Finding decision-makers at a specific site, not just the head office
In industrial sales the decision is often made where the work happens. Here is how we find the right people at the right site, and what cannot be established from the outside.
A company record with one contact at head office looks complete and often is not. If you sell equipment, consumables or services that are used at a plant, a depot or a branch, the person who decides is frequently at that location, and the person at head office may only sign the agreement afterwards, if at all.
The research question is therefore not "who do we know at this company" but "who holds each buying role at the site we want to sell to".
Start by deciding which roles matter where
Write down the roles involved in your sale and where each one usually sits. A group procurement manager may set a supplier panel. A site or plant manager may decide what gets bought under it. A maintenance or safety lead may raise the need in the first place. An operations director may own the budget across several sites.
Those are different people in different places, and the record should hold the association the evidence supports: this person, this role, this site.
Find the site before the person
Group websites describe what the group does. They are a weak guide to what happens at one location. Site pages, job advertisements that name a location, public registers and permits, industry directories and the location on a person's own profile are better evidence of who works where.
Confirm the site exists and what it does before attaching anyone to it. A branch that turns out to be a sales office does not have a maintenance lead.
Then fill each role, honestly
For each role at the site, the research records whoever appears to hold it, the title the evidence shows, and the status of their contact details. Finding the role, verifying an email and finding a direct number are three separate results and the record shows all three.
Where a role cannot be filled, it stays open on the record. An open role is useful information: it tells the rep which conversation will need a referral, and it tells us where to keep looking.
The fictional example
Meridian Industrial Supply, the fictional distributor used across this site, has its head office in Sydney and an unconfirmed number of other sites. On the head-office record, five of six buying roles are found and the safety lead is still open. If the research confirmed a second site, that site would get its own record with its own roles, and the safety lead there might well be a different person from the one at head office. The group record would not be overwritten with site-level people; the site record would carry them.
What the research cannot establish from the outside
Reporting lines, unless they are published. Whether a site manager actually has the authority the title suggests, or has to defer to the group. Whether a person who holds the right role is interested in changing supplier. Those come out of the first conversation, and the record is honest about which of them it does not know.
How we find the right people explains what your team receives. If your sale is decided at the site level, tell us which roles matter and we will say how the search would be set up.