Engage more stakeholders by focusing initially on building trust

Hello Sales Reset Community

In the world of B2B sales, closing opportunities is just the beginning. What matters most is when your products and services create evident success for all your customer’s key stakeholders.

Your customers’ success with what they buy from you will keep them coming back for more and telling their friends!

This week, we’ll look at how to find and engage more stakeholders by building trust with your principal contact.

With care, your principal contact will quickly become your strong advocate and champion with their colleagues.

Why Engage More Stakeholders?

When we speak about stakeholders, we mean everybody affected by what you’re selling.

Here’s the critical rule with stakeholders. There are almost always more stakeholders than initially thought!

Think of it this way: every stakeholder is like a puzzle piece that helps you see the bigger picture. Connecting with more people in your client’s organization gives everybody more insights to shape solutions and ensure they hit the mark.

Plus, you can enhance the status of your principal contact with their colleagues. Everybody will see your contact as genuinely keen to understand their colleagues’ needs and priorities.

And with everybody’s priorities understood and prioritised, it’s more likely that better solutions will emerge.

How to build trust to find and engage more stakeholders

1. Collaborate: Instead of “overcoming objections,” actively explore ALL the implications of your customer's goals, including issues that might cause difficulties.

2. Coach: Most salespeople stop at merely ADVISING their customers. Take your selling to the next level by COACHING your customers. Ask your principal contact and other stakeholders great questions to help them develop a better understanding of their challenges and opportunities.

3. Insights: The foundation of your coaching role with customers is your ability to use your specialist product and market knowledge to share valuable insights. You’ll need to invest the time required to acquire new insights continually.

4. Outcomes: Dive deep into what matters to them—not just today, but for the long haul. Explore how your solutions can help your customers achieve what matters to them. Enable each stakeholder to define the specific outcomes that are important to them.

5. Deliver: Whatever you say you’ll do, do! Aim to impress with every contact by preparing effective agendas for meetings, leading those meetings effectively, ending on time and following up reliably. Your goal is “no surprises”!

When you build this kind of trust, your principal contact will be more likely to introduce you to their colleagues. They’ll be more prepared to invest their personal reputation and credibility to support you because you’ve proved you’ll enhance their stature.

The next step is to identify and engage all the key people affected by using your products and services. That’s the topic of our mid-week newsletter.

In the meantime, work hard to build trust so your principal contact will confidently introduce you to their colleagues.

Join us in our FREE Workshop this week

Every week, the members of our Sales Reset Together Community meet online to share stories about the Weekly Sales Reset theme in a small group discussion. It will be great to hear your stories and learn from your experiences!

Join us on Tuesday at 4:30 pm UK time for this week’s Sales Reset Stories Workshop.

Have a great week!

The Sales Reset Team

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