Know the Deal Stakeholders in a Sale Before You Cold Email

The doors of opportunity for outbound salesSometimes you’ll have the opportunity to close a deal by sending cold emails to a single person and getting their buy-in as the primary decision-maker.

However, most sales involve multiple deal stakeholders across several departments, each with different needs, concerns, and points of view in the buying process.

If you don’t have an understanding of who influences a deal, you risk targeting sales leads that aren’t the right fit or losing out on outbound sales with the wrong cold email approach.

To ensure you’re starting sales conversations with the right people at the right time, you need to break down the stakeholders involved in winning your specific B2B sale.


Transactional & Mid-Market Deal-Making


When outbound deals are easy to qualify, move forward, and close, there’s less people and process involved in winning a sale.

Transactional and mid-market sales have shorter sales cycles and aren’t as overwhelming as enterprise deals. The right target account might even have a sole decision-maker for purchasing your solution.

However, it’s still important to keep your target buyer and their buying process in mind. The people involved in a deal will often vary from company to company.

Once you know the journey that qualified buyers need to take for a potential conversion, you’ll have an understanding of how to start the sales conversation and who to email.


Complex & Enterprise Deal-Making


With sales involving enterprise-level or technical solutions, closing outbound deals usually requires multiple contacts, many touchpoints, and a longer sales cycle.

This type of deal-making requires a well-positioned, multi-threaded outbound strategy and often means managing multiple conversations simultaneously.

While final decision-makers will have the biggest impact on closing the deal, it’s not always a good idea to go directly to the highest level of leadership with cold email.

Depending on the buying process, it might be better to build influence with the departments involved or finding a bought-in stakeholder to be your deal champion.

To win outbound sales involving more complexity, you should keep the buying journey in mind when choosing who to cold email and how to move the deal forward.




The roles you target, their seniority, and the company’s industry, size, and location are a few of the many factors that impact your approach to cold email prospecting.

Without a clear understanding of the verticals and personas you’re targeting, you risk losing opportunities because your cold email approach doesn’t align with your buyers.

The solution is to seek clarity.

By breaking down the needs, pains, and motivations between one deal stakeholder and another, you gain visibility into how cold email fits into your outbound sales process.

Not only does this enable you to optimize the outbound sales experience for any buyer, but it also provides insight into how leads compare to one another using cold email.


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