#019: How To Tailor Your Pitch To Address Different Stakeholders

Read time: 3 min

Today I’m going to discuss how to pitch different stakeholders and decision makers who oftentimes join calls deeper into the sales process. This is a big one and is very much applicable with larger enterprise deals.

Whenever there are multiple decision makers (DM’s) involved in the buying process (which is 95% of the time), it is imperative that you identify who the DM’s are and their titles. Otherwise you will not effectively address the needs and concerns of all the stakeholders involved in the buying process.

This is why the qualification call is so important and where most deals are won and lost. The problem I see constantly are founders not identifying who the stakeholders are and how they make purchasing decisions for a solution like yours. Today we’re discussing the “A” in BANT. Authority.

Stakeholders are always thinking, W.I.I.F.M.
What’s In It For Me?

There are typically 3 stakeholders that are involved in the buying process.

We use they acronym B.U.T. to address each.

1. Buyer (person who writes the check)

2. User (the user(s) of the product)

3. Technical implementer (engineer)

Buyer
The buyer is the person responsible for cutting the check. This is typically the dept head (CTO, CISO, Head of RevOps, etc.) Their goal is to remove bottlenecks for their team and to provide the tools they need to be more effective. They Buyer needs to have buy in from the users that this will be 10x better than their current solution. The buyer’s chief concern is the economics (cost) and security. They need to be sold on how much better their team will be with this tech and how that correlates to predicting and achieving goals, KPI’s and OKR’s a lot faster.

User 
This is the person(s) who will be using your tech. The goal here is to show how much better their workflow would be with your tech. It’s conveying through your demo what life looks like now, and what it will look like after coming onboard. You do this by classifying it in 5 buckets.

1 - Desired outcome: What is their desired outcome when using your product?

2 - Speed: How quickly can you get them to start seeing success?

3 - Efficiency: How much better is your product then their current solution?

4 - Effort: How much effort is required? How heavy is the lift?

5 - Economics: How much is this going to cost; and is it worth it?

Technical Implementer
The technical implementer is responsible for setting up/integrating the tech into their existing stack. The easier and less effort it requires on their part, the better. They’re optimizing for effort and security. When pitching this stakeholder you should always convey, little effort, one on one support, and ease of setting up.

You want to have slides in your demo deck that speak to each one of the stakeholders and how it benefits them.

Key Takeaways

• Always identify all the DM’s and their titles.

• Each different stakeholder is interested in W.I.I.F.M.

• Use the acronym B.U.T. to address the different DM’s concerns.

• Effectively convey speed, outcome, effort, efficiency and economics.

That’s all for today folks.

See you all next week!

Darren

P.S. If you’re ready to level up you can book an intro call with me here