Issue 5 - Is Your Stakeholder Investigation Running Long?

This week’s edition: How to find the right people to involve in your deals, plus the headlines you need to know about, and the latest feature drops to keep on your radar.

When your prospect hops on the first call with you, they don't bring their whole buying committee along with them.

Although that would be nice, wouldn't it? The average size of the buying committee has bloated, and if you fail to build the right relationships with the right people, it could decelerate the deal and thwart your overall conversion rate.

But the reality is, identifying stakeholders and members of the buying committee is a bit of a search party.

Thankfully, it doesn't have to be.

In his article Identifying, Engaging, and Assessing Our Stakeholders, Bob Apollo details the ways you can shorten the guessing game, and get the right contacts. The TLDR is, you need to:

• Ask existing contact(s) who else is likely to have an interest in the project.
  
  
• Asking existing contact(s) how similar decisions have been made in the past.
  
  
• Review previous similar sales opportunities and see which roles were involved.
  
  
• Scan LinkedIn to find likely members of the decision-making community.

It's doable, but it also seems like quite a bit of work and manual research. Fortunately, you can streamline the process with the right tooling. But what kind of tooling is up for the job?

1.) Use data-driven tooling to identify similar deals

Combing through old deals and looking at stakeholders one by one is tedious. Instead, use tools that leverage your CRM data to do the hunt for you. It'll cluster deals based on certain fields like geography, deal size, industry, and more. Get your insights sent right to you so you can spend more time on outreach.

2.) Go in with the right approach based on stakeholder sentiment

Reaching out to the stakeholders you are in contact with already is a good strategy, according to Apollo, but you could reach out to them most effectively if you have visibility on their sentiment. By utilizing a tool that offers a features like contact mapping, you can evaluate a lead's sentiment toward your product and go in with a custom approach. It'll shed light on:

• Any objections that you need to address
• Which product features they really enjoyed
• Which other departments they might need to circle back with

Department recs

In addition to using tooling that finds individual stakeholders, look for one that supports department recommendations. By leveraging the same data it would use to find individuals, these tools identify key departments to prospect and accelerate your deal.

Identify and the right stakeholders today, with Pod

Don't dedicate a big chunk of your day to investigating individual historical opportunities. It just might cost you the deal.

Instead, book a demo with Pod. We support identifying similar deals, making department recs, and contact mapping. We'll do the data, you'll do the selling.

Bite-sized stories

Headlines of the week:

• Signs You Need a More Robust Reporting Solution
• Case Study: Why Zach Hoffman Looks For Tooling Build For Sellers
• Surf & Sales Podcast: It Takes More Than Hustle

Managing the buying committee has never been easier

How do you make sure you optimize your buying committee and arrive to every call extra prepared?

Right here we've got the deets on contact mapping and framework analysis to help with that.

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