Too many cooks in the kitchen🧑🍳
You will face this in sales at some point.
A meeting gets booked & multiple decision influencers are added to the invite.
This is meeting #1.
You're F'd. What do you do?
Discovery Stakeholder Mapping
Take a deep breath & starting mapping the journey out before the 1st meeting happens.
Research
Check out:
- Each buyer’s LinkedIn (personal growth & responsibilities)
- Company website (brand, mission, customer use cases)
- Job openings (for tech stack, team expectations, etc.)
- Crunchbase (funding, press releases, investors)
Find more than one hypothesis for each buyer. Why do you think they’re included in the invite?
Research everything you can, and multi-tier your hypothesis.
Assume Access
They are on the invite, email & all.
Assume it’s cool to reach out preemptively. Email, LinkedIn & phone.
Get interactions with all of them if possible.
You’re looking to find out:
- Their goals & priorities
- How their role & team operates alongside the other buyers
- How big of a problem do they have
- Where do they fall in the decision-making process
Stakeholder Mapping
Create a stakeholder map to track where each buyer falls within your sales process.
Use your best judgment to place them in the correct quadrant, but it’s a fluid chart.
It’s pretty straightforward to chart manually. But…
💡Pro Tip💡
If you have multiple deals at once (as you should) & want buyer conversation data mapped automatically back to your CRM, check out Pickle Conversation Maps!
Treat The Meeting Like A Demo
Alright, it’s meeting time! Set expectations for the meeting.
Bring all your side conversations to the forefront of the meeting.
"Having chatted with all of you, here are the themes I heard…”
With so many parties involved, you can't burn everyone's time with discovery and not do a demo.
It'll be a horrible experience. Hence having conversations beforehand.
This will set you and them up for a successful first meeting.
Post Meeting Follow Up
Always put together a follow-up to the conversation & tee up the next way point.
Include:
- Each buyers's name & something they care about
- Outline the features that caught their attention
- Outline 1 - 2 benefits for each on of those features.
Next article: 4 Better Sales Conversation Starters
