Sales enablement: Why you need relationship maps

Video Transcript

Dave: We know that in traditional, kind of bull markets, I think Gartner says there’s usually between six and 10 people involved in a buying committee. Now that’s in a bull market. Right now in this bear market, I wonder if there’s even more than that. How do you tend to operationalize your team? Or have you done anything to try and help facilitate that?

Eric: Yeah we’ve tried to tackle that at two levels. The account and looking overarching at the account — who are all the players inside the account and being able to see that relationship map, you know, from a planning and strategy perspective. And we really encourage the reps to do that, you know, not just once a year at the beginning of the year, but to keep that maintained for their key accounts and understand what’s happening inside the account.

I mean, people are moving all the time between executive roles inside a company and outside of their company. So not knowing how that network of leaders is changing and some of the biases that can come in with those leaders. Oh that’s an IBM leader or that’s this, that, or the other. I mean it has an impact if you go mid cycle on four of five different strategies and somebody comes in and they have a tendency to go with a different company as their primary strategy. So that’s the account side of it.

And then we do similar at the opportunity level where the sellers can create the opportunity, team, both internal, who do they need inside of our company to address this account, as well as the customer’s buying side, relationship, or network. And also add it’s not just an org chart. It’s who’s a proponent of us, who’s helping us shepherd that deal through on the customer buying side. Who are the resistors or decision makers that don’t want to talk to you at all? How many layers is this gonna have to go through for approval to try and bring that intelligence into the opportunity level and makes for a much different discussion with the sales account team and the sales management team and the executive team above them inside of our company on how they can help.

They might know some of those key players at those levels or it might open the door for a different conversation that will help that seller progress the solution for the customer and really focus on what the customer needs instead of on the approval process itself.

Want to learn more?

Ready to hear more from Eric Chapman, VP of Sales Operations and Enablement at Hexagon?

You can listen to his in-depth interview in Episode 20 of the Revenue Optimists series. We’ll see you there.