Enterprise-level sales have always been difficult to achieve without having someone on the purchaser’s side to champion a product or service. That remains true, but as purchasing decisions grow more complex it’s often not enough to have a singular champion to help bring a sale to fruition. The expansion of decision-making to ever-larger purchasing committees places the onus squarely on salespeople and their supporting teams to identify those additional influencers, and to earn their support wherever possible.
The popular term for this wider effort is multithreading, and it’s an essential component of both the sales cycle and longer-term prospecting. Multithreading requires a significant commitment from sellers in both time and effort, though efficient use of software tools – including Spokeo for Business – can expedite the process.
What is Multithreading, and Why is It Important?
The essence of multithreading can be stated quite simply: enlisting a number of champions and influencers within a potential client’s purchasing committee, rather than relying on a singular champion to see a purchase through to fruition. Think of it as a specialized form of prospecting, utilizing both open-source data tools and old-fashioned networking.
There are multiple sound reasons to pursue a multithreading strategy. A few of the most important include:
- The potential for a single champion within the client’s organization to be promoted, reassigned, or leave the company entirely; leaving their prior responsibilities in other hands and the sales process stranded.
- The growth of buying committees – sometimes 20 or more individuals in the case of technology purchases, according to consulting firm Gartner – makes it more difficult for a single player within the client’s organization to effectively influence the outcome. The more seats at the table, the greater the potential for conflict and disagreement over priorities. Having multiple champions at the table improves the likelihood of a successful conclusion.
- The potential for some who would not ordinarily be considered decision-makers, and are not formally part of the purchasing committee, to exercise veto power. These might include end users of the product or service, or those responsible for its successful deployment.
- The potential for a key person on the client’s purchasing committee to simply not “click” with the lead salesperson. An individual champion can often be neutralized by an individual opponent on the committee, while multiple champions or influencers are more likely to carry their point.
A more subtle benefit is that the very act of identifying and cultivating the necessary people within an organization forces a salesperson, or a sales team, to develop a fuller understanding of the client’s organization, operations, goals, and current pain points. All of these things contribute not just to the initial purchase, but the likelihood of strong ongoing relationships and future business.
The question, then, is not whether multithreading is important or beneficial, but how to practice it effectively.
Establishing a Multithreading Sales Process
Embarking on a multithreading sales process requires a limited number of steps, each easier to state than to accomplish:
- Identify the persons who make up the buying committee, especially those who exert the greatest influence; and any additional personnel outside of the buying committee who have input or can influence the final outcome.
- Map out the relationships and hierarchy within that group, and the constituencies they represent within the client’s operations.
- Assess how best to approach each person with influence on the buying process.
- Identify an appropriate avenue for conducting that approach.
At each step of this process, social media can play a key role in identifying both individuals and the connections between them. The obvious starting point is LinkedIn, with its explicit business orientation and powerful in-house tools for business users, but other social platforms can yield useful data as well.
Collecting and analyzing that data can prove challenging, given the range of other social platforms and the inconsistent data tools they make available to business users. Spokeo for Business can simplify that aspect of the multithreading process, by furnishing salespeople or sales teams with access to information drawn from 129 social platforms (at the time of writing) to link social media handles or usernames with each member of the buying committee within one simple, intuitive interface and a single subscription.
Research is the Basis of Successful Multithreading
The key to each of the steps in establishing a multithreading sales process lies in research. Some of this can be accomplished through conventional methods, including direct personal approaches to existing contacts. Other inquiries may require greater creativity, and often the use of software tools. Let’s examine some of the ways these four steps can be achieved.
Identifying the Makeup of the Buying Committee
The most direct starting point, if the salesperson already has an established relationship with someone on the buying committee, is to simply ask who else is involved in the purchasing process either formally or informally. If this option is available it simplifies the process and can shorten it, but further research will be needed to verify the information provided and to fill in any gaps.
A few avenues for this phase of the research might include:
- Reviewing your company’s champions and influencers among current clients on LinkedIn, Zoominfo, Hoover’s, and other business-centric platforms. If any of them have previously worked at your prospect company, they may be able and willing to provide insight into the current makeup of the buying committee, or perhaps even to make introductions.
- Scrutinizing the in-company LinkedIn connections of any known members of the buying committee. Those from outside their immediate peers, within their own department, are potentially part of the buying committee.
- Searching known members of the committee using Spokeo for Business to uncover their specific social IDs on key platforms. Here again, look for connections with personnel from other departments in the form of comments on their posts, or work-related references that may indicate working together on the purchase.
- Checking the client’s company directory against the names gleaned from LinkedIn and other social media. The client’s key personnel may not always be active on business-centric sites such as LinkedIn and Zoominfo, or the obvious handful of top social media platforms. Searching those names using Spokeo for Business can reveal their online activity on less-obvious platforms – 129 in total at the time of writing – as well as other useful information such as email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses.
- Constructing a pro forma profile of the buying committee, using the best information available to you. If experience suggests that it includes – for example – one executive, middle managers from two or three other departments, and one manager with the necessary technical expertise to assess the product, this should limit the number of potential committee members to a small pool. Assessing which of those candidates are potential committee members, based on their seniority, skill sets, and online activity, can help narrow the pool further.
- Reviewing press releases from the potential client regarding previous purchases, and those from other vendors announcing sales to the client. Any personnel explicitly mentioned by name in the release, other than those in communications, are likely to have been influential in the purchase and may be members of the current committee as well.
Mapping out Relationships Within the Committee
Having established at least a partial chart of the purchasing committee, understanding relationships within the committee is the next step. Here again, direct input from an existing champion within the committee can be extremely useful, but be mindful that your champion is a player in the committee’s power dynamics and that their perception may be skewed accordingly.
Much of the work done to identify potential committee members comes into play here, as well. As the salesperson or sales team identifies connections between committee members, those connections should be assessed for what they tell about their relative positions. Who has more seniority or a higher position within the company? Is there a direct mentor/protege relationship in evidence? Whose posts show them to be “thought leaders” within the company? Do any of them live in the same neighborhood, or post photos from the same country club?
None of these things is necessarily definitive in its own right, but collectively they can paint a picture of the lines of influence.
Define the Value Proposition for Each Decision-Maker
As your picture of the buying committee comes into focus, identifying the motivations of each member (and those outside of the formal committee who may also have an influence) becomes the leading priority. How the client’s executives collectively speak about its priorities and imperatives provides important guidance, but in practice, there may be a disconnect between the view from the C-suite and the reality on the ground.
To align your product or service correctly with the concerns and priorities of the persons making up the buying committee, and their respective constituencies within the client’s operations, you’ll need to accurately identify those concerns and priorities. Here, social media can potentially provide crucial data, though it may not necessarily turn up on LinkedIn. As millennials and Gen Z age into positions of growing responsibility, even platforms traditionally thought of as youth-oriented (Snapchat, TikTok) are seeing more users in their 30s and 40s.
- Search any known and suspected members of the buying committee, or any known influencers outside of it, using Spokeo for Business. This will furnish the sales team with a list of their active social media platforms. Review those platforms for each person’s work-related posts, comments from co-workers on those posts, or their own comments on colleagues’ posts.
- Based on those posts, assess how key people within the client are writing about its priorities and imperatives right now. Are they aligned with the priorities expressed by its executives, or are there discontinuities that will need to be addressed during the sales process?
- Review posts about the client on Glassdoor. Are there specific frustrations that could be addressed by your product or service?
- Revisit the sales message for your product or service, with that in mind. How should its value proposition be best positioned to address the current priorities within each committee member’s purview?
The more specific these individualized campaigns can be, the more impact they’re likely to have.
Identifying the Best Avenue for Each Approach
Just as the committee members’ specific concerns must be individually addressed, it’s also important to determine a suitable avenue of approach for each one. The ideal scenario is a direct introduction to each committee member from an existing champion or influencer, but that can’t always be expected.
Absent that, the salesperson or sales team must settle on an approach that’s likely to resonate with each committee member. This requires research, and it’s here that Spokeo for Business’s ability to furnish a picture of each member as an individual comes to the fore.
Search each known or suspected committee member, and then:
- Review their education and work history, as shown in the Spokeo report and on LinkedIn (there may be discrepancies between the two). If a member of the sales team or a champion at another client has a shared experience with the committee member, that may constitute a point of contact.
- View their current home address, in a similar context. Are there potential influencers within your own company, or at a well-disposed client, who live in the same immediate area and might be known to the committee member?
- Visit the committee member’s personal social media platforms as listed in the Spokeo report. View their public posts, with an eye to what they say about the member’s interests, personality, politics, community involvement, or any other points of potential commonality or leverage. How do they spend their leisure time, and where, and who do they spend it with? Any of these factors might furnish an insight that can smooth the initial meeting.
- Assess whether the lead salesperson is necessarily the best point of contact with each committee member. The best sellers have a well-honed ability to strike the right tone with almost anyone, but it’s also important to ask whether someone else might be better suited to the task.
No one of these factors may carry the day in itself, but in a high-stakes situation any point of contact, from a shared fraternity or sorority to a mutual interest in photography, may prove decisive.
Seeking an Edge
Much of selling can be reduced to finding an edge over a competitor or their product. Competitors are likely to also be aware of the advantages of multithreading, and attempting to forge exactly the same kinds of relationships within the client’s ranks, so simply making the effort won’t necessarily be enough to win the deal.
Data gathered through Spokeo for Business, with its unmatched reach in the crucial area of social media, can provide the competitive edge needed for a sales team to win over key influencers within the client and its buying committee. To arrange a demonstration or free trial of Spokeo for Business, reach out to our team through the contact information found on the product page.
Fred Decker is a prolific freelance writer based in Atlantic Canada, with articles appearing in print and online since 2007. He writes primarily on technology, personal finance, and food and food service, drawing on previous careers in those industries. He was educated at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia Community College, and the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology.
Sources
Gartner: How to Market to B2B Technology Buyers
Pew Research: Social Media Fact Sheet