I want you to close your eyes and imagine sitting back in your office, just waiting for the calls to pour in from qualified corporate executive prospects who are actually willing to schedule meetings with you. Isn’t that heaven? Well, that’s the job of a professional Executive Door Opener. By hiring them, you are literally buying meetings with executives who normally wouldn’t even take your call.

How it Works

Paid a finder’s fee or a combination of commission and fee, these professionals either have their own connections or build prospect funnels using any number of outreach combinations (calling, emailing, messaging etc.) to get to the Executive.

What’s Great About It

Why do businesses need this service? Because only 1% of cold calls result in meetings, while 90% of B2B decision makers don’t respond to cold sales outreach. As a business owner, that’s pretty frustrating and scary. Billions are wasted in marketing that doesn’t work and sales reps spend most of their time networking where they don’t meet the hard-to-reach executives that they are targeting. Professional Door Openers cut right to the chase. I hired one myself to book Executive Roundtables all across North America and it has had 5 times the ROI as a stage agent I worked with the previous year.

Limitations

Multiple clients who (before meeting me) hired costly Door Openers and who got the meetings weren’t always successful. They found out that just because you got an audience with a decision maker, didn’t mean you could close the sale. What was missing was a lack of differentiation and sufficient prospect pain to warrant unseating a current vendor who did pretty much the same job.

Word Of Caution

In my opinion,  Door Openers that are relying on their own networks and favours make me more nervous because often you get the meeting without the prospect being in need of what you’re offering. On the other hand, if the Door Opener doesn’t understand marketing and positioning strategy, they are no more successful in getting qualified leads than the people hiring them. In the absence of proper strategy, it’s very hard for anyone to get a meeting with a corporate buyer.

In the end, you have to look at what it is you’re missing to get the meeting. Is it contacts or a true differentiated positioning and marketing strategy? If it’s the latter, no amount of door opening for you will result in growing your company.

Want to reposition your messaging to grow your leads? Follow me on Twitter, friend me on Facebook, watch my Podcast on YouTube or connect with me on LinkedIn –and let’s talk.