Stop your team members falling into the trap of having only one or two contacts

Hello Sales Reset Leader

How often have your team members fallen into the trap of having only one or maybe two principal contacts in a customer or opportunity?

This week’s Sales Reset focuses on significantly increasing the number of engaged stakeholders in every selling situation.

We hope that by the end of the week, your team members will ALWAYS be trying to find and actively engage more stakeholders! 😀

Here’s what to expect this week:

• First newsletter: How to find more stakeholders

• Mid-week newsletter: How to engage these additional stakeholders in co-creating proposals.

The rest of this email newsletter assumes you have read this week’s first Weekly Sales Reset“:

• Title: Improve sales results by coaching your customers about multiple stakeholders

• Subtitle: Practical multithreading to develop better priorities and required outcomes

How to improve your team's results this week

• Where to look for evidence

• Expected pushback

• Role-Play Recommendations

Where to look for evidence

We strongly recommend reviewing the evidence before your coaching sessions with each team member. The evidence you find will make your coaching significantly more effective.

Before you meet with your team members for your 1:1 coaching sessions this week, here’s where to find the evidence you need. 

• CRM: How many contacts are identified when you look at your team member’s CRM records? If you can do the reporting, what is the average number of associated contacts per opportunity or customer record?

• Emails and Proposals: How many stakeholders are identified in emails and proposals?

• Priorities and Outcomes: If you see evidence of these multiple stakeholders, how effectively have your team members identified each stakeholder’s unique priorities and preferred outcomes?

Expected pushback

So you know what to expect and can be prepared, here are three areas of possible pushback from your team members.

1. My contact is not prepared to involve colleagues: This might result from a policy mandated by your customer’s buying processes. Or it might result from an individual’s insecurity or lack of commercial awareness!

2. I did identify multiple stakeholders but didn’t refer to them in CRM or proposals: You might conclude to adopt the policy that if it’s not in your CRM, it didn’t happen!

3. My principal contact didn’t know: Especially if buying a product or service infrequently, it’s unlikely that somebody will have thoroughly thought through the implications for all significant stakeholders. This is a terrific opportunity for your team member to co-create value as they coach their customers.

What are your best responses now that you know these potential pushback areas?

Role-Play Recommendations

1. Best Current Opportunity: Role-play a discussion about the potential range of stakeholders in your team member’s current best opportunity. Use the questions in Weekly Sales Reset.

2. Most Significant Next Meeting: Look in your team members' calendars. What is the most significant next meeting? Role-play the part of the meeting that discusses multiple stakeholders.

3. Biggest Recent Loss: Role-play the conversation that might have taken place about multiple stakeholders in a recent significant loss. What impact might this have had on who won the business?

(You may find these recommendations about using role-play helpful.)

We hope you’ve found this edition of Sales Reset Leaders valuable.

Have a great week!

The Sales Reset Team

Do your team members subscribe to our companion weekly newsletter, Weekly Sales Reset?