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You can try drawing the org chart of your target customer on paper, a screen or just in your head, but it’s probably going to be obsolete the moment you finish it.
People change jobs.
People get promoted.
New stakeholders become official or de facto members of a buying committee.
Some will be influencers, some will be among the final decision makers, but ultimately all of them are important.
Figuring out who’s who is one of the issues that often makes selling complex, challenging and overly time-consuming.
As selling becomes more dynamic and data-driven, org charts are no longer good enough, because they don’t reflect how the process actually works.
You don’t really sell to an organization. You sell to people.
That means talking to all the right people, which only happens as you build a relationship that’s strong enough with your first contact that you get introduced to the next person.
What you really need is a way to map out all the relationships that are involved in a buying decision at each customer organization, and to be able to plot a successful course to close each deal.
What Relationship Maps Tell You That Org Charts Can’t
Besides reporting structure between all the stakeholders in an account, you also need to understand lines of influence between them.
Will the CFO be a potential roadblock to the sale, for example, or might they be someone you can turn into a champion to accelerate the deal? Maybe it’s the IT person, the operations person or someone else in the C suite.
You can collect and manage that kind of data in a CRM, but who has time for all that data entry?
A relationship map should fast-track you towards the right data — data that can help identify the next best action, like who might be able to make a warm introduction to other people within an account’s sphere of interest.
From there, you can move from false starts with a customer to identifying upselling and cross-selling opportunities. Approaches like account-based marketing (ABM) become easier to execute. You can finally build predictability and confidence into the sales forecast.
How People.ai’s Sales Solution Maps It All Out For Reps
Fortunately, relationship maps are not a theoretical concept. With People.ai’s recently released Sales Solution, reps can easily build relationship maps right inside Salesforce, pre-populated with the contacts they’ve engaged throughout their deal. Meaning, reps can generate actionable maps within their accounts while decreasing manual data entry by 30%. How?
People.ai works behind the scenes to capture contact names, titles, and seniority before matching them to their associated opportunity. When it’s time to build your map, People.ai auto-populates contacts so reps simply draw the lines of influence and buying roles as relationships develop over deals.
Plus, as more contacts get looped in, People.ai will automatically prompt reps to add them to their SmartMaps, ensuring maps are always up-to-date.
With no added data entry, reps have more time to focus on the relationships within an account and the lines of influence that can help increase the velocity of their sales cycle and boost win rates.
Selling used to mean running into a lot of dead ends. Contact us if you’d like to learn more about how SmartMaps in Sales Solution will take you down a better, smarter path.