Today’s post is by Devin Reed, head of content strategy for Gong. Previously Devin worked for six years in SaaS sales.
You’re riding high on a deal that’s certain to close. The prospect has budget, need, and a clear-cut timeline. The prospect even has authority to say yes. In short, you have all of the “BANT” ingredients to ensure a successful deal.
Then it happens. Or, in this case, doesn’t happen. Your main (and, as it turns out, only) point of contact on the deal goes dark. Silent. Gone.
You’ve been ghosted.
Did your contact go on an impromptu vacation? Did he or she leave the company? While both are possible, it really doesn’t matter. The deal is dead.
If you only had...insurance – or deal insurance, to be specific – you would’ve avoided heartbreak (and won that deal). But your BANT criteria is missing a critical element: influence.
Why Multi-threading Is Insurance for Sales
Multi-threading is insurance for salespeople working toward the close. Multi-threading means building relationships with multiple stakeholders within your deal. It’s also your ticket to winning influence in an account. How do I know this?
The Gong research team analyzed 53,632 sales opportunities (and the sales calls and emails within them). We found that most deals start with one point of contact. But deals that are ultimately successful have triple the number of participants from the buyer’s side for the second meeting. Multi-threaded deals are a defining characteristic of sales success.
Here are some other insights we discovered.
GONG LABS DATA POINT #1: Successful deals include at least three people from the buyer’s side in meetings across the sales cycle (phone/Web conferencing).
By contrast, deals that are ultimately lost show that it’s often a struggle to get more than one point of contact to attend meetings. The first person they connect with is often the only person they ever speak with.
The success gap really widens when you look at the unique number of prospects involved in a deal via email.
GONG LABS DATA POINT #2: On average, winning deals involve eight points of contact via email. Losing deals only make it to three points of contact via email. That’s a 243 percent difference in engagement.
Three Critical Advantages of Multi-threading Your Sales Deals
1. Get deal insurance in case your champion goes dark.
When you rely on a single person to close your deal, you’re only a single person away from losing it. This is single-threading, the “unhealthy opposite” of multi-threading.
Even if your champion is the decision maker or economic buyer, investing in their direct reports is worthwhile. You may have a verbal yes, and it may feel like the deal is pretty much done.
Until that single point of contact disappears.
You need additional contacts that will continue to give your deal momentum or, at the very least, supply you with information and deal updates. Any update is better than radio silence.
2. Win over the decision-making committee.
Healthy deals can take a quick downward turn when priorities shuffle, budget restraints set in, or bandwidth becomes limited. Each circumstance has the potential to hold up your deal, but multi-threading can tackle them all.
Multi-threading means you are never fighting obstacles alone. The ability to tackle several threats at once is especially important for companies attempting to go up-market and for sellers chasing larger, more complex deals.
3. Get deeper insight from multiple sources about potential deal obstacles.
Every deal in your pipeline has a surprise – a hidden truth you have yet to uncover. That’s why you’re never truly in control of your deal until you learn the full truth, and that requires numerous information sources.
You uncover unknowns by triangulating the truth with your stakeholders. This means asking the same questions to multiple contacts and seeing whether the answers align.
If they do, great! You have your path to a deal. If they don’t align, then you’ve found a hiccup in the buying process before it’s found you. Now you can get in front of it and continue the buying process.
Build the Path to a Successful Close
Now that you know the importance of multi-threading, you need plays you can put into play today. That's why we created our Multi-threading Playbook, so you can keep influencers engaged throughout your sales cycle. Download it today and get three ready-to-fire multi-threading plays so you can stack the odds in your favor to win more deals.
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