In today’s sales landscape, companies focus more and more on the large, complex, long-cycle deals that have come to be known as “Megadeals.” These megadeals involve a higher than average number of multiple stakeholders and decision makers with complex, and sometimes, conflicting, goals and needs.
In a recent McKinsey article, Landing the Megadeal – Seven Keys to Closing Big Sales that Make Money, sales experts David Levitch, Aditya Pande and Brian Selby focused on key strategies necessary to win these unique deals. McKinsey described closing these deals as “the holy grail of many sales organizations”, as 40 percent of projected revenues comes from just one percent of deals in the pipeline. Losing these megadeals can mean missing revenue targets all together.
To prevent your team from missing these targets, it is critical that sales teams can identify, connect and access the key stakeholders and decision makers that ultimately influence and control the strategic relationships, budget and purchasing process. With that said, relationship mapping is a critical process that can help sales teams win more value-creating megadeals and ultimately achieve predictable, long term revenue growth.
The Value of Adding Relationship Mapping to Your Sales Strategy
In today’s modern sales environment, sales leaders must have a full understanding of the stakeholders and decision makers involved on the buyer side. Yet research shows that only half of sales reps can effectively navigate to the right people in the buying cycle.
According to a recent CSO Insights Sales Optimization Survey, the “average” sales opportunity has 45 decision makers – this is even larger for megadeal opportunities. It is critical that sales reps not only identify these decision makers, but more importantly earn their votes.
Relationship maps are visual maps of the key players that enable sales teams to quickly identify the ‘must have’ votes and where the risks are in an account or opportunity. The recent McKinsey article reinforced the value of relationship maps, claiming “companies that manage relationships well use deal-relationship maps to understand who matters, as well as what matters to each party: price, quality, service”.
Once you have these relationship maps, you can reinforce your sales strategy and ensure that your sales messages are resonating with the critical stakeholders throughout the sales process. The McKinsey article stresses that if relationships are going to deliver, “senior leaders need to be involved.”
Leveraging Relationship Maps to Drive Strategic Selling
Visual relationship maps like Revegy’s help you gain a full understanding of the most important stakeholders, how they’re connected within the organization, and help your teams focus on execution tactics and activities to gain access and communicate value to the individuals influencing the budget and buying decisions. Visualizing this information with a relationship map, representing friends, foes, and third-party influencers, is critical to helping your team identify gaps in relationships and build quality relationship development plans. Revegy’s Relationship Maps take the blinders off of megadeals, and allow sales teams to do the following:
- Quickly and easily map contacts from your CRM and visually connect the dots – from coaches and stakeholders, to decision makers and procurement, organizational charts are easily built with drag and drop functionality.
- Analyze scorecards to identify who is friend and who is foe and the strength of the relationship.
- Determine the relationships that you need to grow and any political risks that may need to be neutralized.
- Avoid surprises that could arise from new players entering the sales cycle unexpectedly.
- Align sales tactics to the priorities, initiatives and goals that matter most to each individual.
With relationship maps and an understanding of who matters, as well as the routes to power, you will be one big step closer to closing the gaps on those all-important megadeals and reaching your revenue targets.
