What's the best way to target and convert enterprise clients?

I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're asking but to get a list of email addresses to start marketing to, you can use a service like BuiltWith to look up the customers of your direct competitors. Then you start marketing to the list.

You asked "How do you get a list of emails so you can begin targeting potential clients."

1. Create a list your direct competitors.

2. Use BuiltWith to find the companies who use your competitors, aka your competitors customers.

Or you can find ex employees of your competitors using LinkedIn, and ask them how they got their customers and sales leads. I say EX because it's probably easier for an ex employee to give you the information, than a current employee because they probably don't want to help their competitors find leads.

Or you can go to software or industry conferences, then buy the list of attendees, sponsors, companies who rent booths, etc.

Or what I would do to start, since it's free, is to call the top sales people of companies who rent out or sell email/data lists, then ask those sales people how each list was built or compiled, then you copy their method to build your own list. Or you can simply pay the money and buy it from them. Your only choices are to either build it or buy it but you should feel better about buying a list when you know how it was built, since it's cheaper than trying to do it yourself.

At this point you will at least start becoming knowledgeable about lists and how they are built so you should start feeling more confident about buying a list and not getting ripped off. Every business that I've started, I got 95% of the inside information/trade secrets from calling the top sales people in that particular industry and pretending like I was going to potentially become a customer. Because in this scenario, they want to make you like them and will tell you anything you want because if they don't answer your questions, they either look incompetent or not transparent. It's kind of a dick move to waste their time like that but there is no other faster or better way to get the same information. And I just view it as more practice for them because they should know how to qualify a customer and avoid wasting time with customers who won't close. The more knowledgeable you are about your industry and the more you can mimic a real customer for them, the more information you will get from them.

I've also purchased email lists anytime I needed to get a solid list of potential customers.

When doing the math, it's easy to see why these companies exist. Whether it is you or a salesman you've hired, compiling a list of targeted potential sales leads is a very time consuming process so it's always way cheaper to bite the bullet and simply pay the money for a list. If you determine that building your own list manually is the way to go, you might want to revisit your approach because it's almost impossible to justify doing on your own unless you want to pay $10-20 per qualified name on your list...that's is one pricey list.

There are many different qualities when it comes to a prospect list, that you have to consider. For example, what type of prospect list do you want? Do you want the email address or the phone number to the actual decision maker? How do you know who the decision maker is for your type of product and price, at each company? The only way to know who the decision maker is, is to call them and ask someone who actually knows the answer. The company receptionist doesn't know the answer unless the company has 3 employees total.

So even to just build the prospect list, you need someone who can make the initial phone calls into the company, to directly ask the question "Who is the 100% correct person I should be speaking with at your company? Meaning they make the decisions for the exact product i'm selling." At some companies, it might be the CTO, CIO, CFO, Director of Accounting, Controller, Software Engineering Team Lead, it's impossible to know unless you call them.

Now try to think about how long it will take to actually get through to someone who is high enough at the company, to even know who the decision maker actually is? How long do you think this takes and how many people or companies, do you think you can add to the prospect list per day? Not many. So this means that each name on your list is VERY expensive to make.

Unless you are a pro at doing this, each name on your prospect list might cost you $10-20 to actually know the correct person who makes the real decision for what you're selling.

Your approach depends on your goals for the business. And I understand that the IndieHacker community is going to prefer using technology or an inbound approach, over hiring human sales people, but it's all the same thing. When starting out, you either grow faster by doing sales calls or you grow slower by using an inbound or content approach because you can control how many sales people you hire and how many calls per day they make, which means you essentially control the growth of your business. But it's hard to predict how many deals you'll get from each email blast and it's a very fine line when you're sending unsolicited emails because it's basically SPAM. Sending SPAM isn't illegal and you're not going to physically go to jail, but you really have to know what you're doing or your website will get blacklisted with a quickness and you will no longer have any effective email campaigns because your emails will get blocked by the SPAM blockers, so you're limited to how quickly you can grow your business using unsolicted emails.

I started a business where I used unsolicited emails (cold emails) to get customers and it was a hardcore challenge because you had to buy IPV4 IP's, which there are only a limited amount available in the world. I used to pay over $1-2k each at an auction for these IP's. So after succeeding in getting your emails to the intended inbox's, you then had to try to avoid the user reporting you to spam because once too many people report you as SPAM, your inbox delivery rates drop instantly. And you have to purchase an commercial email server software to do any kind of volume. Any software less than a few thousand dollars, won't work because they will be slower than molasses, and companies like MailChimp or ConstantContact or any of the major providers, don't allow you to send unsolicited emails to begin with. They have alerts set up so if you start getting too many people reporting you as SPAM, they'll kick you out because you're hurting their IP addresses.

Sorry for the long winded reply, but this topic isn't super simple depending on what you're selling.

Don't forget LinkedIn for lead generation (LI groups, sponsored content, ad-targeting based on segments, etc.).

A few tips to more easily target and convert Enterprise customers.

The first is with regards to the price point of your product. A good price point when selling to B2B is a price below $500 because most manager level people can expense up to $500 without needing an approval from a superior or the accounting office.

The difficulty of selling something that your customer will need approval for versus not needing approval for, can be a really big difference so something to keep in mind. And if your product is over $500, this is something you want to address from the start with your customer because you don't want to waste a bunch of time with them only to find out they don't have the authority to make the decision. You obviously don't just hang up on them, but it will organically change the conversation and your approach with them once you find out the sale won't close for another 8 months compared with decision makers who can pull the trigger immediately. And almost anyone you talk to will tell you the truth about needing approval or not if you ask them.

Another tip you can use to start a relationship with Enterprise customers, is to develop a cheap training product to sell to them. Something like a "Introductory overview course on X" or "How to avoid X headaches in your industry by using our product" or "The X Competitor Landscape and what you can do to stay ahead of the competition." etc. This way, even the low level employees can buy from you without an approval and it even makes them look good.

With Enterprise, you're way better off if you can figure out a way to make your customer look good to their boss. The majority of employees at Enterprise customers will have their own annual training budget they are required to burn up each year. One of those "Use it or lose it" scenarios, so it's a lot easier to sell them something like a cheap remote training or webinar. If you must, tell them they will be entered into an ipad drawing or something. Think of how much easier it would be to sell your product to them once a bunch of their employees have already bought from you and they all love it etc..This takes pressure off the decision maker because it's safer for them to approve the buy since everyone already has some experience with it and likes it.

Also, having sold a company your training products, no matter how small, increases your chances of closing them as a customer by a lot. Once you exchange any type of money with them, any real transaction with a purchase order, they are now technically your customer. And it's a night and day difference to sell your product to an existing customer than to a complete stranger. You can even start using this fact to sell to all the other departments at their company with an intro like "We've already been successful in working with X over in X department at your company and I was hoping to speak with your group as well,."

This is basically taking the email/content marketing strategy, and using it with Enterprise customers. The reason content/email marketing works is because you start the relationship off by selling them something small first, over deliver and build trust, which technically makes them a customer and a happy one, then it increases the odds of selling them the big product by 10 or 100 times. If they feel repeatedly happy for each transaction, then they will probably be happy again when they buy the main product from you because the past is indicative of the future. If you over delivered on all the small stuff, you'll probably make them happy again on your main product....by this time they've already formed an opinion and already know what it's like to buy something from you, which is a game changer.

For selling big ticket items, you almost have to do it this way because it's not just about the money, but it's also the reputation of the person buying from you. If they don't do their due diligence, it can and will make them look incompetent so they reduce the risk a lot by getting to know you first by doing a small deal with you just to get a feel for the type of company you are.

This isn't just a way to get your foot in the door, but almost a requirement if you want to make career out of selling to Enterprise customers. With Enterprise customers, closing the deal on a low cost thing is basically the beginning of the sales funnel. Money is nothing to Enterprise clients, so spending a little money with you, is their way of showing real interest. Anything else is almost not even considered a lead. If you compare closed deals with people who have downloaded a whitepaper from your website versus purchased a $99 lunch and learn webinar from you, there's a huge difference. The company I worked for, would almost not even sell you anything unless you have first purchased a small training from us so you can make an informed decision and not waste our sales people's time asking questions.

Hope this helps.

Targeting starts before finding email address.

Do you know the types of companies that you're going after? What are the job roles/titles that are responsible for the problem your product solves?

Figure out the reason they would want to start a conversation with you. Did they just reach a hiring or funding milestone? Did they just update their flagship product? Did the person just do a podcast interview or get quoted in an industry article?

Then, when you get the email you have both context and relevance.

https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/startup-get-enterprise-customers

For emails, you can use hunter.io

The other thing is most enterprise customers I've had, they were not really willing to use SaaS products, instead they wanted to have on premise solutions etc. Enterprise market is tough but money is solid.