Trying To Sell Domains To End-Users? Make Sure You Are Talking To The Right People

Everyone wants to sell their domain names to end-users right? It has always been the holy grail of Domain Investing, take a name you bought for a few hundred or a few thousand dollars, and flip it for a huge profit to an end-user that will put it to good use. Selling to end-users is also an incredible art, just ask any professional broker who does it and they’ll tell you it is no easy task.

Selling to end-users has a lot to do with finding the “right” end-users, and contacting them at the right time. Sometimes timing will work in your favor, other times it won’t, but if you’re not contacting the right people then you might not be seeing the results you’re looking for.

So I thought now would be a good time to share some of the lessons I’ve learned recently when selling domains to end-users. In the last year I’ve learned a lot about the importance of targeting and really understanding who is is that you’re emailing, before you email them. Many Domainers use automated tools to give them large lists of email addresses that they email. While I still use automated tools like Estibot and LeadRefs to find end-user leads, I go a few steps further to really qualify each person that I’m emailing.

Below is the process that I’ve been following:

  • For each end-user lead I use DomainTools to see how many domains they own. Typically if you find that someone has hundreds of domains, it’s not an end-user, it’s another Domainer. While you can certainly email all the Domainers you want, don’t expect to sell for end-user prices to Domainers. I personally filter these guys out and really look for companies with less than a handful of domains to their name.
  • Next I look at the company website and pay careful attention to their “Title” tag. This will help me understand what keywords they are trying to rank well for. Hopefully my domain name exactly matches one of their top keywords.
  • Once I know this information I do a Google search and see how the company ranks for their targeted terms. My hope is that the company uses the keywords in my domain within their title tag, and they are nowhere to be found on page one for the term. If the company is already ranked well for the term it’s going to be a harder sell.
  • Finally, the very last step I take is looking through the company website to find a decision-maker. While the WHOIS contact might be perfect, you’ll want to make sure you’re contacting a real decision-maker and not some tech guy in a lab.
  • In some cases I will actually call the company first and ask for who would be the right person to contact about domain names. About 50% of the time I find that they know what I’m talking about and provide me the appropriate contact info – in fact, this happened to me in Q4 of last year with one of the largest Credit/Debt companies on the planet!

I found that at the end of the day there was very little correlation between the domains that sold and the number of people I emailed. In fact, one of my best sales of the year came from sending only four emails. So if you’re trying to sell domains to end-users, take the extra time to really qualify who you’re emailing and make sure that you are truly contacting the right people.

Your time is valuable, don’t waste it emailing the wrong people. Don’t be afraid to pick-up the phone, it’s all about finding the right person to contact, and that can often be a bit more involved than just looking at the email address on their WHOIS record.

As always I would love to hear from you! Please feel free to share your own end-user sales techniques or share any end-user sales stories, tips, or tricks you’d like to! Comment and let your voice be heard!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton