Complex sales cycles take weeks. You have to coordinate demos, create the perfect pitch, and build what feels like a strong case. But when it’s time to close the deal, a decision-maker (one you didn’t even know existed), raises concerns and everything comes to a stop.

Enterprise sales are anything but simple. 

These deals come with long buying cycles, intricate organizational networks, and stakeholders with conflicting priorities. Success hinges not just on your solution but on your ability to understand the human side of the deal. Without a clear map of the decision-makers, influencers, and even detractors, your sales team risks losing control of the process.

The stakes are high, and the challenges don’t stop with external coordination. Internally, enterprise sales require huge effort:

• Organizing, and making sure the right people are in the meetings with various stakeholders.
• Getting your team up to speed on “who’s who” at the customer’s organization.
• Managing multiple demos (especially in tech)

The truth is, no matter how great your product or service is, you likely won’t win the deal without a deep understanding of who holds the power and influence in the organization.

That is why we built OrgChartPlus (OCP). Designed as a powerful Salesforce-integrated solution, it provides sales teams with the visibility they need to map and visualize stakeholders, clarifying the path to success. You can turn the chaos of enterprise sales into a structured process, increasing your win rate and helping you hit your quota, faster. 

Let’s explore how OCP can bring structure to the way you approach enterprise sales.

Multiple Departments, Many Interests

In enterprise deals, the sales process doesn’t revolve around a single decision-maker or department. Instead, it often involves people from IT, finance, legal, compliance, marketing, and operations. Each of these departments has its own priorities, decision criteria, and pain points. If your sales team isn’t addressing all of these needs, misalignment is almost inevitable, causing friction and delays.

For example, while IT may prioritize a solution’s technical fit, finance could be more focused on ROI, and legal might be concerned with compliance risks. If even one group’s needs aren’t fully understood, your deal could hit a roadblock late in the process.

How OrgChartPlus Helps:

• Stakeholder Mapping: OrgChartPlus provides a visual map of all stakeholders involved in the deal directly in your Salesforce. This clarity helps sales teams see which departments are represented and ensures no one is overlooked.
• Goal Management: You can document and track the specific goals, decision-making priorities, and concerns of each department directly within the stakeholder map. This means that your team’s pitches are relevant, no matter who they’re speaking to. 

Informal Influence

Not every decision-maker has a formal title. In many organizations, key influencers operate behind the scenes. Think team members with no official authority but significant sway over decisions. These individuals, often referred to as “hidden influencers,” can make or break your deal. Without a way to identify them, you risk missing critical voices until it’s too late.

Take, for example, a cross-departmental project where a trusted engineer or operations lead has earned the ear of the CFO. Their opinion might weigh heavily on the final decision, even if their name never appears on the org chart.

How OrgChartPlus Helps:

• Relationship Tracking: OrgChartPlus highlights not just formal roles but also informal influence within the organization. It captures attributes like “Influence Level” and “Intimacy,” making it easier to identify those with sway.
• Strategic Engagement: By revealing these hidden influencers early, sales teams can create strategies to win their support and neutralize potential resistance.

Stakeholder mapping in enterprise sales is more than just listing names on a spreadsheet. It’s about understanding the web of relationships, priorities, and informal power dynamics that drive decision-making. OrgChartPlus you have the complete picture.

Let’s move on to Section 2, where we’ll explore the key roles you need to map!

Key Roles to Map with OrgChartPlus

In enterprise sales, success often depends on understanding the dynamics of the organization you’re selling to. Knowing the key players, their roles, influence, and priorities, can make the difference between a stalled deal and a smooth close. OCP helps you identify and engage with the individuals who matter most. Let’s take a look at four critical roles you should be mapping in every enterprise deal.

Economic Decision-Maker

The Economic Decision-Maker is the person with the authority to approve budgets and make the final purchase decision. Often a high-level executive like a CFO, COO, or department head, this individual tends to prioritize ROI and overall value.

Why They Matter:

Without the Economic Decision-Maker on board, even the most compelling pitch can fail. They’re the ones who ultimately sign off on funding and ensure your solution aligns with the organization’s financial goals.

How OrgChartPlus Helps:

• Tagging Economic Buyers: OrgChartPlus allows you to clearly label the Economic Decision-Maker, ensuring their role is prioritized within your strategy.
• Focused Engagement: By noting their specific priorities, such as cost savings or operational efficiency, your team can make sure presentations address their concerns directly.

Compliance and Legal Stakeholders

In enterprise sales, deals often hinge on legal and compliance reviews. These stakeholders may not be involved in the day-to-day discussions, but their input is critical to moving the deal forward. Overlooking them can lead to costly delays or even derail the process entirely.

Why They Matter:

These stakeholders ensure the solution meets regulatory standards, contractual obligations, and internal compliance policies. If their needs aren’t addressed early, it can result in last-minute roadblocks.

How OrgChartPlus Helps:

• Sign-Off Tracking: OrgChartPlus enables you to map legal and compliance stakeholders and track their progress on required approvals.
• Visibility: With OrgChartPlus, you can monitor where these stakeholders are in the process, ensuring their involvement is planned and managed proactively to avoid surprises.

Champions and Influencers

Champions are your internal advocates, individuals who believe in your solution and actively promote it within the organization. Influencers, on the other hand, may not be as overt in their support but wield significant sway over decision-making, often shaping the opinions of key decision-makers.

Why They Matter:

Champions help build momentum for your solution, while influencers can quietly tip the scales in your favor, or against you if you ignore them.

How OrgChartPlus Helps:

• Role Assignment: OrgChartPlus allows you to tag Champions and map their relationships to other stakeholders, showing how their support flows through the organization.
• Influence Mapping: By identifying influencers early, your messaging can align with their interests and turn them into allies.

Detractors/Blockers

Not every stakeholder will be on your side. Detractors are individuals who actively oppose your solution, often because of loyalty to a competitor or concerns about change. Ignoring them can lead to unexpected resistance that derails your efforts.

Why They Matter:

Identifying detractors allows you to address their concerns head-on, potentially turning them into neutral or even supportive players.

How OrgChartPlus Helps:

• Tagging Detractors: With OrgChartPlus, you can flag detractors and track their concerns.
• Mitigation Strategies: The platform provides insights into their influence level, helping you develop targeted efforts to address their objections and minimize their impact on the deal.

Understanding the roles and relationships within your target organization is key to managing enterprise sales effectively. OCP shows you the “who” and the “how”, how these individuals influence the deal, interact with each other, and shape the outcome.

Next, let’s see how mapping these roles in action can accelerate your sales process and prevent common pitfalls.

The Impact of Mapping Stakeholders

OCP turns your stakeholder mapping into more than just a static list of names and roles; it creates a dynamic strategy to deal with the complexities of enterprise sales. By using OCP, sales teams can tackle common challenges and gain a competitive edge. 

Here’s how stakeholder mapping can help you win more enterprise sales deals:

Preventing Deal Delays

One of the biggest threats to enterprise deals is unexpected delays caused by missing critical contacts or scrambling to meet unanticipated requirements. These issues often arise because stakeholders like compliance officers, budget approvers, or technical reviewers are overlooked until the last minute.

How OrgChartPlus Helps:

• Salesforce Integration: Being native to Salesforce, we embed stakeholder tracking into your existing sales process.
• Proactive Planning: At each stage of the sales cycle, OCP ensures important contacts, like compliance officers or IT reviewers, are identified and engaged early.
• Tracking Critical Steps: For example, if a security review is critical to closing the deal, you can log this requirement directly in Salesforce and assign the responsible stakeholder in OrgChartPlus. This keeps the process moving smoothly.

Multi-Threaded Deals

Single-threaded deals, where the sales team relies on one or two key contacts, are fragile. If a primary contact leaves the organization or loses interest, the deal can collapse. Multi-threaded deals are built on relationships with multiple stakeholders across the organization, making them more resilient.

How OrgChartPlus Helps:

• Connection Visualization: OCP visually maps your relationships across the organization, helping you identify gaps and ensure you’re connected to multiple decision-makers, champions, and influencers.
• Redundancy Building: By engaging several stakeholders early, you create a safety net. If one contact leaves, others are already invested in the process, minimizing disruption.

Engagement Strategy

Enterprise sales aren’t one-size-fits-all. Different stakeholders care about different aspects of your solution, from financial impact to technical feasibility. A personalized approach is essential to winning buy-in across the board.

How OrgChartPlus Helps:

• Stakeholder Attributes: OrgChartPlus tracks details like “solution opinion” and “intimacy level,” giving you insights into each stakeholder’s perspective. For example:
  • If the CFO is skeptical, focus your communication on ROI and cost savings.
  • If the IT manager is a strong supporter, encourage them to advocate for your solution internally.
• Targeted Engagement Plans: With this data, sales teams can address the unique concerns of each stakeholder, building trust and alignment.

Mapping stakeholders is more than gathering data, it’s using that data strategically to move deals forward. With OrgChartPlus, your team can identify bottlenecks, strengthen relationships, and engage stakeholders with precision, ensuring every step of the sales process is effective. 

Summary

Enterprise sales require more than a great product or service, they demand strategic relationship management and an in-depth understanding of the people who hold the keys to success. 

Without a clear, actionable view of stakeholders, even the most promising opportunities can falter. 

Use OCP to allow your sales teams go beyond traditional CRM capabilities, structuring their approach to stakeholder engagement. By mapping each stakeholder’s role, influence, and priorities, OrgChartPlus provides the clarity needed to:

• Map Stakeholders: Identify the right people, from decision-makers to detractors, and understand how they influence the deal.
• Reduce Risks: Prevent delays and roadblocks by engaging critical contacts early and ensuring no one is overlooked.
• Accelerate the Sales Cycle: Create a smooth process by aligning with Salesforce workflows, tracking progress, and maintaining momentum throughout the deal.

OrgChartPlus is more than a map, it gives you a strategy that allows your team to successfully close even the most complex enterprise deals with confidence.

Start mapping your next enterprise deal with OrgChartPlus and see the difference it makes. 

Don’t wait until your next deal hits a roadblock – take control now, for free.