The first step in any sales process is understanding the relationship with a particular client or clients for that matter. Understanding the relationship and getting it right could be the key to making a sale or otherwise.
Take for instance a partner in some organization you are trying to sell your product to. The partner in question may not have sole authority to make purchases and had you implemented relationship mapping, you would know this.
Imagine spending all that time trying to convince them to buy your product and then finding out that there are other members of the organization with more power and authority to make decisions like those. All that pointless hustle would have been avoided with relationship mapping.
What Is Relationship Mapping?
Relationship mapping is basically creating a visualization of all your interconnected contacts, who knows who, who is in charge and how well they know them.
Relationship mapping goes into deeper details like when last you contacted particular clients and what you contacted them about. In the long run, it can be used to infer if your relationship with a particular client is getting stronger or weaker. An accurate database of customer info reveals all this information, which is critical to a B2B prospecting tool.
Why You Need Relationship Mapping
If you have been in business, you are certainly no stranger to hearing no at a sales pitch or on someone’s door when doing door to door sales. There is a decent chance that the negative response is because of a weak relationship with that prospective customer or dwindling relationship with an existing customer.
Throw in some lack of understanding and all you will hear are nos.
Relationships need to be nurtured just like romantic relationships – business dinners are okay, just not flowers. Without good relationships, these customers may start passing on you which can be very damaging especially when you have a lot at stake. Important, healthy customer relationships are best depicted where complicated decisions need to be made – the more complicated the decision, the more that is at stake.
Cultivate and nurture great relationships with all your customers so other customers aren’t jealous – just kidding. As a business, you can’t just depend on one customer, which is why maintaining strong relationships with all your customers is paramount to success.
Relationship Mapping and Relationship Intelligence
A couple of articles into business relations and you are guaranteed to see these two terms being thrown around quite often. So, just how different or alike are they?
To put it simply, what we get from relationship intelligence platforms is an outcome of deploying relationship mapping software. Relationship intelligence is aimed at winning new clients, protecting existing clients, and furthering business with existing clients to boost revenue.
Back in the day when there’re weren’t a plethora of relationship mapping software, relationship mapping was done the traditional way: actually building out a visual chart of all key stakeholders with individual cards for each stakeholder, which included motivations and some notes about them – kind of like that big board detectives and private investigators have in their offices with pins and all the connections to a particular case.
It’s all a matter of individualism and you could use color codes and symbols to your liking to represent different relationships.
You can see how tedious and complex this can be for large organizations. On top of that you could complete a build and have it obsolete because some logistics have changed. Having to update it all over again is very cumbersome and tiring.
Portability is also an issue for the old-fashioned way. Imagine carrying that big board around because insights are typically located in a centralized location.
Technology has eliminated all that with relationship mapping software and relationship intelligence platforms. There is no need to manually create and update potentially one-off visual maps. This software creates insights that are automatically updated and delivered via email.
Benefits of Relationship Mapping
Before even getting to its advantages when using B2B prospecting tools, automated relationship mapping has numerous advantages to your business. After careful analysis of trustworthy data by the AI, insights can now be accurately drawn. Insights typically include:
Who in your business has the best relationship with whoever you are targeting in a certain organization? Where are the opportunities to upsell? Who is in the best position to provide referrals?
All these insights are crucial to bettering relationships and upscaling sales.