Multiple decision makers are becoming more prevalent.
The single-threaded approach—a salesperson forming a relationship with one decision maker—is becoming less effective.
What if they leave the job? Not a good thing but if you align yourself with others, you can avoid risk of losing footing. One way is to test your Champion to see if they’ll help you make other valuable connections in the organization.
According to LinkedIn, the average B2B opportunity has 5.4 decision makers involved.
Helping buyers reach a decision requires multiple points of contact in the company. Instead of following through with only one prospect, sales professionals must go deeper into the buying team’s structure, creating and building many relationships.
Social selling enables you to leverage extended networks to find those multiple contact points:
- Find a champion – Search LinkedIn for people with titles that may be direct stakeholders. Remember, you can have more than one champion.
- LinkedIn Outreach Strategy to connect with them.
- Find connected decision makers through LinkedIn profiles and Advanced Search.
- Use social networking and research to map the buying committee of prospective client organizations
- Use social media to track the conversations that people are having around your brand and your industry
- Follow your prospects and their companies on social media
- Analyze what they are talking about and the content they’re sharing
- Tracking Content – Create tracking links to see how often your content is getting shares, clickthroughs, and downloads. Create tracking links for: Blog content, Demand Generation content, Event registration, Content for prospects
Anthony Lobosco
