This post is about something I myself find problematic at times: dealing with corporate end users. Corporate end users are obviously well-funded for the most part but there are particularities is when it comes to this end-user type which makes dealing with such entities cumbersome.

Today, I will address some of the aspects that I think need to be understood so that you know what you’re dealing with.

First and foremost, you have to understand that corporate end users usually don’t get back to you as quickly as other end user types. A lot of times, they will reply in a painfully slow manner. This is because in a lot of cases, the party you are interacting with needs the approval of other people before making a decision. He cannot just decide how much to counter with or whether or not he should accept your offer. He might have to contact another department or one of the higher ups, I’m sure you get the point. As frustrating as it may be, you have to understand that that is simply how things stand and resist the temptation of sending countless follow-up emails because it tends to weaken your negotiation position.

If you are contacting end users directly and want to reach out to a corporate end-user, finding the right decision maker tends to be quite a challenge. Which executives should you contact? Which department is more likely to represent the right choice? You have to ask yourself such questions because if you don’t contact the appropriate person, there’s a very high likelihood that your email will go by unnoticed, even if the end-user in question might have very well been interested in your domain. Now sure, you can simply politely ask the person you’re emailing to forward your message to the right decision maker but yeah, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

Perhaps one of the most frustrating aspects you will come across when dealing with corporate end users is the fact that despite having lots and lots of money at their disposal, a lot of them are tighter than you might have expected. You may very well end up realizing that a multi-million dollar company is reluctant to spend even meant four figures on a great domain name. But that is just how things work. Each department has a budget and for expenses like domain acquisitions, the budget allocation is not always very generous.

Sometimes, corporations spent quite a bit of money on all sorts of seemingly stupid things instead of simply straight out buying your domain. Let me explain. It sometimes happens that the higher ups ask a lawyer to contact you and negotiate the domain sale. I assure you that they pay the lawyers in question a hefty hourly price tag and when it comes to making an offer on your domain, they start being less generous. It really is frustrating to receive a three figure offer from a lawyer hired by that company, who bills them three figures per hour for the oh-so-difficult task of sending you an email. Oh well!

There are more aspects worth highlighting but I’ll stop here. It should be clear by now that despite the fact that a lot of domain investors consider dealing with the corporate and user a blessing, the negotiation process won’t always be as awesome as you might’ve hoped. You can indeed end up selling domains to corporate end users for lots and lots of money but the same way, more often than not, you will end up bitterly disappointed.