“Imagine you are traveling with your laptop and your smartphone. For some reason, you are stuck in the desert, and you have no Wi-Fi connection whatsoever. It means you have no access. No access to emails; no access to information you are used to gathering from various websites, no access to your network where you could ask for help. Now, imagine you are working on a large deal, and you have no access to the key decision makers. It feels almost like being in the desert with no Wi-Fi.”
As Tamara Schenk of CSO Insights puts so clearly above, not having insight into your prospect’s buying panel is the equivalent to being stranded on a desert. Tamara goes on to say, “Identifying the key decision makers in a large deal is the first step. Social media can help a lot to speed up this process. Then, this group of decision makers has to be analyzed to figure out what value means for each of them based on their role, position, and specific responsibilities.”
Building relationships with all decision makers is absolutely critical to the lifespan of the deal. How many times have you been on both ends of a deal (sales people, I’m talking to you) where your one point of contact left the company, and you’re hustling like crazy to connect with their colleagues to ensure your solution doesn’t fall between the cracks? The opposite just happened to me recently – there was a tool that just one member of our team had been using. After they left, the sales reps were desperate to get one of us on the phone and walk through a training session. They knew they would lose us as a customer if they didn’t build relationships fast. Don’t let that happen to you. Be proactive. Stay in touch.
