“Who is signing the contract?” This is a question that many sales leaders will ask their individual contributors (IC). My experience in Enterprise Sales has shown me different ways to reach the answer to this question. One of the better ways is understanding the power within an organization by powermapping. This technique helps you understand the more crucial question, which is: “do we have a deal here by a certain date?”
The value of powermapping depends on the product you sell and to whom to sell it to. For large- value contracts, where multiple decision-makers are involved, it’s critical to use this simple approach to quickly ascertain where your deal is and how to move it toward closure.
When I sold Yammer, mapping out who owned the power in the company was critical to making the sale. For almost every deal, I’d work with my manager to whiteboard how the deal gets done. In addition to our 1:1s, I put an additional 30 minutes on his calendar to walk through the powermap of the opportunities I had that were in my pipeline at greater-than-30%-likely to close. This time was invaluable because it helped me understand what actions I needed to take in order to accelerate each specific opportunity.
Below is a power map that I created for a large enterprise organization. From here we determined that the best course of action would be to have a meeting with the VP of Technology.
There are many actions that one can take in a sales process. However, if you know what the best action is, then you can accelerate your deal and improve your close-rates. Powermaping is an excellent tool to help visualize the process and stimulate creative ideas that move the sale toward a final signature.