AMA: LinkedIn Director of Sales, Enterprise & Mid Market | North American Staffing Industry, Michael Cirrito on Stakeholder Management

When tailoring value narratives, start by clearly defining the stakeholder personas you typically engage. At the most basic level, this includes your Champion, Users, and Decision Makers. But any mature sales organization will have either a specific set of personas they've developed, or likely map to a formal sales methodology like MEDDIC or Sandler, where Economic Buyer, Technical Buyer, Blocker, Procurement, are common. The specific labels vary by company, but the underlying principle remains ...Read More

Effective discovery is the foundation of great sales. Yet, conducting strong sales discovery (Disco) is one of those things that sounds simple but is consistently hard. The quality of Disco depends not only on the questions a seller asks but also on how they respond to the answers they hear. Starting with the questions—this part is straightforward. I’ll share two time-tested discovery frameworks that have served me well. First, the Sandler Pain Funnell which is eight simple questions.  But when ...Read More

Stakeholder turnover mid-deal is inevitable — especially in large enterprises or global organizations. I learned this acutely during a decade spent leading sales teams in Government and Higher Education, where buying cycles often stretch 12–18 months. The key is to plan for turnover rather than react to it. 1. Build for resilience through multithreadingThe single most important habit is developing multiple, meaningful relationships across the account. Top account managers will typically have 6 o ...Read More

In a typical enterprise SaaS sales cycle, communication cadence, content, and format should be tailored to the audience.  At LinkedIn, we use a set of recurring, purpose-built meeting types to engage stakeholders at different levels of the customer organization.  This is what it might look like for a typical Enterprise customer:   Executive Briefings — Annually Audience: Senior executives such as the CHRO, VP of Talent, COO, or CEO (in smaller organizations).Purpose: Align your solution to the c ...Read More