Want to get ahead connecting with influential stakeholders to drive meaningful change for your product or mission? Look no further than Leadership Networks.
This one-of-a-kind tool acts as your secret sauce for identifying key decision-makers and their motivations while mapping essential relationships to open doors to new opportunities and propel your goals forward with speed and efficiency.
Explore the steps to leveraging this powerful opportunity to connect with sales stakeholders below!
Step 1: Identify and analyze key stakeholders
Start by narrowing down the people who could become vital connections for your goals. Search by job titles, industries, or organization in Leadership Connect to identify your key targets.
From there, you can study their profiles to get a sense of who these decision-makers are and what’s important to them. Researching their current projects, federal spend, background, and pain points gives you the upper hand when crafting outreach to them by standing out and connecting on a deeper level.
Step 2: Map relationships and networks
Now you’ve nailed down your target. Great, what’s next? Now it’s time to learn more about the people they know. You can see who they’re most closely connected to, whether it’s policymakers, political figures, or other industry professionals. Networks is the best way to make your connections work for you!
Check out a person’s relationship map to see how they are connected to you or your organization. Once you study the relationship map, you’ll find the perfect avenue to reach out to mutual connections to facilitate a direct introduction to boost your credibility.
You can also track their career history to get a sense of how each person landed at their current roles and who they’ve connected with along the way. Career history is essential to anticipating shifts and getting in on the ground floor of policy change or upcoming opportunities.
Insights into career histories are especially important in an election year. You can see who was employed by any former administrations and see where they’ve been since to see what organizations and connections they’re most closely related to.
This intel helps in anticipating which decision-makers and influential advisors may soon enter office. Connecting with their previous coworkers and bosses gives you an inside track to get ahead of the competition in influencing the new administration.
Step 3: Develop a targeted engagement strategy
Time to prep your outreach! Create a tailored approach to engage with each stakeholder based on everything you’ve learned about them so far. Most people are more receptive and more willing to build trust with someone they can find common ground with.
Use those mutual connections or add a personal touch based on their career history, education, or other aspects of their background to make yourself stand out and get a better chance at a good opportunity to influence government spend and business initiatives.
Step 4: Put your knowledge into action
Your outreach paid off and now you’ve got a meeting! Here’s your chance to clearly communicate the benefits of your solution in a way that resonates with stakeholders that you can customize based on all you’ve learned from Networks.
You’ll have the specific intel in your back pocket to explain how your product or service is the best answer to achieving their goals and solving their pressing issues.
You can also use Networks to see how your target is connected to their own potential prospects. Explaining to them how they can get an inside track for their own interests helps you stand out and show your credibility that you know the ins and outs of their needs and pain points and know how to provide the solution.
Step 5: Maintenance
You’ve successfully established a connection through Networks! Make sure you regularly follow up with stakeholders to provide updates, answer questions, and offer additional support. Continue to use your stakeholder relationship map to monitor changes in the network and adapt your strategy as needed.
Don’t worry about wasted time trying to keep up with any changes; turn on alerts for people or jobs to get automatic updates right on your home dashboard.
Check it out today! Head over to your Leadership Connect Dashboard to start networking now.
