Finding Storage Management Contacts
Finding target prospect organizations is the first requirement. The second is finding appropriate contacts in
those organizations. A list of management level contacts (VP, director or manager) whose sole responsibility is
managing storage would be a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Even a comprehensive list of storage
administrators is elusive. Although it seems counterintuitive based on the importance and growth of storage, the fact is that at the management level there simply are not many contacts available. Only in the biggest of the big storage user organizations will there be a storage management level contact.
At the technical level (ie. storage administrators), we know there are plenty of these folks in the market, but that
contact data just isn’t to be found. Technical contacts in any area of IT have always been a tough market to
track. Frankly, there’s just no money in it for database companies to try and track down technical contacts.
Both Jigsaw and Netprospex maintain large online databases with a lot of contact depth for large organizations.
A simple keyword search for “storage” in contacts at the CXO/VP/Director/Manager levels comes up with 454 contacts in Jigsaw (about 25 million total contacts tracked) and 496 contacts in Netprospex (about 15 million total contacts tracked). This includes contacts at IT companies with storage in their titles as well as a handful of managers at self-storage facilities. This is not a barometer for the number of management contacts that are out there, but perhaps an indicator as to how elusive they are to find.
Storage marketers are generally targeting contacts with ultimate responsibility for storage. In some medium and
most large IT shops it is the operations/data center group that has direct responsibility for storage management.
At the lower end of the market, where operations may be a small group, the CIO/Director of IT will be the most commonly available contact and the place to start.
