#1 How to keep your stakeholders accountable?

It might not be what you think...

This is the ☝🏻 edition of the CONQUER SALES Newsletter, where we look at insights, methodologies and techniques that move the needle, delivered to your inbox every other Sunday along with your warm croissants and coffee. Whoop!

The Office

So in this weeks newsletter I want to point out two things:

  • When's the right time to book your call?

  • What are MAPs and how to make the best use of them?

When's the right time to book your call?

I don't think I'll start a "Chart of the week" section but who knows 😉.

An image is worth a thousand words and this one is quite striking.

Basically, book your next call as soon as possible to make sure you keep the sales momentum going! I know you knew this deep down but it's always nice to have a chart confirm what we knew, no?

Forgot the source, let me know if you know

How to keep your stakeholders accountable?

We're always looking for ways to keep our buyer engaged, keep that momentum going, keep the interest sky high... at least we should! So today I'll talk to you about a B2B strategy that has really picked my interest and that I've started to use: MAPs.

What are MAPs?

Mutual Action Plans.

To be fair, you could broaden the term to call this a journey or a flow and several companies that actually leveraged that for their names (you know who you are, more info 👇🏻).

Merging actions within a deal

So what are the fundamentals of a MAP? Well say there was a way to merge several key actions of a deal motion into one place:

  1. Help you qualify deals

  2. Help set expectations for all involved

  3. Facilitate multi-threading (we all know how the number of stakeholders has increase significantly... even CFO is joining in lately!)

  4. Establish a timeline to speed up that deal

  5. Improve forecast accuracy which is leaderships main pain with the sales team

You can already see how this can benefit all levels of an organisation. From the rep all the way to senior leadership.

So what could include all these steps? (You might've already guessed it)

You're building a MAP

Do you like to try and find that last version of a proposal in your emails?

Yeah, neither do I...

That's where MAPs come in handy!

You'll use a MAP to guide your stakeholders on their purchasing journey (remember I mentioned you could call this a journey or a flow?)

You're a sherpa guiding the buyer through the complexities of the sell 🏔️ (analogy I heard on a podcast, if you know which one, please let me know!).

What are the building blocks of a MAP?

  • Executive summary (align on the deal’s “why”)

  • Next steps (meetings, tasks, action items)

  • Timeline (due dates & milestones)

  • Stakeholders (an owner on every step)

  • Resources (everything your buyer needs to sell internally)

What's very important to remember is that you're guiding your buyer to VALUE – not simply their signature!

And I highly suggest you build your MAP around a go-live/success date, not the close date of your deal.

So what do you think about MAP? Is it something you'd be able to work with? Something you want to learn more about?

What companies can help you out?

There are a few different options out there:

  • Accord: when you open Accord, you straight away feel that Entreprise focus, it's serious, focusing clearly of MAP, with integrations to the main CRMs, and the pricing is also very Entreprise level. But don't be fooled, they cater to single users too.

  • Flowla: A newcomer to the game, Flowla creates a flow for the buyer that goes beyond the MAP. It can help with earlier stages of the buyer journey such as the Consideration phase where you can send a simple link with all the relevant information.

✉️ If you have any questions, I endeavour to reply to all my emails. Ping me.

When you're ready, there are a few ways that I can help you but all of them currently pass through talking to me. Why not book some time with me? 📅

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