Your Stakeholder Is Ghosting You…Now What?

Sellers keep telling me the same thing: we can't get in front of the stakeholder. Here's the old term worth reviving, and why calling almost anyone else in that building beats sending one more email.

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If you prefer to read - here is the transcript:

I have been out talking to clients and former clients for the better part of the last couple of months, and one theme keeps surfacing.

"Hey, Colleen. The thing we can't do right now is get in front of the stakeholder.

They're not returning calls. They're not showing up to meetings. They're not returning emails.

What can we be doing?"

A couple of things here. One, I think we need to revive a term that was used quite a long time ago but seems to have fallen out of fashion, and that is account based marketing. In other words, let's not manage the PO or the order. Let's manage the account, even if it's just an opportunity with a brand new account.

What do I mean by this?

Let's go wide inside the organization and call anyone. If you can't get ahold of your stakeholder, then quite frankly, any warm body will do.

They can give you information that you can then use to form more compelling messages to your stakeholder. They can give you inside information about the structure of the organization, and maybe they sit adjacent to the stakeholder.

But call wide inside the organization.

Instead of creating a gatekeeper situation for yourself where you are the gatekeeper, call colleagues inside that organization. Think to yourself, how can my product add value to different divisions? Call people your competition isn't calling.

And by all means, use a multimedia approach.

If you're not getting a hold of your stakeholder because all you're doing is emailing them, pick up the phone. Try LinkedIn. If you're still in a market where you're door knocking, go knock on the door.

Pick up the phone. Send an email. Send a text.

A multimedia approach will make your stakeholder, the person you are in hot pursuit of, more likely to return your call. But also go wide across the entire account and see where you can talk to people who can affect a decision to actually get you in front of that stakeholder.