Prolifiq & 30MPC: 9 Tactics For Multi-Threading In Deals

 

Why is this worth your time? 

It’s one thing to figure out who you need to engage and begin a multi-threaded sales approach. It’s another to get access to them & build relationships to the point where they’re willing to advocate and be a champion for you. We break all of this down in actionable, step-by-step format for every part of the deal. You’ll have concrete examples of what to do, the questions to ask, the people to engage, and more depending on your situation. It’s no secret that having more supporters and champions internally increases your odds of winning deals, so let’s get into how to do just that!

 

Multithreading

As sellers are well aware, getting wide in accounts and multithreading can oftentimes be the difference between winning and losing deals. But oftentimes, we’re not sure how to go about it. There are multithreaded applications that teams can use, but we understand most teams don’t have access to that technology. So we’ve built a playbook that dives deep into different parts of the sales process and outlines tasks, talk tracks, and strategies to master multithreading at your biggest accounts.

 

What’s covered in this playbook?

This playbook is broken into three sections of multithreading tactics that follow a sequential order, from early in the deal → when you have deep traction on a deal.

We’ve broken this playbook into three sections:

1. Tactics to use on the first call you have with a prospect.
2. Tactics for when you have preliminary traction in the deal.
3. Tactics for when your deal has real legs.

 

Tactics for Crushing The First Call:

Gather a Lay of the Land

Description:
In your first call with a prospect, ask to get a sense of what their team looks like. This will give you insight into the other players you’ll want to connect with and primes them to understand your solution affects multiple functions/stakeholders. Without this, creating your approach to getting multithreaded is very difficult. Dive into the current state of how they’re handling things and the challenges/frustrations that come with the current behaviors. This puts you in a position to bring a distinct POV to those stakeholders you just uncovered.

Talk Track:

• “Can you give me a sense of how your sales organization is laid out? The reason I ask is that our solution tends to affect multiple functions, from Sales Ops to Business Development and Account Management, and it’s helpful to have a lay of the land of your  GTM function”.
• “What are the challenges your team is facing today that led to you connecting with me?  Generally, decision-makers aren’t aware of specific challenges and it’s helpful to bring fresh perspectives and input. This is great feedback to gather from individual contributors and bring with you to decision-makers. This empowers you to bring a pointy POV. 

Keys to Success:

• Make sure to explain why you’re asking this question.
  • Promise anonymity if that will put your contact in a spot to open up

Who would feel left out? 

Description:

• Most folks don’t want to exclude others. Ask: who else should be involved?

Talk Track:

• “Armand, who on your team would feel left out if they weren’t involved in understanding how our stakeholder mapping tool helped sellers visualize the buying path and identify the stakeholders they need to engage?”

Keys to Success:

• Make sure to frame the ask in a way that indicates your product will affect how other people do their jobs.

Name Drop Stakeholders

Description:

• You should know some of the key roles that usually get involved in a deal. In your call prep, research the specific humans at your customer’s org before your call so you can refer to them by name.

Talk Track:

• “Typically, folks on the sales side or operations front want to understand how our native account planning solution will impact their sales process, Salesforce adoption, account penetration, and more. Should we invite Nancy to our next meeting to cover that?”

Keys to Success:

• Make sure to explain why this role is typically involved in the deal.
• Help them understand the benefit of these people having input early on

Turn These Relationships Into Revenue

Tactics for when your deal starts to get traction:

The Exec No Ask

Description:

• Sometimes, to get economic buyers involved in the deal, you have to leverage your execs to pull them in. We leverage our leadership team to help the team get multithreaded while simultaneously connecting with their peers in the other organization to bring them up to speed. We send them to deal guides, allowing us to control the message and narrative while bringing other decision-makers up to speed without an ask.

Talk Track:

• Your exec might write something like “Eddie, I got word that my team is working with your GTM team on account planning at (Company). I’m the executive sponsor of the initiative on our end. Eager to see how things pan out and I’m around if you would like to connect or have any questions I can answer. I’m sharing a quick one-pager on the progress of our engagement so far to help answer any questions and bring you up to speed. Don’t hesitate to reach out if I can help”. 

Keys to Success:

• You’ll probably need to ghostwrite this for your leadership team.
• Bring them up to speed on the current discussion, situation, and opportunity
• Save executive engagement for deals that are bigger (1.5-2X) bigger than your average deal size is a good rule of thumb

Push for InfoSec Review

Description:

• InfoSec is usually one of the easier stakeholders to get involved in your deal. Every software needs some sort of IT / Security review. By pushing for this early, you can “break the seal” of your buyer’s willingness to multithread you.

Talk Track:

• “Armand, when most folks are evaluating our software, they often need to have some sort of InfoSec or security review. It’s never been a problem for us before, but I’d rather be safe than sorry with this kind of thing. What is the best way to get connected with your InfoSec team?”

Keys to Success:

• Run this step in parallel with your other pieces of the sales process. This should not slow down your deal by 2 weeks. Work steps in parallel, not sequentially.
• Ask if they have specific requirements (SOC II), or other standards you need to meet

 

Last Time You Bought This

Description:

• Your buyer has likely facilitated large purchases before. Typically, those purchases required multiple stakeholders to be involved. By asking about the last time they bought something like this, you can get them to reveal other parties who need to be involved again.

Talk Track:

• “Mark, I’m curious – what did the evaluation process look like the last time you bought a solution to help with the sales process, planning,  or stakeholder mapping?” 

Keys to Success:

• If your buyer doesn’t know/has not bought stuff like this before, here’s where you might advise on how folks typically evaluate something like a MAP.
• If you haven’t already, build out a map of everyone you’ve engaged, and spend 15-30 minutes with your champion outlining the map and where you need to spend your time and energy.

Tactics for when your deal has real traction:

 

Mutual Action Plans 

Description:

• A mutual action plan is a great tool to facilitate an open & honest conversation between you and the buyer about the “journey” it takes to evaluate your product/service.  Outline roles, responsibilities, and milestones so that each company is in agreement on the path you’ll be taking.

Talk Track:

• Emma, now that we’ve done a demo with you and your team, there’s usually a decent amount of due diligence customers want to do before we do business together. I’m also sure you have some questions and other evaluation steps that you want to make sure we take care of. Other folks have benefited from having me put together an outline of these different punch list items. Do you think it could be helpful for me to run the legwork in putting some of that together?

Keys to Success:

• Your MAP should NOT end at the point of the contract signature. Should end at the point of success for the prospect (usually post-implementation).  The sale is just the beginning.
• An opportunity plan can be beneficial here to centralize all of your findings and make the MAP a living, breathing document in your CRM.

 

Regular Exec Updates 

Description:

• Deep in the sales cycle, you’ve usually made contact with your economic buyer. If you lose contact with them after this meeting, you’re torpedoing your deal. Stay in contact with regular updates.  This is when you’ll see dividends from getting multithreaded earlier in the sales cycle. This approach also allows them to “opt out” of hearing more. Leave the ball in their court.

Talk Track:

• Emma, I can’t imagine you want every minute update about how the evaluation process with your team is going. But, I don’t want to leave you totally in the dark. Mind if I send over a short status update now and then so you know we’re on track?

Keys to Success:

• Don’t make a big deal of this, introduce it casually
• Updates to the exec should be extremely short.

LinkedIn Follow + Comment 

Description:

• Any time you meet someone new in the sales process, connect on LinkedIn with a note + hit the follow button (the bell). When they post, engage + comment. 

Talk Track: 

• N/A

Keys to Success:

• “Win” the comments. The bar is set pretty low, so this will get you remembered. 
• “Share” the posts people make back to them in a direct message on LinkedIn with your commentary. It’s a great way to start a dialogue.

30MPC- Prolifiq Playbook Video.

 

Mult-threading in Deals: 30MPC & Prolifiq – Conclusion

• • Prolifiq helps you carve into your territory by mapping out the critical stakeholders and milestones you need to get access to open a deal and drive it thru close.

 

• • We can’t reiterate this enough, multi-threaded sales and leveraging different internal team members will be the difference between falling short or hitting your number. Leverage all of the resources you have, and document the priorities, risks, and opportunities within the account and the people you’ve engaged to date.

 

• You can download our relationship mapping tool for FREE on this page. Check out the product and find the contacts you don’t already know as well

 

FAQ

How does multithreading work?

This is a sales approach where sales teams create a process to identify, engage, and build rapport with multiple people that are typically involved in a sales cycle. This helps provide visibility to internal team members on where activity has been occurring, and who they can help engage as well. These are foundational aspects of multithreading.

What part of multi-threading sales is often done incorrectly?

Multithreading is common for B2B sellers, especially in enterprise sales cycles that involve 8-12 people or more. The mistakes we see from a sales team include:

• • Keeping notes and information around specific engagements with those stakeholders in slide decks, spreadsheets, sticky notes etc. It lives in places outside of the CRM that don’t help the other team members or anyone else in the organization because data is inaccessible. The sales team can’t leverage leaders or people with existing relationships when this happens.

 

• • Touching on the point above, understanding someone’s interest, involvement, and overall sentiment is rarely documented and shared. This is critical as you work towards building a coalition. There is a lack of data that is in one place to drive action.

 

• The conclusion of the sale presents another opportunity to begin threading into other business units. Especially since you’ve built trust and relationships selling into them already! If the organization provides upside, work with your team to identify the next place to start, and leverage your champion for this exercise as well.

How do you get multi-threaded in sales?

• • Research and using data are key parts of this. Pull up all of your closed won accounts, and then look at the people who engaged during the process. Do you see trends? Multi-threaded sales start with research and a deep understanding of who is involved. From there you can prioritize multiple stakeholders that the GTM team can work on.

 

• • Work to find other reps who also believe in a multi-threaded sales strategy. This could be finding teammates who sell into larger organizations, there is a natural need and understanding that more people need to be engaged to win.

 

• Check out the organization on LinkedIn, do you have any mutual connections? Does anyone in your network know people at the company? Think about alumni of previous companies, schools, and other ways you come across professionals. Buyers make decisions to engage salespeople in many ways, so think of the various routes you can go to begin generating conversations.