Why Relationship Mapping: 5 Ways to Boost Your Selling Strategy
Today, I’m going to let you in on a little secret – relationship mapping is a great way to boost your selling strategy. In fact, more sales teams are turning to examining relationships within key accounts since it’s been difficult to meet and sell to new people during the pandemic.
If your selling approach could use a breath of fresh air, check out why relationship mapping can help you.
Why Relationship Mapping is for Prospecting
When building out an account and strategizing how to win it, identifying key decision-makers is the first step. Cold calling and emailing sometimes gets you replies like, “I’m not in charge of this”. While many account executives get disheartened by such responses, it’s actually amazing progress – you can now add another person to your account relationship map.
Following bread crumbs in this way will eventually enable you to find more people to contact in the company until you find a decision-maker, and then another one, so on.
Why Relationship Mapping is Crucial for Account Planning
A key component of account planning is managing relationships with strategic accounts. Mapping out relationships within an account will help you identify which accounts you have strong connections with, and which ones you may need to focus more time and effort on. Doing this also helps you identify important stakeholders within an account and how to strengthen those relationships as well.
Why Relationship Mapping Helps You Become Multithreaded
Externally – Customer success’ worst nightmare is when their one contact at a company leaves, and that’s been happening a lot lately as we see the increasing effects of COVID-19. Instead, put a placeholder on the hierarchy when they leave, and build out the org chart so you can start working on other relationships within the company in the meantime to identify gaps in relationships within an account.
Find the right relationship mapping tool for your company.
Internally – In the past, when sales managers leave a company, they’ve taken their relationships with them. But it’s also helpful to be multithreaded within your company too. Having multiple sales and customer success managers involved with key accounts increases renewal rates. If you win the biggest influencers in a company, you win the deal.
Why Relationship Mapping Can Create Cross-Sell & Up-Sell Opportunities (and/or up-sell?)
When it’s hard to sell to new customers, you know like because of working virtually thanks to COVID-19, then focus on up-selling or cross-selling to existing customers. Not only can you offer the convenience of one-stop shopping, but this also strengthens customer loyalty increases the likelihood of renewal.
Taking the time to identify, understand, and strengthen relationships within key accounts helps build trust as you prove knowledge and comprehension of the customer’s business. This sets you up perfectly to demonstrate the value of your product by showing how you can solve their problem(s) successfully.
Plus, the more relationships you have within an account, the more opportunities for there are to cross-sell and up-sell.
Why Relationship Mapping Helps Drive Salesforce Adoption
Most sales leaders would admit that their teams don’t use Salesforce as often as they should. To justify the price point of the world’s best CRM, especially in this climate, get your sales team to log in regularly. How? With a relationship mapping app that is native to Salesforce, meaning it snaps into your org in minutes while leveraging your extensive Salesforce database and security. Not only does it saves loads more time, but it also means your Salesforce Admin can easily configure it to fit your org’s unique needs. This eliminates the slow, expensive process of working with a consulting service to customize your org.
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