Your Hottest Sales Prospect Just Started a New Job

If you’re tasked with outbound sales, connecting with newly hired executives should be your number one priority. Why would you want to do this? It seems almost counterintuitive that you’d want to reach out to a newly hired exec. After all, they haven’t found their rhythm yet, they’re bound to be swamped as they get acclimated, and they will never be more distracted than they are in the opening weeks and months. However, newly hired executives are often the best sales prospects because they are often:

• Hired with a mandate to deliver change
• Given a budget to make changes
• Not locked into legacy products/systems

Now if you were given a mandate for change and a massive budget, would you sit idly by and go about business as usual? I know I wouldn’t. I would allocate large sums of my budget toward the tools that I need to bring about sweeping results.

It turns out that most newly hired executives feel the same way. In a recent webinar we hosted on closing big deals, expert sales consultant Craig Elias presented some statistics from DiscoverOrg showing that 80% of executives who will spend $1 million or more within their first year, will do so within their first 90 days. So what does this mean? It means that you need to reach out to newly hired executives before their desk chair gets warm.

How to Identify Newly Hired Executives

In our webinar, Craig offered some sage advice on how to find newly hired executives. Here’s how to do it:

Step 1:  Set up LinkedIn alerts to tell you when executives you follow change jobs.

Step 2: Discover who your contact replaced at their new job and find out where that executive landed.

Step 3: Find out who replaced your contact at their previous company.

Step 4: Find out where that replacement came from.

This easy process will enable you to identify up to four newly hired executives each time an executive in your network moves to a new company. Keep doing this and, over time, you’ll be reaching out to throngs of newly hired decision makers with the impetus and budget for change.

How to Appeal to Newly Hired Executives

So what do you do when you get a hold of newly hired executives? The first thing you should do is listen to them. Find out why they were hired. Did their predecessors fail to meet expectations? Discover their goals. And then work with them to build a solution that will meet those goals. By taking this approach, you will have a far easier time reaching decision makers before your competitors do. And hopefully, by the time competitors do reach out, they will have already chosen your solution.

Looking for some more killer prospecting tips? Look no further than our latest webinar How to Close Big Deals.