How to find the right person at a large company

At a company of 20,000 people, the person who owns your problem has a title you can't guess. You search for "VP Engineering", find forty of them, and pick one at random. Three weeks later you still have no reply.

The fix is to stop searching by title and start searching by problem. This article shows a method for finding the one to three people at a large company who actually care about what you sell, and how to check that you found the right ones before you write to them.

Why titles fail at a large company

In a small company the CTO owns everything. In a large one, the same work is split across business units, platforms, shared services and regions, and each unit uses its own titles. "Head of Platform", "Director, Developer Experience" and "Senior Manager, Cloud Foundations" can all describe the person who owns your tooling decision. "Vice President" at a bank can mean a mid-level manager.

So a title tells you rank, not ownership. You want ownership: who is responsible for the problem your product solves, in the part of the company that has it.

Step 1: Pick the unit, not the company

Large companies rarely buy as one body. Before you look for a person, decide which team has the problem. Three places to look:

• Job posts. A posting for "Site Reliability Engineer, Payments Platform" names a team, a location and often the tools in use. The team that is hiring is the team with the work.
• Engineering writing. A conference talk or blog post from one team shows that the team exists, what it runs and who speaks for it.
• Public repositories. If the company publishes code, the organization page and recent commits show which teams are active and who maintains what.

Write the unit down in one line: "Payments platform team, hiring two reliability engineers, posted October 6." Everything else in this method hangs off that line.

Step 2: Find the people near the work

With a unit in hand, look for three kinds of people. You rarely need all three; you need to know who each would be.

Start with the first kind. They answer email from strangers more often, and they can tell you who the other two are. Asking "Who owns tooling decisions for your team?" is a better first question than a pitch.

Step 3: Confirm they still work there

Large companies reorganize constantly, and a profile can lag behind a job change by months. For every name you plan to contact, check two things on the day you write:

1. Current employer and title. Check a source updated recently, such as the company's own team page or a conference listing from this year.
2. Fit with the unit. A person who moved to a different business unit last quarter is the wrong person, even if the old title looked right.

Write the check date next to the name. A list of names with no date is a list of guesses. If you can't confirm someone, mark them "unconfirmed" and move to the next name before you spend an email on them.

Step 4: Write down why each person cares

For each person, write one sentence that links them to a fact. "Owns on-call for payments, which posted two reliability roles this month" is a reason. "VP at a large bank" is not.

If you can't write the sentence, you don't yet have a reason to contact that person. Keep researching, or skip them. The method for researching a technical account covers where to find the fact.

Step 5: Choose your order

You will have a list of five to ten people. Don't contact all of them on the same day. A sensible order for a large company:

1. The person closest to the problem, with the strongest dated reason.
2. Their team's owner, a week later, with a note that references what the first person's team is working on. Don't claim you spoke with the first person unless you did.
3. The reviewer, only when the deal reaches a technical review.

If the first person points you to someone else, follow that pointer before your own list. It is the best information you will get.

Common mistakes

• Going high. Writing to an executive of a 20,000-person company because the title is impressive. They forward it to a stranger, or don't.
• Going wide. Writing to twelve people in one unit on the same morning. They compare notes, and you look careless.
• Trusting a purchased list. A list's data was right on the day it was built. At a large company, many of those people have moved since.
• Reaching for personal information. You need work facts: role, team, public work. Nothing about private life belongs in this research.

A worked example

Where Repclose fits

Repclose does the first pass of this work. You upload your accounts and a sales profile, and it ranks the accounts against that profile. For the top-ranked accounts only (the top 10 by default), it lists about 10 people, gives the top 5 a profile check, and writes a short card on why each might care. Each point links to its source, with the publication date where one is available. It works from public information about people at work, and anyone it suggests can opt out.

It gives you a starting list. You still confirm that each person is current and decide whom to contact first. See what the output looks like in the sample brief, or try your own accounts.