What have you learned about engaging more stakeholders this week?

Hello Sales Reset Community

Finding and engaging more stakeholders is crucial, especially in your more significant opportunities. Multithreading relationships is a key to your sales success.

We started our Weekly Sales Reset this week with the assumption that there are almost always more stakeholders than initially thought!

We introduced the need to earn the trust of your initial contact. The first person you speak with in a new opportunity must be sufficiently confident before introducing and recommending you to their colleagues. 

We looked at some key ways you can build this trust: 

1. Collaborate: Working together to define challenges and opportunities. 

2. Coach: Take your selling to the next level by COACHING your customers. 

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 and ask great questions. 

4. Outcomes: Dive deep into what matters to them. 

5. Deliver: Whatever you say you’ll do, do!

How to make your principal contact a hero

In your mid-week newsletter, we examined how to make your principal contact a hero.

You’ll do this by helping them understand more of the investment implications they’re considering. One of the most significant outcomes of coaching your customers will be their growing awareness of other people who might be affected. 

You’ll help your contact prioritise these additional stakeholders. Together, you’ll develop an action plan for recruiting these stakeholders to join your discussions. 

You’ll enable your principal contact to improve their standing with their colleagues. They’ll be seen as genuinely motivated to identify and incorporate broader needs and priorities as proposals are developed.

Like every other aspect of selling, a key topic when coaching your contact about stakeholders is “What’s in it for me?” 

After identifying and prioritising stakeholders, help your contact think through WIIFM for each stakeholder. That’s how to get them engaged!

Reflection and learning at the end of the week

Here are some questions to help you reflect at the end of the week on all that you’ve learned:

• More Stakeholders? Looking back over your week, in which situations did you identify more stakeholders?

• WIIFM? How effectively did you coach your principal contact about: “What’s in it for me?” for each stakeholder?

• Stakeholder Engagement: What was the best example this week where you successfully increased the engagement of additional stakeholders? How did this increased engagement affect the probability of winning the business?

Join us in our FREE Workshop next week

Join us for our Sales Reset Stories Workshop next Tuesday at 4:30 pm UK time.

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

Have a great weekend!

The Sales Reset Team

Does your sales team leader or coach subscribe to our companion weekly newsletter, Sales Reset Leaders?