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Seeing Other People: How Sales Can Adjust to Larger Buying Groups

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People have a tendency to make things difficult.

And more people make things more difficult, especially in sales situations. It’s more people to win over, more people with their own criteria and agendas, more people who could potentially veto your sale.

Yes, things would be so much nicer if you could just cut out a few people. But you don’t really have a choice. Naturally, salespeople long for the good old days of small, manageable buying groups of one or two people. In his recent post, “10 Things I Learned About Sales the Hard Way,”  sales guru Anthony Iannarino captured the dangers of this inclination perfectly:

“I have felt very safe in a relationship with a single stakeholder who I believed was all that was necessary to win an opportunity. Later I was surprised that people I had never met, and who had nothing to do with the opportunity, had killed it. It is easier to get consensus when you include people in the process from the beginning rather than springing it on them later. Make sure you have all of the stakeholders involved from the beginning.”

Here, Iannarino points out that salespeople can very well choose to follow the path of least resistance and build a relationship with only one stakeholder, but they do so at their own peril. Getting all stakeholders involved—and doing it early—is the only way to avoid an out-of-left-field torpedoing of your sale.

But you say, “One stakeholder is tough enough. Now you want me to manage five stakeholders for every buyer I work with?” Whether you loop them in or not, they are already in the deal.

The sustainable alternative in this world of larger buying groups, meeting after meeting, and call after call is this: technology. You will need to use sales technology that automates the distribution of messaging to stakeholders and the tracking of that distribution. It’s also going to be technology that makes it easier for stakeholders to share content and messages with each other in order come to an agreement about your solution.

This technology-assisted scenario would create double benefits: stakeholders get helpful, relevant content faster, and salespeople get more time to focus on filling the role of trusted advisor.

To learn how Consensus automates content distribution to stakeholders and frees up salespeople to better serve buyers, click on the orange “Watch Demo” button below.

Read the source article at The Sales Blog

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