Sales prospecting

Sales Blindspot Alert: Are You Missing Key Players?

As a sales manager, you’ve been down this road before. Yours is a profession with its own unique blindspots — potential dangers that your team shouldn’t take for granted while working to find prospects. These hidden pitfalls can take a deal from freeway speed to a dead stop: On average, 24% of forecasted deals go dark every year.

Our new set of downloadable resources for sellers, the Pipeline Management Kit, is designed to help keep your deals cruising toward a successful close. One major hazard your sales team shouldn’t take for granted is missing or losing key decision makers during the sales cycle.

Salespeople used to be able to reliably close by connecting with the one key decision maker on an account. They could build that single relationship and nurture it for continual business, year after year. But the sales landscape has changed. Twenty percent of buyers change roles annually — that means total turnover in just five years. What’s more: most B2B decisions now involve more than six people.

Your team may need a new model for connecting deep into target accounts. Here’s how you can coach your reps to check this blindspot and avoid a crash.

Check Your Sales Blindspot: Connect with Key Stakeholders

Find Prospects by Mapping the Buying Committee

With some extra research, salespeople can reduce risk before they even make first contact. Instead of looking for one key decision maker, encourage your team to explore the target account’s org chart to find potential stakeholders. The list should include:

  • The final decision maker
  • Advisors to the decision maker
  • Department heads where your solution will be implemented
  • End users of the solution
  • Up-and-comers who may gain influence over time

Sales Navigator can help your team gain visibility into the account to identify the entire buying committee. Buyer Circle, a feature within Sales Navigator Deals, helps you clearly identify key players and provides insight on how best to approach them.

Build Multiple Relationships within Accounts

With key stakeholders identified, your team should make multi-threading a priority. Digital selling can help start and build relationships. Encourage your salespeople to follow these individuals on LinkedIn, engage with their posts, and share helpful content targeted to each person’s unique needs.

This approach helps build a web of relationships at the target account, drastically reducing risk. If a single stakeholder changes roles or leaves the company, the other points of contact can smooth the transition. And, of course, the more decision makers your salesperson can influence, the quicker the sales cycle should be.

Update Relationships throughout the Sales Cycle

As the deal progresses, reps should keep in contact with each decision maker. That doesn’t mean constantly pressuring for a close. Rather, it means providing value, sharing content, even helping them with problems that aren’t directly related to your solution.

It’s important for your salespeople to keep a record of the developing relationship with each member of the buying committee. The better they track each point of contact, the more relevant and valuable they can be with each interaction.

Use Sales Navigator to Track Relationships

As the manager, it’s crucial for you to know if your team is connecting and fostering relationships with the right people. Sales Navigator can help you keep track of who your reps have connected with and how the conversation is progressing.

Sales Navigator Deals gives you and your reps a centrally visible place to monitor each deal in real-time, including current status, relevant information, and all the people involved.

These insights can inform coaching sessions and make your instruction more focused and efficient, ultimately guiding your reps to close more deals.

 

Help your reps avoid stalls and crashes: Download The Pipeline Management Kit.

 

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