Understand your buying group with Stakeholder Mapping

Stakeholder Mapping

In B2B sales we often talk about the ‘buyer’, but the buying group is not just one person. So how many people are there? We did some research over the past few years, and we found that SEs across the world were reporting on average 4.8 stakeholders per deal. In fact, Gartner did similar research and found that Account Executives see on average between 11 and 20 stakeholders. 

We found at least 16 stakeholders can be involved in the buying group. Now you might be going through that buying learning journey yourself – have a think about how many colleagues you have that are interested in this project and that you have to help understand the various nuances and benefits that you have suggested. No matter what the actual number is, there are lots of people involved, so trying to make sure that they are helped is very important. 

So we have our champion. Usually the person most invested in the project, and the one saying ‘this is going to work’. But you’ve also got other people. Depending on your product it may be a Finance Manager or Chief Customer Officer bringing in change and software to make a difference. If your champion has gone all the way through the buying journey and is ready to commit, the other people in the buying group probably aren’t. Maybe they’re feeling left behind, so they may actively serve to stop that project or slow it down. Making sure you get all of them on board is very important. Also, don’t forget IT; I’ve personally spent a lot of time in IT and security in my career and certainly servicing those technical people with information, who usually come along at the end of the decision making process, asking all sorts of questions and extra details. So it’s key to remember that there are all sorts of stakeholders. 

One of the ways we can help with that in Consensus is the Buyer Matrix. When you send them a demo, you get to see who’s been clicking on it and who’s been selecting what’s very important, somewhat important and not important for their learning journey as they customise the demo to their needs that day. What you’ll find is the dark green dots represent the selection as very important. These people feel these items are very important… a great bit of discovery. Light green are somewhat important, and the clear dots are topics, they’ve selected as not important for their learning journey today. 

For each stakeholder interacting with your demo either during the start of that buying journey or all the way through, you get to see a heatmap because you’re always helping them.,. The heatmap provides an overview of how they’ve interacted with the videos. Each feature is represented here, and their watch time is represented by the different colours. Green they’ve watched once, orange they’ve watched twice, and the darker it gets the more times they’ve watched that part of the video.

In this example, ‘How Consensus Personalizes the Demo’ might have been very important to the viewer, so they’ve watched that part quite a few times. Either way, it’s very important that when you do speak to them, ask them why it struck their interest. It’s great that they interacted with that and learned a bit more, so why not uncover the reasons behind that?

Stakeholder Enablement

How do we then enable these stakeholders to move themselves through their buying journey? Certainly it’s not by saying “Hey, which sales stage are you at now?” They’re in buying stages: It’s a buying motion. So I would recommend the DEEP-C framework. We’ve found it particularly helpful for  really enabling the champion. Discovering who the champion is, who the other stakeholders are, though them engaging those other stakeholders and equipping them with what they need. Personalising that information to those other stakeholders is absolutely key, and it’s a coaching methodology that helps this whole process. It’s available in Garin Hess’ book Selling is Hard, Buying is Harder or you can find out more here on our website.

For more details on the DEEP-C framework we've built an interactive course right here in Consensus Academy! Search for DEEP-C or the word Coach.