If you're considering purchasing an email list of CEO contacts in the CRE industry, read this first. There are better ways to find contact information for executives in commercial real estate, including an innovative prospecting tool that's changing the way CRE companies and related businesses connect with each other.
Before we get into the brass tactics, let's talk about three basic types of decision makers -- or decision influencers -- that you should be targeting to grow your business.
Who Are Decision Makers? 3 Basic Types
It's natural to want to go straight to the CEO with your sales pitch, but smart business development professionals understand that there are three types of people you want to reach: end users, gatekeepers and decision makers.
End users
These are the people who actually use your products or services every day. While they may not be decision makers, they may have influence over purchasing decisions.
For example, a proptech company might reach out to property site managers, project managers and construction site supervisors to offer free demonstrations. These end users will be most interested in how new technology might solve their pain points, make their jobs easier, and win points with their bosses.
Gatekeepers
This type of decision maker stands between you and the person who “signs the contracts.” It may be a procurement office or team, especially for a larger or governmental organization. Gatekeepers can also be the mid-level management team that stands between end users and executives.
Gatekeepers care about not only end users' efficiency and productivity but also the greater organization and its bottom line. With our proptech example, the conversation with a gatekeeper changes from day-to-day operations toward topics like ROI, reducing costs, and increasing profit margins.
Primary Decision-Makers
Decision makers are, generally, executives and owners within the CRE organization. They are the primary people or teams who select vendors, subcontractors and suppliers within a commercial real estate operation.
Continuing with the proptech example, the primary decision maker would be most concerned with how adoption of new technology fits within the organization's long-term goals.
Find CEO Phone Numbers, Emails in CRE Industry
First, we’re going to explain how to use Biscred to find CEOs in the commercial real estate industry.
Then, we will show you how to be strategic in your search to reach end users and key personnel who influence decisions within a CRE organization. Yes, the CEO (or COO, CIO, etc.) may have the final say, but there are numerous key personnel who influence his or her decisions.
Using Biscred to find CEOs in CRE
After logging into your account and navigating to Criteria Search and then People Criteria, filter by job title. In this example, we set People Job Titles to “CEO,” and we set People Seniorities to Executive.
There were 122,127 people who met our criteria, and you can see that Biscred's tool included 12 titles beyond CEO (chief financial officer, chief marketing officer, founder, partner, etc.). We can use the search filters to add or remove titles. In this example, we removed chairman, chief investment officer, and chief marketing officer, because they're not likely decision-makers for our hypothetical proptech project.
When we revised our search, we found over 54,342 potential decision makers. Now, we can use our filters to narrow our search based on company industry, company asset experience, location, and size — the details that really matter to the business developer or salesperson.
Don’t stop with the CEO: Do smart searches to find influencers and end users
Let’s say a salesperson at a technology company wanted to demonstrate a web-based project management tool built especially for real estate development. His sales territory is in the Southwest US (Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas).
Instead of reaching out to the company’s top executives, the salesperson used Biscred to identify all the people in their territory who hold the title “project manager” and work for developers. With this information, he finds contact information for 751 people at 363 companies. From there, he can narrow his prospects even more.
Free Ways to Find CEO Contact Info
If you’re looking for the names, phone numbers, and email addresses of individuals in the C-suite of any organization, there are a number of basic ways to search:
Company websites: Visit the company’s website, look at their About Us, and find the names of their leadership (if it’s been published and updated).
Google: Do an internet search (Google, for example) for the company name + CEO, and if you’re lucky, you’ll find what you’re looking for on the first page of search results.
More Googling: Search for the CEO’s name + phone number or email and hope for results, which can be especially challenging if the person has a common name.
Social media: Search social media channels for the company and its leadership’s names.
Public records: If the company is a public company (listed on a U.S. stock exchange), you can try to find the information on the SEC’s EDGAR system, which is a vast database with more than 20 years of records from publicly traded companies.
These methods are free, and they can work, but they take time and patience. Expect to scroll through a lot of misleading information to find accurate contact info. The upside of using conventional search methods like this is that it costs nothing, besides your time.
That said, your time is valuable, isn’t it? There are better ways to find CEOs and other key decision-makers contact information in the commercial real estate industry.
Powerful tools like Biscred are changing the way companies in commercial real estate do business with each other and find leads. In a related post, we explained how to find and contact property owners. But the best way to learn about Biscred is to try it for yourself.
Use this form to request a demo of the Biscred prospecting tool. One of our own business development staffers will reach out to you to schedule a time to walk through the tool, so you can see how it works.
Photo 140557185 | Ceo | Andrii Yalanskyi | Dreamstime.com
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