Account Executive

February 28, 2023

Discovery Stakeholder Mapping: How-to & Template

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.

Stakeholder filled calendar 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.

Stakeholder map template

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!
Account Map template by Pickle

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.
Post-meeting follow up email template

Back to the Discovery menu

Next article: 4 Better Sales Conversation Starters

You'll like these emails 🥒

Pickle writes to their friends every few weeks with spicy tips to make their wall-to-wall meetings suck less.
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