How many times as a sales rep have you gone through a sales process with your champion, hitting all your marks in your discovery and your demo calls, feeling good...
Only to have the executive shut it down because they never cared in the first place.
You can't sell to one buyer anymore. Orgs are continuing to tighten up spending and every new purchase is scrutinized by full buying committees.
You have to win over the champion.
Then the department leads.
Then power with full wall-to-wall alignment.
Or... go in reverse order.
This is what we call "multithreading" in sales. We're breaking it down in 3 steps:
1. Know where you're going before the sales process even begins
2. Make the ask in your buyer's best interest, not yours
3. Get scrappy if your requests are denied
Let's thread the needle.
1: Know where you're going before the meeting
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A rookie rep asks this question at the end of a discovery call:
“Who else would benefit from joining the next call?”
Not only does this show you’re unprepared, but it leads to prospects bringing in irrelevant or junior stakeholders into the sales cycle.
It's your job to teach them how to buy. Here's how.
1) Map the Champions, Decision Makers, and Influencers.
Champions drive the sales process forward. Decision Makers or Economic Buyers approve the final purchase. Influencers who might weigh in on the decision.
2) Map the order in which you should speak to them in (aka: The Golden Path).
In Top-Down Selling, you start at power, ask for intros to the department leads, then get permission to circle back with a recommendation and hopefully full team alignment.
In Bottom-Up Selling, you start by winning over your champion, work across to the department leads, and then use their consensus to drive up to power.
3) Figure out when you ask for power in your sales cycle.
In my sales cycle, I typically foreshadow the ask to power at the end of the first discovery call. Then if the demo goes well, that's when I go for the formal ask to loop in an exec.
Now... how do you make the ask to get in front of their boss?
2: Make the ask in their best interest, not yours
At the end of your discovery call, run The 5 Minute Drill and ask these 3 questions:
- Do you wanna buy? (Validates that a next step is even worth it)
- When do you wanna buy? (Confirms that this is a priority NOW)
- How do you buy? (Suggest and set next steps).
The last question is where you teach them how to buy and why it matters.
This is where most reps screw up: they make a self-serving ask for power like this.
In order to get this approved, we've gotta loop in your CXO.
But elite sellers teach their prospects how to buy and frame the ask in the prospect's best interest, like this:
It sounds like you really care about getting this right. Typically when it comes to compensation decisions, I've just seen it blow up if someone like your CHRO, Jane isn't involved, just because comp is such a touchy subject. Think we could pull her into the next call and work on this one together?
It's all in the best interest of helping them solve the problem.
Not helping you close the deal.
(but that's how you'll close the deal, duh)
3: What if your champion won't get you to power?
It's really nice when the talk tracks above work out perfectly.
But sometimes, your champion won't be comfortable making the introduction no matter how much you frame it in their best interests.
First, you can prevent this from happening by:
- Sending a benign CXO-to-CXO note earlier in the sales cycle. Have your CEO / CRO / VP send a note to their DM early in the evaluation after discovery or demo. No ask, just have them say that we're meeting with your team and we're extending our support to you exec-to-exec. That's a line you can call on in the future.
- Don't stop prospecting until you have a verified champion. The biggest mistake reps make is they stop prospecting when they book a meeting -- a champion is not a real champion until they've proven they're willing to shop you around the org. Keep prospecting until you know you've got the right person.
But inevitably it'll still happen, which is when you can:
- Ask them questions they don't know the answer to. In Episode 130, Morgan Melo asks "how do you plan to justify this internally?" to test their champion's ability to pitch. From there, she'll start to poke holes around what the exec's priorities are, how they plan to build a business case, and it'll become obvious to the champion that they want you in the room.
- Sell through your champion (and teach them how to sell). If your champion wants to take on the initial internal pitch, you'll need to teach them to speak in business problems that'll resonate above-the-line. If they lead with personal / process problems like complaining about how they're going to save time clicking in spreadsheets, it's gonna get shot down.
- If your contact is not a true champion, go over their head (sometimes). If going through your point of contact is going to be the only way to get the deal done, don’t go over their head. It's personally blown up in my face.
I'd recommend doing these things in order from least to highest risk.
One closing thought for you to noodle on and always remember:
The rep who gets to power first often wins the deal.
I don't care how much your champion loves you and says all the nice things in the world.
If they can't get you up in the organization, they're not a real champion.
***
That's a wrap folks! This was your intro to multithreading, but if you wanna go deeper... we wrote a four-part multithreading newsletter series a while back right here:
- Ch. 1: The Golden Path
- Ch. 2: Top-Down Selling
- Ch. 3A: Bottom-Up Selling
- Ch. 3B: Bottom-Up Selling (Part 2)
Go climb that ladder in your deal cycle folks.
