You closed the deal at the national level. Then the prospect said "we're going to take this to the local markets and see what they think." And you realized you had no idea who those people were.
I had a conversation recently with the VP of Growth at a company that sells into large national health plans — Fortune 500 insurers with operations across dozens of states. His team had built strong relationships at the C-level. Real traction with the national product team. Then the national team said: "Great. We'll take this to the markets."
And his team was completely blind.
The Barbell Problem
The way buying decisions work at these organizations is more distributed than most sales teams realize. A national product team evaluates solutions and builds a portfolio. But the local markets — each with its own P&L, leadership, and priorities — get to pick from that portfolio. Sometimes the local market drives the conversation up. Sometimes the national team pushes it down. Either way, if you're only covering one end, you're exposed.
This VP described it as a barbell approach: you need simultaneous presence at both the national and local level. If the national product team pushes your solution to 30 local markets and nobody there has ever heard of you, you're starting from zero at the worst possible moment — right when the decision is being made.
His team's ask was straightforward: map out every local market. Find the president, the CMO, the chief medical officer, the directors. Build the org chart so they could start evangelizing months before the national conversation trickled down. So that when the national team asks the local market "have you heard of this company?", the answer is "yeah, they've been talking to us for months."
The Roles That Don't Exist on LinkedIn
It gets harder. His Medicaid counterpart told me about a specific type of role — directors of managed long-term services and supports. These are high-value targets. They approve the exact type of services this company sells. And they're almost impossible to find.
They're not at the conferences. They're not posting thought leadership on LinkedIn. They're mid-level managers supervising teams of care coordinators — important enough to kill a deal, but not visible enough to show up in any prospecting tool you can buy off the shelf.
The only clue? They usually have "LTSS" somewhere in their job title. That's it. That's what a seasoned sales leader with a decade in this industry had to work with.
This isn't a niche problem. Every industry has these hidden influencers — people whose titles don't match their authority, whose organizations don't structure roles the way LinkedIn assumes, and who your data vendor has never indexed because they don't fit a standard persona template.
The Timing Trap
There's a second dimension here that rarely gets discussed: knowing when NOT to sell.
That same Medicaid leader told me he'd spent most of the prior year chasing a health plan that looked like an ideal target. They'd recently acquired three smaller plans and won several new contracts. Growing fast. Big footprint. Perfect ICP match — on paper.
In reality, they were the worst possible prospect. They were drowning in implementation work from the acquisitions. Zero bandwidth to evaluate anything new. By the time he realized this, he'd burned months of his best reps' time.
His takeaway was blunt: if a plan just acquired multiple organizations, deprioritize them. There's a window before implementation and a window after where they're receptive. In between, you're wasting cycles on an organization that can't say yes even if they want to. And that's not intelligence you get from a contact database. That's contextual knowledge about what's actually happening inside an account.
What This Actually Requires
Traditional data vendors give you contacts at companies. That's table stakes. What these teams need is organizational intelligence — the full map of who sits where, what they influence, and whether the timing is right to engage.
That's what Salmon does. We don't just return a name and email. We map organizations: the local markets underneath a national entity, the directors who don't surface in Sales Navigator, the leadership structures that vary wildly from one subsidiary to the next. We pull from the live web — team pages, public filings, press releases, conference attendee lists — because that's where these people actually show up.
And when your team needs to know whether a target account just went through three acquisitions and is buried in implementation, we surface that signal so your reps spend time on accounts that can actually buy.
The hardest part of enterprise sales isn't getting in the door. It's knowing which doors to walk through — and when.
If your ABM strategy only covers the top of the org chart, we should talk. Get in touch.