Too many sales teams treat account mapping like detective work. However, identifying the relevant customer stakeholders shouldn’t be a sneaky internal sales process.
After all, you and your buyer champion want the deal to close. So why not collaborate to build a more accurate and effective account map?
Here’s our guide to collaborative account mapping — no Hercule Poirot mustache-twirling required.
What is account mapping?
In sales, account mapping is creating a visual representation of the roles and relationships between the key stakeholders in your target accounts. The goal of an account map is to:
- Get a clear overview of the people involved in purchasing decision-making to make sure you’re building multi-threaded relationships with the right people during the sales journey
- Enrich your CRM data with a more comprehensive picture of each of the stakeholders involved in the deal
- Understand your prospect’s decision-making processes so you can increase your likelihood of closing the deal
- Create a more effective account management strategy by spotting opportunities to upsell and cross-sell within the account
At a minimum, an account map should capture:
- A profile of each of the key stakeholders and influencers within the prospect account, including their name, title, role, involvement in purchase decisions, and contact information
- The pain points and reasons for purchase for each of the stakeholders, as well as any possible concerns or objections
- An organizational chart showing the structure of the organization and the internal power dynamics that could influence the deal
A quick note: in this article, we’re talking about sales account mapping. There’s also:
- Partner account mapping: the process of researching and deepening your understanding of your partner organizations to spot opportunities for further collaboration
- Marketing account mapping: a process used by account-based marketing (ABM) teams to consolidate customer data into a single account so you can create targeted content.
When do you need account mapping?
Account mapping is a good idea for any enterprise sales motion. It’s particularly relevant for Sales teams dealing with:
Large deal sizes with a lot of stakeholders
Account maps can help ensure you’re engaging with the full (and often complex) network of stakeholders involved in making large B2B purchasing decisions.
Long sales cycles
Account maps act as a useful framework for engaging with the right buyer personas within each account, keeping deals on course during a slow buying cycle. By providing the right content to overcome roadblocks and meet individual stakeholder needs, you may even be able to accelerate your sales velocity.
Security and technical reviews
If you’re working on high-ticket deals, account mapping can help you avoid security concerns before they start to hold up the sale. By ensuring you’re already talking to security and legal stakeholders early on, you can find out their requirements and provide necessary documentation in advance, avoiding delays down the road.
4 account mapping tips & strategies
Too many guides to account mapping focus on the physical act of building your map. Frankly, this doesn’t seem very useful. If that’s your only goal, check out tools like Miro, Figma, or Canva.
But honestly, a beautifully designed account map is unlikely to make any meaningful difference to your sales efficiency. So, what does?
1. Build your account map with your prospects, not behind their backs
If you treat your account mapping like detective work, you’re not only wasting time, but you’re also likely to end up with an inaccurate and incomplete result.
Instead, create a shared account map in collaboration with your buyer champion. Since the majority of the purchase process will be made internally without your involvement, your buyer champion is your most important Sales rep.
You and they both want the same thing: to put the deal through.
To make that happen, ask them to help you understand the lay of the land and who you need to talk to, engage, persuade, or get past to get the job done.
During the discovery period, ask your buyer champion specific questions like:
- Who are the key decision-makers when you’re buying this kind of software?
- What do you think will be the most important factors for them?
- What are some of the common objections we’ll be likely to run into?
- Who do you think might be a deal blocker?
- Who was involved in the last purchase process you completed?
- Who will need to know about this purchase?
- Which departments are likely to be the primary users of our solution?
- Who is the economic buyer for your company?
- Which technical stakeholders should we loop in?
- What does the buying process look like?
- How long do you usually take to purchase software?
2. Create a shared account map your prospects can see
Instead of hiding away the findings of your account mapping conversation in an internal sales tool, share it with your prospects. Create a stakeholder registry to capture all the point people, decision-makers, and contact information in the same place.
With Dock’s collaborative workspaces, you can easily include that registry in your prospect’s digital sales room. That way, your prospect can see and update the registry to correct inaccuracies or add missing stakeholders.
[Suggestion: Add screenshot of stakeholder registry here ]
This tool is great for your sales team because it prevents any unexpected stakeholders who are brought in at a late stage of the deal from lengthening the process. It ensures you have a single source of truth and a clear list of who to prioritize to get the deal across the finish line.
It’s also great for your buyer champion because it reminds them of everyone who needs to be convinced if they want the deal to close.
3. Track stakeholder engagement over time
Account mapping shouldn’t be a one-time event during the sales journey. Accounts change over time, people leave or move departments, and decision-making processes evolve.
You need to track real stakeholder engagement to avoid losing deals because of what you’re not seeing.
- Are the people you identified during your initial account mapping conversation engaging throughout the deal?
- Are they looking at your price quote?
- Are they viewing the demo you recorded?
Any good account mapping strategy should have ongoing tracking built in. Dock makes this much more accessible.
Our people analytics features let you monitor who’s looking at your digital salesroom, what they’re looking at and how often they’re looking.
This tool serves two purposes:
- It lets you passively uncover stakeholders involved in a deal. Instead of having to ask who you should be talking to, you get a naturally evolving account map as people are funneled into your Dock link and start interacting with your content.
- It lets you track engagement from each relevant stakeholder so you can confirm a deal's health. Has the economic buyer looked at the quote yet? Has your buyer champion viewed the internal sales pitch deck you put together for them?
Instead of a static org chart, you have a window into your prospect’s decision-making process.
4. Use the account mapping process to multithread relationships
Account maps are only helpful for your Sales team if you use them to foster long-term relationships across the prospect organization. That means taking a multithreaded approach.
Sales multithreading is the process of building multiple ties between your two organizations to form a stronger partnership.
Even if you’re using a top-down sales motion, you’ll still be well-advised to foster relationships with the entire network of stakeholders in your prospect account or risk the deal crumbling if your key point of contact leaves or loses interest.
In practice, that can look like:
- Engaging with each of the stakeholders on your account map via multiple channels (social media, email, and video calls, for instance)
- Building many-to-many relationships by linking up like-minded people from across both organizations — your CEOs, your Marketing Managers, your Sales VPs, your CFOs.
- Focus on establishing rapport rather than simply closing a deal so that you start to be seen as a business partner, not just a vendor with a one-time offer.
Account mapping tools
Here are a few tools you’ll need for the account mapping process:
CRM
Before creating an account map, you’ll want to gather prospect account information in your CRM. If you’re going deep into the account-based sales approach, now might be the right time to level up to an enterprise-ready solution, like:
Prospecting software
If you’re going the traditional route with your account mapping, then you’ll need some tools that will help you uncover the details you need to create a useful map:
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator: You can use LinkedIn's Sales Navigator tool to visually map out key deal stakeholders and research each stakeholder in more depth.
Other useful research tools include:
Design tools
If you’re building a visual account map, you may want to use a design tool to make it easier. Some examples include:
Buyer enablement platform
Or, of course, you could skip all that and use Dock to collaborate with your prospects and create a more accurate account map together.
With Dock’s digital sales rooms, you can:
- Add a stakeholder registry that your prospects can see and help update, enabling your buyer champion to keep track of who they need to engage to get the deal done.
- Track stakeholders when they enter your digital sales room so you know who’s involved in the deal without needing to ask.
- Monitor buyers as they interact with your sales content so you can see how the deal is progressing and where you need to be more proactive.
Make account mapping collaborative with Dock
Account mapping shouldn’t need to happen behind the scenes, and you certainly shouldn’t waste your time trying to deduce your prospect’s key stakeholders, relationships, and decision-making processes. Instead, you could try just… asking them.
With Dock, you create a shared workspace and a collaborative relationship with your buyers, so you can easily work together to get the deal done.
Curious? Try Dock’s digital sales room template now, or sign up for Dock for free.
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