10 ways to complex deals with 10+ decision makers
Founder Laura Hannan welcomed Janice B Gordon to her LinkedIn Live to discuss the challenge of selling your solution when up to 20 stakeholders are involved in the decision making process.
Use LinkedIn to research the hierarchy and relationships between stakeholders.
Understand their roles, interests, and how they influence the decision-making process. Identify and understand your champions as in complex deals you will need to have a champion.
Use LinkedIn’s search filters to identify all relevant stakeholders, such as decision-makers, influencers, and potential deal blockers within your target company. You and your colleagues can ‘cross connect’ to make your content more likely to be seen. Personalise your connection requests to make it relevant to each company.
Develop content that addresses the pain points of your stakeholders. Share case studies, whitepapers, or industry insights that demonstrate your expertise and the value of your solution. Have your colleagues like and share your content.
Actively comment on and engage with the content shared by your stakeholders. Provide insightful comments that add value to their posts. This helps build rapport and keeps you on their radar.
Utilise the Sales Navigator feed to get deeper insights into your stakeholders’ activities, such as recent changes in roles, company news, and engagement with specific content. All of these give you conversation starters in the inbox.
Find out more about them, and what they need. Use AI notes when on a call so you can remind yourself – even much further down the line – what they are looking for. If they are attending an event relevant to you, go along to it to meet them in person, see them speak and follow up digitally afterwards to stay front of mind.
Have your follow up primed ready to send straight after the call, check in to make sure it has been received via a short voice note or message. Don’t forget, large companies want the information quickly, but then it has to be circulated around multiple stakeholders – so you need to be there to deliver quickly but don’t expect a speedy response back.
Regularly share updates, ask for feedback, and stay responsive to stakeholders’ concerns. Use LinkedIn’s messaging features for timely follow-ups, ensuring that you remain engaged throughout the deal cycle.
Maintain targeted content throughout. Take note of the language and phrases used by your target company. Mirror their language. This helps to show you are aligned, and understand their needs. On an individual level, communicate in an appropriate way with each stakeholder based on what is important to them in their role.
In long sales cycles a deal may take 6 months to a year to complete. Chances are stakeholders could move on during that time, so it is crucial to build your connections across your target company. It also makes internal referrals more likely, as you stay front of mind for more stakeholders who recognise you for your content, knowledge and visibility. As we say at Pitch121; become the obvious choice.
