Streamlining B2B Sales: Mastering Multi-Stakeholder Collaboration

The challenges for sales teams

More stakeholders lead to increased complexity

The number of stakeholders involved in a deal is constantly growing.

Sales reps now interact with 6 to 10 prospects during a deal (1).

This is much more than before!

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Sponsors, business decision makers, technical experts, security experts, procurement teams, etc. Each participant defends his own interests and schedule.

More people means more interactions to manage, more subjects to deal with and longer deals.

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For you, these are constraints and differences to manage.

Without effective coordination, your deal won't succeed.

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Consequence: Stakeholders are misaligned

The multiplicity of information exchanged during a deal, coupled with the growing number of participants, hinders effective collaboration. The sources of misunderstanding, misalignment and slowing down your deal are numerous.

The result: you spend far too much time coordinating your contacts.

At best, your deal slows down. In the worst case, your deal bogs down and eventually dies 💀

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Current tools are inadequate

In this increasingly complex B2B sales environment, the tools used by sales teams to communicate with their prospects are showing their limitations.

Many salespeople consider email, video and telephone as being too "siloed" to collaborate effectively with multiple contacts on several topics simultaneously, all over a period of several months.

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Sales Best Practices

1. Make your interactions more collaborative

Make it a habit to (almost) always keep a written record of your exchanges with your prospects. This way, your contacts can easily exchange relevant information (especially if they're not present).

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In particular: send a written summary after each videoconference with your prospects.

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However, avoid including "decision-making" content in your emails. The further your deal progresses, the more this valuable information gets lost in endless, unreadable email loops. This is detrimental to smooth communication.

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💡 Favor collaborative documents (such as Word online, Google Docs). They facilitate collaboration and can be shared easily between different interlocutors.

This way, you'll have much better control over the information your Sponsor sends to its Decision Makers (in addition to simplifying its life considerably!).

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2. Give stakeholders greater visibility and context

Invest (sufficient) time in explaining to participants how their role will fit into the overall course of the deal.

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This is all the more important as the nature of the tasks and the level of involvement required vary greatly depending on who you're dealing with (Sponsor vs. Decision Maker, Tech Expert vs. Purchasing team, etc.).

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💡 For greater clarity, create a recap table that summarizes the role of each participant at each stage of the deal.

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Communicate it at a kick-off meeting with all participants to inspire effective coordination from the outset. Then use this chart as a guideline, regularly reviewing it with your contacts throughout the deal.

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3. Communicate deal progress to your prospects

Give participants regular visibility of the deal's progress so they can anticipate their tasks.

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💡 Plan synchro' points to make sure the hands-offs are running smoothly. And have the reflex to participate or involve your Sponsor (few Sales do this systematically)! Particularly when the transition takes place on the prospect's side, that's when your risk is highest.

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🔎 The golden rule: your Sponsor is your best ally.

He plays a key role in coordinating participants on the prospect side. He's your relay where you can't be present.

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Involve him or her sufficiently to make coordinating contacts a priority, and rely on him or her to realign stakeholders when necessary.

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How can Katalyz help you work better with your prospects?

1. Your entire deal in one place

With Katalyz, your entire deal is centralized on a single online platform: the dealroom.

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Your stakeholders interact directly in Katalyz and find all the info they need (exchanges, resources) to move the opportunity forward.

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Gone are the days of fragmented communications between multiple channels (email, CRM, visios, phone, Slack, etc.), email transfers, multiple files and so on. They're sources of misunderstanding and misalignment in your deal.

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2. Optimal visibility throughout the deal

In Katalyz, you build a collaborative roadmap with your prospects. It reflects the stages of your sales cycle as well as the actions required of participants with their deadlines.

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Throughout the deal, your prospects thus have maximum visibility over the progress and tasks they need to complete, with whom and for when.

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Unlike an email, the collaborative roadmap re-contextualizes each action for your contacts. This makes it easier for them to intervene and move your opportunity forward quickly.

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💡 If you're familiar with the Sales customer centric selling methodology: the Katalyz roadmap is inspired by the Mutual Action Plan, which is a tool used by many companies with complex sales cycles such as Stripe, Dataiku, etc.

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3. Collaborate seamlessly

With Katalyz, you don't just sell to your prospects, you collaborate with them, in a customer-centric selling mode. We've taken our inspiration from project management tools (such as Trello, Asana or Monday) and adapted it to a Sales context.

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In a dealroom, it's no longer a problem to work with a large number of interlocutors on several subjects simultaneously. Your interactions remain fluid and your interests aligned.

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How does it work in practice? You (or your interlocutors) can:

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• Assign tasks to deal participants and set deadlines.

• Guide your contacts by specifying the objectives of each of their actions and adding a description.

• Exchange information (in the form of comments).

• Share relevant resources.

• Mention other participants (@John Doe).

• Etc.

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Let's take an example. Let's say that for the purposes of your deal, you build a business case with your Sponsor:

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• Create a dedicated stage and define the required actions and deadlines.

• Remind your Sponsor of the objectives: demonstrate that your solution reduces the length of sales cycles by 20%, thereby increasing revenues by €5m/year.

• Then share with him a business case model you've drawn up in a previous deal, which will serve as a working basis.

• Prepare a checklist with all the information to be gathered internally.
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Finally, the collaborative roadmap enables participants to keep each other informed of their progress. All they have to do is mark their actions as "completed". This gives all parties involved real-time access to the progress of the deal, enabling them to coordinate with each other. For maximum efficiency, Katalyz automatically notifies them as soon as their intervention is required.

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Summary

✔ The growing complexity of B2B sales is making it increasingly difficult for Sales to work with multiple contacts.

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✔ Effective coordination requires to:

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• Make interactions between stakeholders more fluid thanks to collaborative tools.

• Provide more visibility and context on the deal for participants.

• Communicate the progress of the deal with prospects.

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The golden rule: in these missions, your Sponsor is your best ally on the prospect side.

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✔ Thanks to Katalyz:

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• Centralize your entire deal on a single platform (the dealroom) and put an end to misalignment.

• Provide optimal visibility to your interlocutors throughout the deal, including your decision-makers.

• Collaborate seamlessly with your prospects in project management mode.