at the website and decide if you are correct and if so they will send the email to the right person in the company to handle it.
Well, you see… I did describe how it will bring them new customers and improve this and that, but I can’t go in the details, you know. Only in the meeting it self.
And as for the CEO, I can’t understand you… The CEO actually is the one who should make decision about things like this, because it’s something that goes beyond the usually things that marketing chief, for example, have permission and budget for. And obviously for this reason he will ignore this opportunity, because it’s out of the goal of hes and it’s not hes responsibility to take care about it… So IN THE BEST case he may just transfer it to the CEO or someone else, but I think he won’t do anything about it. Am I wrong?
Most likely, yes you are. It’s better to start with the ones that have immediate responsibility over the effort. They are the ones that have to account for the budgeting, the scheduling and maintenance of the effort. If they don’t have final dollar approval, they will have a process in place to send the funding request up the appropriate chain of command.
I’ve also seen that when someone starts from the top down, there is often more resistance from the day to day staff. You’ve now gone over their head, told their boss that they are incompetent and don’t know how to recognize the issue much less knowing how to resolve it.
I worked at a shop that went from a .net envionment to a open source environment because the CTO thought it would “save money on server costs”. Problem was no one on staff knew the open source languages, so through a lot of trial and error, their product lines were changed over to this new environment, and they found the costs actually went up when you take into consideration the learning curve for the developers, and the rework time when the open source project they were using as the baseline went under and they had to go back to square one. Plus they found more errors that hadn’t existed before, and the costs overall weren’t that much different than what was there before. All they saved was the server license, which wasn’t all that much in the long haul…
But if you want to keep trying the “top down” approach, good luck to you. I just don’t think you’re going to get as much response from the effort than you would if you started with the ones that are responsible for the work.
But there is a good chance they can though this away simply because it’s not their company, you know… they do their job for marketing for example and they’re fine with this. Do they need to have a headache about this new thing about website… new customers(for the company - NOT them! ) - no… But I do understand about your example with making all the personal feel bad about going above their heads(if we talking about speaking directly to the CEO), but this is much more positive than nothing at all… after all, it’s what they feel about them selfs, not because I’m making them look like this. And as for the open source example, yes, I totally agree with you, but I think it’s about different case here. I’m not dealing of what will happen AFTER, I can’t even reach the meeting.
But of course I didn’t came here to argue and prove I’m wrong etc… If this is the only way out, I’m gonna try this, even tho this is somehow I already did.
Ok then. So after I’ll email them to the marketing department, as you said pitch mail and they will respond to it, I think there is two main paths here: 1) to meet with them 2) they will request some additional information. and here I am thinking about it and getting lost… I obviously can’t reveal more than I emailed them, so I should or explain them in a polite form that this is something we could speak in the meeting or should I in the first place not write it all in the first mail(but then again, they may not even respond to that, so it’s better to have as much information as it can be)
Yes, but you know, one way is get new customers by he’s own way and another way is to use someone to get them… This is actually what I thought that may bring my offer down for this guys at marketing.
And? Either way you’ve opened a line of communication. Take advantage of it. Neither will guarantee a sale.
If you’re worried about two, give them a taste of what you can offer. For example, if you can find 38 different items which can be improved that will lead to more sales, tell them how many you can find, giving them a couple examples (say 3-5) which they can then analyze to see if what you say is reliable. It might cost a little on the initial contract, but it’s a door opener.
Dave, Thanks a lot! It’s more clear now to me what should I really do. Beside the fact you revealed me some things I didn’t understand before properly, I also rethought some other things while thinking about it while this conversation. Thanks again!