When contacting a potential client make sure it’s the appropriate person

Within an organisation there are generally four types of person that will be useful to you These are:

• Level One-The person who signs off your appointment and signs the cheque. This will be someone like the Chairman, Managing Director, Works Director, Facilities Director.
• Level Two- The technical person who has the responsibility to select the appropriate person for the project. This will be someone like Works manager, Facilities Manager, Procurement Officer, Works Engineer, and Estates Manager.
• Level Three- The end user who will use the facility once completed. This will be someone like Department head, Head Doctor/Nurse, Headmaster.
• The influencer – There is also, within organisations the Influencer. This could be someone like the Finance Director or Human Resources Director who may not have a direct involvement in the process but may have a degree of influence in the selection process.

You will find that unless the organization is very small it will be very hard to contact, from a cold start, the level one person. Also the level three people will not have the appropriate influence and knowledge of the process to be very useful to you at the very beginning of a relationship. The person to target is the level two people. Win them over and they will sing your praises and introduce you to the other two levels and influencers. You will probably need to win over all levels eventually.

The first task for the professional is to establish a relationship within the target client organisation. If you do not establish the roles of the various people within the organisation you may run the risk of “selling” to the wrong person. You need to find out quite early how the target client goes about deciding who they use. Therefore there is a need to establish:

• Who is the decision maker? Does that rest with level two who just gets level one to sign off? Or does level two make recommendations to level one who therefore also needs to be nurtured early on?
• Who will be the users, who are the most powerful?
• Who are the influencers?