Stakeholder Mapping Template

Introduction

In 2023, getting wider in the accounts you sell into is critical. More stakeholders are involved in sales cycles, more eyeballs are scrutinizing spend and the return on your investments. The team’s success hinges on understanding and effectively engaging with stakeholders. To optimize stakeholder management and ensure project success, businesses rely on a stakeholder mapping template and the proper way to build a stakeholder map.

Understanding Stakeholder Mapping

The process involves identifying and analyzing all individuals, groups, or organizations that have an interest in or could be impacted by a project. At the core of this exercise lies the stakeholder map, which serves as a visual representation of the stakeholders’ roles, interests, and influence. At Prolifiq, we’re working to get operations, enablement, sales, account management, legal, and finance engaged in the majority of our sales cycles. Additionally, think through who your team typically works with at a company during a sales cycle. Ensure they’re on your map and being engaged properly. Your stakeholder map will vary depending on the deal size, which you can learn more about with our free stakeholder mapping templates to build out your own stakeholder map.

Get our Free Template! Map Out The Stakeholders On A Deal You Or Your Team Is Working!

The Ultimate Template: A Key to Success

A stakeholder map streamlines the process of identifying, categorizing, and analyzing stakeholders. This provides guardrails for understanding where you have gaps, who is helping drive your deal home, and where your next steps should be focused with regard to your internal stakeholders and external stakeholders. You’re ready to handle stakeholder mapping 101 now with the guidance below:

• Key Parts of A Relationship Map: Level of support, level of influence, buying role, and any other critical information you need in a sale.

  Mapping Stakeholder Interests: Analyzing stakeholders’ needs, expectations, and objectives to align project goals accordingly. Mapping Stakeholder Interests: Analyzing stakeholders’ needs, expectations, and objectives to align project goals accordingly.

• Identifying Potential Stakeholders: Exploring various stakeholder groups and assessing their potential impact on the project. This could be counterparts to your main contact or similar roles in the business.
• Stakeholder Analysis: Use the template to understand where you have coverage, gaps, and risk. One of the benefits of stakeholder analysis comes in the form of segmentation of your buying committee. It becomes a way to quickly divide and conquer who is going to prospect into who.

The Benefits of Stakeholder Mapping: Guide Project Success

Leveraging a stakeholder map offers several benefits to project/account managers and sales teams, driving faster sales cycles, higher win rates, and more. So let’s dive into why you should build a stakeholder map:

• Proactive Stakeholder Management: By identifying stakeholders early on, teams can address potential conflicts and challenges before they escalate. This also helps you get ahead of other possible stakeholders that may not be on most opportunities.
• Informed Decision-Making: A clear understanding of stakeholder interests enables project managers to make strategic and well-informed decisions. Gathering information about challenges, structure, current state, upcoming initiatives and more will help. As they are the foundation of a good account plan and relax well.
• Efficient Communication: Stakeholder mapping templates facilitate open and effective stakeholder communications with all relevant parties, ensuring a smooth flow of information. Whether it’s major stakeholders or other stakeholders with less influence, this should help organize your team and drive better messaging.
• Project Scope Management:  This helps define the project scope and ensures alignment with external & internal stakeholders’ objectives. Which types of stakeholders will determine whether to purchase your product or service?

How to Use a Relationship Map Template Effectively

To maximize the potential of a relationship mapping template, project managers and teams can follow these essential steps:

• Step 1 : Run through closed won opportunities over your last 3, 6, or 12 months. See who the main contact was. But also take note of the many key stakeholders your team talked to throughout and the level of involvement they had. Legal may only come at the end. Is there a CFO who typically approves/signs? This research helps uncover this.
• Step 2: Stakeholder Analysis: Analyze each key stakeholder and their interests, level of influence, and potential impact on the project. Are they going to derail your efforts, or sell you internally? Relationship maps will help you break this down.
• Step 3 : Engagement Strategy: Develop a tailored key players engagement strategy based on their needs and interests.
• Step 4: Document pre-existing relationships. Find ways to get other team members to help you penetrate the account when appropriate

We have a free stakeholder map template to help you. You can use it to get familiar with relationship mapping on deals you’re working on today!

Real-World Applications: Success Stories with Relationship Mapping

Explore real-world case studies. Use examples of successful projects that harnessed the power of stakeholder maps. How did they help drive success, enhance collaboration, and ensure project objectives were met? All project stakeholders should be leveraging and using this map.

Stakeholder Management and Stakeholder Mapping: A Perfect Pairing

Project managers play a crucial role in relationship mapping. They oversee the entire process and implement strategies to effectively manage project stakeholders throughout the project lifecycle.

• Utilizing Stakeholder Mapping Templates in Excel: How to create and customize templates using Excel for maximum efficiency.
• Project Stakeholder Management: Integrating all of the work and understanding key relationships and different types of stakeholders with overall project management processes.

Conclusion

In conclusion, a well-designed stakeholder map template serves as a powerful tool for project managers and teams to understand, engage, and collaborate with stakeholders effectively. By utilizing our free template, businesses can mitigate risks, optimize project outcomes, and foster a culture of open communication and engagement for a product or project.

As projects become more challenging, the ability to identify key stakeholders and respond to their needs becomes a major reason relationship maps are invaluable. With a comprehensive stakeholder mapping template at hand, businesses can unlock the full potential of their projects and pave the way for sustainable growth and success. One of the major mistakes we see teams make in the stakeholder mapping process and key account management, in general, is laying out the executive team or higher-level people only. Conversely, in most cases, managers, end-users and directors will have a lot of sway in decisions! Don’t take shortcuts, regardless of the mapping method you use.

FAQ:

How do you create stakeholder maps using a stakeholder map template?

Answer: Creating a dynamic stakeholder map requires a stakeholder mapping tool like Prolifiq. The stakeholder map template provides the foundation and necessary inputs to start to uncover where your sales team needs to prioritize their time. Understanding the stakeholder matrix, the makeup of the organization, and the engagements with stakeholders that are less influential to a CFO is critical. Stakeholder maps can help a project team or group to begin to build a more holistic understanding and view of the account.

What is the ROI of relationship mapping in stakeholder analysis?

Answer: There are several ways for a team to begin to understand the ROI and impact of a relationship map analysis. Think about how building out a stakeholder map impacts win rates, sales cycle lengths, the ability to sell into other business units (whitespace), customer lifetime value, retention rate, and many other metrics. The list of internal or stakeholders can represent the effectiveness of your multi-threading. Be predictive of whether you’ve built a wall of support for the customer. This template will get you started. The key comes to ensuring it’s updated and used to grow your business. Eventually, this is where a tool that dynamically updates as you engage with people, and leverages CRM data such as who reports to who, along with using AI to automatically add people to a map based on your previous deals can be beneficial.

What is the importance of stakeholder mapping?

Answer: This will vary depending on the business. A B2C or SMB sale may not need a stakeholder chart. Albeit having a stakeholder map to identify internal stakeholders, external stakeholders, pre-existing relationships and other critical relationship knowledge can be the difference in winning or losing game-changing deals. Various stakeholders can impact whether you win a deal or lose it, so understanding stakeholder engagement and stakeholder influence will help your team eliminate blockers that can derail you while riding champions to the finish line. A stakeholder map provides the visual representation that helps organize a project and the project stakeholders. One of our main account manager tips centers around this process.

What are the steps in mapping stakeholders and conducting stakeholder analysis?

Answer: A stakeholder map is the end result, but think about working backward. How do you uncover who the stakeholders are that need to be engaged and won over? Using your CRM data, talking to customer support, and using your own intuition from your experiences are ways to start. Look at all of the accounts you’ve won in the last 6 months (or at least 15-20 deals), who is involved? Additionally, who is the main contact on the opportunity? Another place to look is at the account activity, which people seemingly come up with repeatedly. These people MUST be on your stakeholder map.

Our team also works with marketing and listens to sales calls to see who is typically involved in making decisions. Good discovery will help unpack which people will need to be added to future meetings, and should be mapped! Part of understanding your stakeholders and how to win them over is getting deeper into their day-to-day, seeing what they’re measured on, what their challenges are, and applying that knowledge and ensuring you help prove to them you can solve their issues over time with our relationship map template PowerPoint.