Do you know what multithreading is?

There are some consistent issues I see in sales teams. One of those is multithreading – or rather, the lack of it. Multithreading in the sales context means having multiple contacts at your prospect, who are engaged with multiple individuals in your team.

The importance of multithreading may be fairly obvious, but just in case… A single line of communication is a single point of failure. If that individual realises that your solution will not advance their career, maybe they will go quiet on you, despite the fact it is a good solution for their company. Maybe the person who is really going to see the value is not your initial contact, but someone they engage with internally. Certainly, more senior people in your prospect will have a different perspective on the value of your solution than junior people. Product or business people will have a different perspective from users or engineers. None are wrong or right, but to build a true picture of the value you can bring, you need to engage with multiple people.

Giving your prospect access to multiple people in your company allows you to build different relationships, find different information and create other supporters. It will give your customer more confidence that you can support them broadly. You will be able to uncover objections which you may not have discovered through your main contacts. When one contact goes a little quiet, rather than worrying, you can speak to someone else if they’re on holiday or looking at an alternative vendor.

Oddly, many AEs are reluctant to create this environment. I think this is because they feel they may be losing control. Or maybe it is because they feel it would be rude to impose on someone else. Perhaps they can’t think of a reason why a certain conversation should happen. Leadership should therefore work with AEs to help them overcome these concerns and create the relationships.

In any decent sized account, the AE should not be running every conversation. As soon as possible, you should have some type of senior engagement, perhaps from the head of sales or regional director, to your Champion’s manager. You should be aiming to get the appropriate executive in your business engaged with the Economic Buyer. You have sales engineers/solution architects talking with technical individuals – they shouldn’t just respond to questions, but they should be engaging in building relationships.

In the largest deals – 1m+ – you will should have 8-12 separate contacts you are working with at the customer, likely from 4-6 people in your business. In any six-figure deal, I would be surprised if you have less than 4-8 contacts. Even in a mid/high five figure deal, there should almost certainly be 3-4 contacts.