The average B2B deal involves six to 10 decision-makers, according to Gartner. If you’re working on a particularly complex deal, there may be even more decision-makers involved.
This is why multithreading is so important in sales – it allows you to build relationships with multiple decision-makers within an organization. Instead of deals hanging by a single thread, you’ll have several relationships with different people in the buying organization.
Dozie Anyaegbunam, the senior content and SEO manager at UserGems, says you should always be multithreading. If a deal falls off the radar for your champion, it may pop up on the radar for someone you just interacted with. How can you get it right with sales multithreading? Read on. We share Anyaegbunam’s top tips in this issue of PromoPro Daily.
Ask your contact who else you should involve. After you get your initial contact to commit to a call verbally, Anyaegbunam says the next step is to get as many people as possible to join the call. When you get your contact to help with the multithreading, you establish trust with them and you can be sure you’re building the right relationships. Try phrasing it like this, “Is there anyone else who may want to join the meeting? Anyone who may feel left out if they’re not a part of the discussion?”
Monitor your accounts for any changes. Your primary decision-maker may leave mid-deal, but if you’ve done a good job multithreading, you can work with other points of contact and keep things moving. Anyaegbunam suggests keeping an eye on your accounts for new champions or buyers. This way, if someone leaves, you don’t have to wait for the next person to fill the role – you’ll already have the solution and process in place.
Bring in the executives early. More often than not, Anyaegbunam says you’ll need to sell to executive buyers. Or it could be a high-priority deal or account that needs some sort of executive presence. Either way, executives involved in the multithreading process can increase your chances of winning the deal. It’s best to bring them in early, but not too early, like during discovery calls.
Make deposits before withdrawals. In other words, don’t bombard your prospects with requests right out of the gate. Instead, show that you care about their success and not just their budget, Anyaegbunam says. You can do this for your multithread prospects by striving to add value like sending an interesting article or a useful guide.
Sales is all about building relationships. With multithreading, you’re simply building multiple relationships at the same company. It’s an effective strategy that can lead to bigger deals, faster.
Compiled by Audrey Sellers
Source: Dozie Anyaegbunam is the senior content and SEO manager at UserGems.
