Improve sales results by coaching your customers about multiple stakeholders

Hello Sales Reset Community

Most people in B2B sales roles know the importance of involving multiple stakeholders.

In recent years, we’ve started using the term “multithreading,” which describes the growing number of people we must include in our selling conversations.

We do this because buying decisions can often involve 6-10 stakeholders. These stakeholders will often have very different roles and priorities. By engaging various decision-makers, we can:

• Include a broader range of priorities

• Build more support

• Accelerate decisions

• Increase win rates

• Reduce risk

• Make successful outcomes more likely

Here’s one practical recommendation for engaging multiple stakeholders more effectively.

Coach your customers about multiple stakeholders

At Sales Reset, we emphasise the need to coach our customers. It’s one of our core selling skills.

Coaching customers means using your product and market knowledge to ask them great questions. Your goal is to help your customers figure things out for themselves.

Coaching customers is so much more effective than doing all of the talking yourself and trying to persuade them! 😀

Why should you coach your customers about stakeholders?

The person you’re speaking with might not be sufficiently aware of the impact your discussions have on others.

Here are some coaching questions you can ask your customers this week to identify a broader range of stakeholders:

• Who else might be affected by what we’re discussing today?

• How do you and your colleagues typically approach situations like this to ensure everybody’s priorities are considered?

• Who might feel left out if they were not actively involved?

• Where will the outcomes of these changes be most significant?

Here are some follow-up questions after you’ve identified some of these additional stakeholders:

• You mentioned [insert stakeholder name]. From their perspective, what might be their key priorities?

• How would the changes we’ve discussed impact them?

• What might be the best outcomes for them of these proposed changes?

• How might their priorities lead to changes in how we approach these early stages of discussion?

What to expect on Wednesday

Today’s newsletter is all about how to FIND more stakeholders.

In your mid-week newsletter on Wednesday, we’ll recommend ways to ENGAGE with these stakeholders to co-create more compelling proposals.

We’ll be very interested to hear about your experience with these ideas and your suggestions for involving more stakeholders.

Have a great week!

The Sales Reset Team

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