#608 - How Mapping the "Shadow" Org Chart Got Me to 305% of Quota
30 Minutes to President's Club | No-Nonsense Sales
Laura McDonald shares her enterprise sales strategy that helped her achieve 305% of quota by mapping the 'shadow' org chart—uncovering hidde
Key takeaways
- Mapping the 'shadow' org chart reveals true decision-makers beyond official titles.
- Building trust early allows access to candid insights about organizational politics.
Main topics
- Shadow org chart mapping
- Enterprise multithreading strategy
Notable quotes
"The point is you kind of want to get it wrong—because then they'll correct you, and that's how you build real alignment."
Conclusion
By mapping hidden power structures, engaging champions as coaches, and
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:00) So today we're going to go through the critical thing, especially in enterprise sales, which is not just how do you map the org chart in a company to figure out who's your champion, who needs to be your exec sponsor, who's your detractor. What you really want to be thinking about is how do you map the power base, the political invisible spider web. in your customer and your prospect. I spent a lot of time learning this technique and it's definitely one of the things that helped me get to 305 % of my number this year and finish as the number one rep out of almost 100 sellers. I've learned this from sales leaders. I've learned this from a book called The Power Base. So I'm going to... consolidate these learnings and take you through my exact strategy for how I do this. Speaker 3 (0:40) Perfect. So we've split this episode into three chapters. We're going to start by the exact way that you map the power base, the shadow org chart, the political org chart with your champion. Then we're going to talk about how you get access to the different people that you need to win over and the blockers you need to neutralize. And then we're going to talk about your playing Cupid matchmaking. Why are the building strategy that you use to make sure that you win the deal? So Laura. You were telling me when we were prepping for this, this is not something that you are wasting your time with before you even spoke into somebody. You're not even doing it after like the first or second call. Give me context for when you map the Powerbase. And then I would love for you to show me this crazy diagram that you are using to get your champion to basically coach you how to win over the whole org. Speaker 1 (1:27) Absolutely. And thank you for having me. It's my favorite topic. So excited to hopefully share some learnings here. And you're spot on, like you cannot do this until you have real trust with someone on the customer on the prospect side. So if you're an enterprise sales, this could be a couple of months even into your cycle. And it might be a champion. You can even do this with a coach, to be honest, doesn't really matter. Champion is ideal, but just someone who you trust enough and who trusts you that they're going to open up the kind of kimono on the organization here. I'm Speaker 3 (2:00) going to show kind of. what this looks Speaker 1 (2:02) like and then I'll work backwards to sort of how I get here. Speaker 1 (2:07) I mean, this is real life. I'm obviously not going to zoom into individual names on here, but you can see this is where I do all my org chart and power base mapping. There's so many ways you can do this with AI or in other tools. I just prefer it in mirror. It's just my preference. I'm going to zoom in on one here. This is a fake company, NextVar Chemical Group. I made it up, but this is kind of what it would look like in real life. And you'll see this one's been... a little bit built out i'm down to you know like six layers in in some of the teams in this particular chemical manufacturing organization so i'll just rewind as to where this starts so i will always build the initial framework of the org chart and i will always start with pretend you know we're selling to pepsico i will go to their leadership page first this is obviously Super easy. You can find CEO, CFO, SVPs, etc. So I would just manually kind of build these into my org chart. I will just guess and presumably in this case, Scott reports into Jordan. I can presume that COO Valentina reports into Jordan. And so I will build out that first layer. I'll then also go to LinkedIn. Again, easy. Go to PepsiCo's page. open them up in Sales Navigator and kind of do the same thing, you know, PepsiCo. Speaker 1 (3:37) And then I'll probably seniority title. Like I'm looking to build out at least CXO and maybe SVP, VP type level. And then I'll kind of filter a little bit by if I'm looking for building out analytics org, for example. I'll look at analytics and kind of see who comes up at that title. Senior director, maybe I'll add Vomesh VP here, Jeremy, I'll add them in. So I'll build out. that first couple of layers so maybe here i've gone down to you know i've added fatima in nadia etc and you're Speaker 3 (4:13) just Speaker 1 (4:13) taking your best guess Speaker 3 (4:14) at this because i'm an idiot i have zero idea how to build something like this i mean you're smarter than me but it seems pretty comfortable i mean pepsico is a massive company next of our chemical group not a small order i mean you're smelling something of massive companies laura but Speaker 1 (4:27) it's it's just guesswork and the point is you kind of want to get it wrong once you got to this point in your in your sales cycle with your champion coach whoever I will get on a call with them. You know, I'll make up some excuse to have a one-to-one or maybe we just have a weekly one-to-one or something already as part of our engagement. And I will say, hey, I've been selling analytics for a long time. I know how many people are involved typically in these kinds of decisions, as do you. You've been at the company for a while. You've been in this role. What I would love to do if you're open to it is can I just walk you through? the different people who I think will need to be involved in any kind of decision on ThoughtSpot. And, you know, you tell me if we're thinking about things in the right way, and then together we can kind of figure out if we need to involve these people and when that might be. So Speaker 3 (5:14) you said something really interesting a second ago. You said the point is to kind of get it wrong. And I thought I was supposed to be clairvoyant and get everything right as a salesperson. Don't I look silly if I get it wrong? Speaker 1 (5:27) No, the... Speaker 1 (5:29) There's a book by Chris Voss, you know, the never split the difference. We've had him on Speaker 3 (5:34) the show, Laura. Speaker 1 (5:35) Okay. So you, so, you know, and I'm sure so many people watching this will know as well, the whole, the psychology of getting people to know or getting people to correct you. Speaker 3 (5:44) So Speaker 1 (5:44) if, if you show someone an org chart and they see people are in the wrong place, they will tell you that you've got them in the wrong place. How Speaker 3 (5:51) do you tee this up? Cause I imagine you don't just like. pull this up and you're like, so I built this thing. I guess, what do you say to like introduce? So Speaker 1 (5:57) I'll say, so I've kind of taken my best guess at your org chart. In this scenario, I really want to understand, you know, selling analytics or whatever. I want to be in the data analytics org to start off with. So I'll say, okay, so I presume your CFO reports into your CFO and then Mr. Prospect, Mrs. Prospect, you've talked a lot about... Scott Thomas, your chief AI officer, is probably being the sponsor of this. I see this in different companies. Sometimes CAIOs report straight to the CEO. Sometimes I've seen them go into the CFO. Do I have this right here? Does Scott report to Scott? And they'll say yes. Or they'll say, no, actually, Scott Thomas reports to Valentina over here. Speaker 3 (6:42) There's one really subtle thing that you're doing there. You're not just saying, who does Scott report to? You're saying, hey, I've seen this at different companies. Sometimes it's this, sometimes it's that. And what that is showing is that you are one, you know what you're talking about, which again, continues to raise your status in the eyes of the prospect. Okay, Laura is somebody that I can trust. She's done this before, but also it's just like. You're making their cognition easier here by suggesting as opposed to making them do all the thinking work. And it's this really subtle thing. But when you make this exercise feel heavy to your prospect where they're doing all the giving, even if you get through all this, they're going to be less apt to help you again in the future. And so subtle thing you're doing, but I've noticed you do it at multiple different places. I really like it. Speaker 1 (7:29) Thank you. Yeah, well, yeah, exactly. Like if you just say, hey, can you draw out your org chart for me? That's like... massive cognitive load. They probably don't know as well. So anyway, and then I'll kind of continue a little bit. Some of these names who are lower down in the org, every single time I have a call with a prospect company, regardless of who's on there, I will add them to where I think they sit in Speaker 3 (7:51) the org. So this is Speaker 1 (7:52) a continually evolving thing. And it also just helps me remember. who's who and who have we met and who haven't we met and things like that. If Speaker 3 (7:59) I fast forward here, what ends up happening is you end up having a discussion with your champion where you get a sense of not the shadow org or the power base, but you get a sense of like the real org structure. What you're doing here is you're trying to understand who are the people that care about this project. But I think then you're going one step deeper and you're figuring out who has influence over the... Scots of the world and the other key executives here. So could you take me to what are the types of questions you are asking your champion in this discussion? And what are you trying to understand? So Speaker 1 (8:35) once we figured out, you know, all these people sit here and they sit everywhere and you'll see as well, I have little notes. Like if I'm on a prospect call and someone mentions. oh you know if pina says i love tennis and she's got two sons and things like that i'll just kind of add some of this stuff along the way again so that i remember for later down the line then i will start to ask questions to figure out who actually matters here um because what we find is that usually it's not always who you think it is so um so pina so she's okay vp of ai so i will ask questions like okay so like do pina and scott kind of get on and then the prospect would either say oh yeah you're like you know they're super close and they work together at a previous company um pina really is scott's kind of right-hand person for this etc etc etc and then you can kind of put on that thread like oh interesting so does does peter's pina know about this analytics project that we're working on at the moment Oh yeah, we keep her regularly updated and things like that. And we send her a summary every week of the different tools that we're looking at and where we are, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, so do you reckon Pina is telling Scott that? Like I'm presuming they meet pretty often, et cetera, et cetera. And then they'll say, oh, probably not because Pina doesn't tell Scott things until we've made a decision on the technology. Oh, interesting. Okay, so Scott has absolutely no idea that this evaluation is even happening. No, no, no, no. So you can just learn little things along the way. One, you're trying to figure out, do these people have influence over the EB? But then you can go deeper into, does the EB even know this is going on? Kind of a red flag if they don't, because then that means probably not their top three priorities. Speaker 2 (10:25) Today's show is brought to you by Align, the AI deal workspace that helps sales teams close complex deals. So here's a tip about multi-threading. There are stakeholders in your deals that you don't even know exist, like the VP of Finance, who's viewed your Champions Recap twice this week, but no one actually introduced you. That is the type of person who's peeking around your deal and might sneak up to kill the deal at the finish line, and Align's AI surfaces it before it's too late so you can multi-thread to them. We built a full multi-threading playbook powered by Align. It's free in the show notes. Speaker 2 (10:54) What's going on, folks? Quick heads up. The week of September 21st is SKO slash RKO planning week at 30 Minutes to President's Club. There are a lot of companies that spend months and hundreds of thousands of dollars at sales kickoffs. They fly everyone into a place. They take sellers off the floor.