If you are cold calling and trying to get your foot in the door of an account and the target prospect never answers his or her phone, this will seem like a significant barrier preventing you from selling to that account. The simple workaround for this is to find other contacts at the account that you can call in order to find another way in. Sure, the other people may be difficult to get a hold of also, but if you increase the number of contacts you are calling from one to three, you increase the odds that you end up talking to someone.
We refer to this process of finding other people at an account as organizational movement, and there are two different types of movement:
Vertical Movement
This is moving up and down the different levels of the department for your target prospect to find new contacts. For example, if your target prospect is the director of finance and you can’t get a hold of that person, you can move up the organization to try to contact the VP of finance. You can also move down the organization to try to contact the finance manager.
Horizontal Movement
This is moving laterally to find contacts in other functional departments. For example, if you are calling the director of finance and can’t get a hold of that person, you can move horizontally to contact people at the same level in other departments, like the director of IT, the director of operations, the director of human resources, etc.
A good tool to use for organizational movement is LinkedIn as it makes it easy to find different contacts at the account that you are trying to get into. Simply go to LinkedIn and perform a search with the company name to find other contacts to pursue.