How to contact CEO of a company

CEOs are really busy and they don't provide their contact email addresses to avoid spam. Well, I wanna contact CEO of a X company, using the [email protected] really will not help that those emails will never get forwarded from support team to CEOs. I hardly believe the FAX may work up to some extent. So, how can I a contact CEO of a company to make a business proposal?

Contact someone else in the company who may know already or is more accessible. Ask them who you should get in contact with to discuss your proposal. Make sure you are courteous to everyone you communicate with and go through the appropriate channels- will give you more credibility and increase your chances of approaching higher ups with your proposal.

Also, you may want to join Linkedin and make contacts through other mediums at that particular business.

Great question! Working directly under a CEO, I think I have some experience that can help. The key here is determination.

Step 1: Try to contact the CEO's secretary or business administrator. Usually you can find a phone number by looking at the company headquarter's contact us page.

Step 2: Once you've got somebody real on the phone, see if the CEO is willing to take phone calls. If not, make sure that they have a personal relationship with the CEO and can pass your message along to him/her before getting into what the message actually is.

Step 3: Once you have established that this person is your connection, let them know that you have something very important that the CEO will be very interested in hearing about. Mention that you think the CEO would lose out if you didn't get to speak with him/her (presumably what you have to say will actually benefit the CEO in some way). Show only what the CEO will gain from talking to you. He/she will NOT be interested in doing you a favor, unless it is worth his/her time. Form your case in this "how I can help you" attitude, and chances are the secretary will not want to skip out on an oppurtunity to pass along information that could help his/her boss.

Be confident and relentless, and don't stop until you've either spoken to him/her, or heard first hand that the CEO is not interested. Unless you are willing to go to extremes to speak with the CEO, chances are what you have to say isn't going to be worth his time anyway.

My guess is that if you don't know how to effectively establish basic contact, then your "business proposal" is not going to be well received.

I see these emails all the time sent to random generic addresses from people with a message "Please forward to [CEO]..." I don't think that ever works well.

I would suggest you use tools like LinkedIn, or other means to establish some kind of legitimate contact FIRST, and then send your proposal.

If CEO's of any reasonably sized organization weren't able to filter out all the sales pitches (or business proposal if you like that phrase better), when would they have time to run their company?

Start by making your company the one the decision makers seek out, rather than being the troublesome sales person they have to filter out. Go to trade shows where people meet with the expectation of being sold, rather than calling them at their place of work when they are trying to run their company. Get your solution reviewed or advertise in places your customers will see.

I'd also suggesting using social networks that are geared towards business. Make connections on LinkedIn, but don't forget that there are lots of offline resources as well.

Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy.com, and I were talking on the phone a while back. He interviewed me and he pretended to be a guest while I asked him questions on the phone. The topic was, how can you connect with other successful entrepreneurs. While some stuff may not apply in your case, I believe most of the tactics can be used to contact CEOs.

Andrew even gave me real life examples of each topic, but I have forgotten the examples as they were on the phone.

Tactic 1: Solve their problems ; If the CEO you are trying to contact has a problem with his company, say his webdesign is really unattractive, you can help him out. This looks like a thoughtful gesture than a cold call. I have actually used this to get more LOCAL customers for web designs.

Tactic 2: Get someone to introduce you ; This tactic is very tricky because in order for this to work, you need someone who knows your target CEO. Again, this is way better than a cold call as someone suggested. I used this tactic to talk to Tim Ferris while he was on a trip! Do you think an entrepreneur would take timeout of his vacation and reply to some cold caller? NO! I got someone to introduce me to Tim Ferris.. he knew and trusted the person and knew they wouldn't waste his time.

Tactic 3: Use WHOIS ; If the company is small enough, say founded by a couple of friends.. this will work. In your case though, I highly doubt it. Still, wanted to leave this here for someone else.

Andrew listed some other ideas, but I actually forgot them. This conversation occured over a month ago. I am sorry if I didn't give you a lot of insights. I tried to be a wiseass and asked Andrew, what if I didn't know someone who knew the CEO? He said, if you know their name, solve their problem first and get an introduction :P

I believe you can go really far with Tactic #1. If I can use it to talk to Tim Ferris, you can use it for so much more. Andrew gets so many of his guest contact infos from Neil Patel.