How to Measure the ROI of Relationship Mapping
Documenting and mapping out key stakeholders is a critical part of your sales process. It enables alignment between cross-functional teams, allowing them to better strategize on maximizing the impact of the account on your business. But oftentimes, higher-ups ask us, “What’s the ROI of building out these relationship maps?” That’s a fair question, and we’re going to dive deeper throughout this blog on the true ROI of relationship mapping for your team.
Discover Decision Makers Faster
To begin with, this process is critical and becomes quantifiable as you begin to uncover who is typically involved in your deals. Let’s work through a hypothetical example for a lot of B2B sales teams in 2022.
Imagine you’re selling sales technology; do you typically engage Sales Operations personnel? Sales Managers, Directors, or VPs? There can be countless types of people who are impacted by a sales technology purchase and thus involved in the decision-making process. In 2022, B2B sales teams typically see 6-10 decision-makers involved in a sales cycle! Laying the foundation of who these purchases impact and documenting them on a map is a great first step. Do you see trends in the people that initiate demo requests, take the first meeting from outbound prospecting, or bring your product or service across multiple companies they work at? This is good information to have at your fingertips. It becomes easily accessible for sales teams that consistently go through this motion. This can also help you become a great friend to your marketing team as well!
Which Stakeholders Are on Your Side?
Taking this a step further, Prolifiq would recommend your team begins to label people who are “supporters” or in favor of your product or service, “champions” who are leading the charge, or more neutral or even worse, “blockers” of your pursuit. After you build out maps for opportunities over the course of a few months, patterns may emerge. How many supporters did you have in deals you won versus deals you lost? Was your sales team single-threaded, or only engaging people in one team or department in deals you lost? Is a specific persona or business unit the champion of your service more often than others? This sort of data is table-stakes for helping teams understand where there are gaps in current deals and helping guide what actions you need to take next to avoid losing to your competition.
Identify Upsell Opportunities
Another way stakeholder mapping can greatly impact revenue is within your current customers. When you build maps out during a sales cycle, once that account is a customer, you’ve documented everyone involved in that journey. Your support team knows whom to lean on if there are issues. Your sales team has a better understanding of whom to engage when it comes to upselling or expanding within the account. The sale doesn’t end when they sign the contract. There can usually be the potential to add more licenses or seats, or different products to an existing contract.
Leveraging your champions is a great way to do this. You can easily build reports on accounts that you upsell where you built a relationship map versus accounts where you didn’t. Are sales cycles shorter? Are win rates higher?
Retain Your Business
Lastly, it’s common knowledge that winning new business is great, but retaining it is even more important. What happens if your champion leaves? Having an updated relationship map gives you an immediate view of the account. It helps you identify the people you need to engage to continue to retain the account. These individuals are also the best way in for an introduction to the newest team member. Some metrics you should look at include customer retention. Do retention rates improve with accounts that fully implement maps versus accounts that don’t? That is an immediate ROI to share up to leadership!
As we’ve laid out here, there are countless benefits to the business and ultimately to revenue when teams partake in documenting the key stakeholders in their sales pursuits. Taking the 20-30 minutes to identify these people and consistently update your engagement with them, their sentiment, and their involvement in the deal can pay out massively in the long run.
To learn how to effectively relationship map inside of your Salesforce CRM, check out a live demo!