(NOTE: This post is a rough draft and may contain errors. Final version will be available shortly.)

Even if own the perfect domain for a company’s needs, contacting the right decision maker within that company can mean the difference between a 4-figure sale and a no-response. That decision maker is typically a high-ranking official within the company’s marketing, sales, or business development departments. Below are five different avenues — ranked from breeziest to most involved — that you could travel locate that receptive pair of ears:

1. Browse website contacts. If the company lists its executive directors’ names and e-mail addresses on their site, e-mail the two or three whose job titles appear most advertising-oriented. Avoid sending e-mail to info@/contact@/enquiries@ addresses or submitting online forms unless the company’s either extremely small (< 5 people) or you cannot pull up any other company contact information. sales@ e-mail addresses, however, ARE generally worth sending to. On occasion, you can locate the destination e-mail addresses of web forms by browsing the HTML source code of their containing pages (right-click > View [Page] Source); search for instances of the ‘@’ character.

2. Pull up Whois contacts. The ideal whois contact for pitching to is verifiably an employee of the company you’re pitching to and either a mid-level manager or VP. Google the names on the registrant and admin contacts, to help you determine their affiliations with the company. The technical contact is also worth e-mailing if he/she is an employee of that company (as opposed to an outside IT firm). Contacts protected by whois privacy or who simply have listed their webhost’s information rarely respond to soliciations, even if your e-mail is forwarded to the underlying contact’s inbox. If a company’s info@ e-mail address is listed as their whois admin contact, this is a positive sign as it indicates at least one company official is computer-literate and might understand the benefits of purchasing your domain name. If a specific company member’s business contact info is listed on her website (e.g. sallyg@companyname.com) and her personal contact info listed in the domain’s whois (e.g. sallyg@comcast.net), avoid pitching to her personal e-mail address as she would likely then consider you an intrusive bastard. NOTE: Many ccTLDs, such as .co.uk, do not list e-mail addresses in their whois entries.

3. Jump back in time. Some companies list executives’ contact information on either their website or whois entries but later decide to remove them as an anti-spam measure in the wake of company growth. Other companies initially list contact information but enable privacy to immunize their staff from e-mail harvesting software (most registrars didn’t offer privacy at all pre-2005!). Unfortunately for those companies, the mantra that “no information is private anymore” holds true. Three tools — Archive.org, DomainTools Historc Thumbnails (domaintools.com/historic-thumbnails), and DomainTools History (domain-history.domaintools.com) — allow you to peel off this protective armor by “going back in time” to the point before these companies delisted employee contact information. The first two tools archive renderings of websites, the latter whois entires. DomainTools History is generally the most effective for penetrating privacy protection (though you’ll need a DomainTools Silver account, which costs $15/month). Compare GardenOfLifeUSA.com’s 2004-04-26 whois information to their 2009-07-01 entry. The former contains the CEO’s name / e-mail address of her secretary, whereas the latter lists a gatekeeper-type address. A search on Google or the Manta.com business directory may reveal whether whois-listed name person is, in fact, the company CEO.

4. Wind through Jigsaw.com. Whereas the “Jump back in time” strategy suceeds most often for contacting mid-sized companies, Jigsaw.com is fabulous resource for obtaining contact information of mid-dog and top-dog executives; they higher they rank on the food chain, the more likely it is that Jigsaw.com lists them. You can gain access to these business cards by spending Jigsaw “points”, which you can either purchase outright, or let accumulate by contributing data to Jigsaw.com. Again, aim to contact team leaders and department managers within your prospect company’s marketing or business development divisions.

5. Surf the phone chain. If tactics 1-2 come up short or you can’t afford to try 3-4, call the company’s main number, obtain an operator, and ask to speak with a marketing or business development director in charge of handling business-to-business offers. You’ll like needy to flit through several departments before reaching the director you’re looking for (or his/her voicemail). Alternatively, you could obtain a marketing executive’s name for free via Jigsaw.com and ask an operator to hook you up with him/her directly. Once you’re transferred, be prepared to state your pitch in 30-60 seconds once you’re transferred. If you’re unfamiliar with pitching to corporate executives or you feel uneasy doing so, check out sales trainer Jill Konrath’s amazing blog on this subject at sellingtobigcompanies.blogs.com.

How many of the contacts you gather via these methods should you speak with? Well, e-mailing just the info@ address alone of an established corporation will typically get your message bured instantly. On the other hand, e-mailing your offer to 7 different marketing executives will convey desparation. Overall, we have found the obtimal number of recipients to be 2-3 specific individuals spread across multiple departments (e.g. IT & Marketing), with the highest-ranking executive in the “To:” line and the others CCed. If you’re contacting a small, family-owned business, one individual should suffice. Be sure to address that individual by name in both the subject line (”To Mark – YourSite.com website question”) and in the e-mail body (”Dear Mark”) if you truly wish to maximize your chances.

Happy hunting!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 21st, 2009 at 5:37 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.