Stakeholder mapping for considered deals

Four buying roles (Miller and Heiman, Strategic Selling). Economic buyer: one per sale, the final yes or no (managing partner, MD, CEO). User: uses or supervises it (head of marketing or BD; the people who post). Technical: screens against technical, regulatory and compliance standards; can say no, cannot say yes (COLP, IT or security lead). Coach: wants you to win; gives inside information. Treat technical buyers as vetoes from day one, never a late formality.

Response modes: triage before you pitch. Growth ("We want more partners visible this year") and Trouble ("Our two best-known consultants just left"): go to discovery and demo. Even keel ("Partners post when they want to. It's fine"): no demo yet; insight and a gap question first. Overconfident ("We're already great on LinkedIn"): no demo yet; ask them to compare their people's visibility with the firms they lose pitches to.

Win and result. For each person record the business result and the personal win. Head of BD: result "every fee earner visible", win "I stop being the bottleneck". COLP: result "no breach of our obligations", win "I can show the partners AI is under control". Sell to both.

A champion is someone who acts. Coaches provide information but never take action (McMahon). Record someone as a champion only after they have arranged a meeting with the COLP, IT lead or economic buyer; shared the firm's evaluation criteria or procurement steps; helped build the case in the firm's numbers; or introduced legal or procurement. The tests, word for word:

"Could you get us 20 minutes with your COLP and your IT lead before we go further? It'll save them a long email chain later."

"When you write this up for the partners, would it help to include approval workflow, rules checked before posting and an activity log as criteria? Those are the things a compliance officer will usually want to see."

"If we had to decide this week whether to keep going with this or step back, what would you advise us to do?" (A champion tells you how to stay in; a coach shrugs.)

Arm the mobiliser. The friendly coordinator who takes every call often cannot drive change; the sceptical head of BD asking hard questions often can (Challenger Customer). Arm that person with a one-page note for the partners' meeting, in their words.

The company question ("will you be here in a year?").

Say

"Fair question, and you should ask it. We're new, and you'd be one of our early customers. What's true: it's used every working day inside a recruitment business one of our founders owns, so we live with it ourselves. You get a direct line to the people who built it. Your data is yours: you can download everything we hold about you, or delete your account, from Settings. And nothing rolls over without a conversation."

Never mention funding, revenue, investors or valuation. If a buyer asks about helping shape the product, do not offer the Founding Design Partner programme (D4, not decided): take it to Alex or John.

Light MEDDPICC layer. On considered deals only, add three lines to SPICED's Decision field and nothing more: economic buyer (named; met or not); decision process (steps in order, with dates); paper process (what must be signed or answered before payment).

Regulated-buyer path. Holly at Observe to start (D8); approval chain set before anyone posts; COLP and IT met before the proposal; a Technical Proof demo; policy uploaded as rules only after the data processing terms are in place; the rules check is "a second pair of eyes, not a compliance sign-off"; a paid scoped pilot only if Alex or John set it (pending D17).