A Competitive Edge blueprint for stakeholder mapping in complex enterprise sales
Picture the scene. Your team has invested six months nurturing a £2M deal. Your client ‘champion’ is fully bought in. Then someone from procurement you’ve never met kills it on a compliance issue you could have neutralised in week one.
That’s enterprise buying now: a team sport with more players, tougher gatekeepers, and higher stakes. Gartner puts the typical buying group at six to ten decision-makers, in many complex tech deals it’s considerably more. If you’re only engaging with one or two, you’re leaving the outcome to chance – and handing the edge to competitors who man-mark the whole field.
Forensic man-marking is the discipline of finding every stakeholder who can move the deal – champions, influencers and blockers – and shaping your pursuit around what matters to each of them. Here’s how to do it.
Start with a precise ICP
Before you map people, be ruthless about which accounts deserve a must-win effort. A strong ICP goes beyond firmographics and tells you the real fit signals: technology environment, transformation pressures, and how decisions typically get made in that kind of organisation. Legacy systems, for example, don’t just suggest ‘migration opportunity’, they hint at security, risk and IT leaders who will shape (or stall) your deal.
- Checkpoint: In must-win pursuits, a vague ICP isn’t inefficient, it’s a liability.
The forensic man-marking framework: three steps that protect your edge
Armed with the data and well evidenced ICP to pursue, now the real work begins. You need to go deep and map the full stakeholder ecosystem.
1) Start with your champion, then map the whole field
Your champion is a guide, not your only route in. Ask early: who else weighs in, who controls budget, who owns risk, and who will sign off commercially? Then validate it yourself. Use LinkedIn, CRM insights and your own network to uncover reporting lines, peer influencers and likely veto holders across IT, finance, security and legal.
- Checkpoint: If finance, security or legal aren’t visible early, expect late-stage surprises.
2) Rank influence before you craft messaging
Not all stakeholders carry the same weight, and they don’t care about the same things. Economic buyers want outcomes and ROI. Champions need internal business-case ammo. Technical evaluators need architectural confidence. End users need adoption and ease. Blockers need their objections surfaced while there’s still time to address them. Capture this in a simple matrix: person, influence level, priority, and the message they need from you.
- Checkpoint: If you can’t rank influence, you can’t tailor persuasion.
3) Track sentiment like a win/loss metric
Man-marking is a live view of the deal. Track who you’ve engaged, their sentiment (supportive, neutral, sceptical, blocking), and the actions needed to move them. This is where marginal gains show up – small shifts that compound into a decisive win.
From map to strategy – shape the deal before it’s written
A map only becomes competitive advantage when you act on it early enough to change the outcome. Tailor proof to each stakeholder: a tight exec narrative for the economic buyer, deeper detail for IT, workflow impact for ops, and risk confidence for procurement and legal. Multi-thread your engagement so the deal doesn’t collapse if your champion moves on. And at every stage-gate, run a stakeholder review: have you found everyone who can influence or veto, engaged them directly, and neutralised their concerns?
How to begin this week
Pick your top three active deals and build a stakeholder matrix for each (if you don’t have the tools to allow you to go deep enough, ask us for ours). Fill gaps through LinkedIn. In discovery, ask ‘who else needs to be involved?’ Track engagement by stakeholder, not just by account.
Enterprise deals aren’t won by selling harder. They’re won by seeing the whole field, engaging it with precision, and removing surprises before they become deal-killers.
Need help to unlock your edge?
If you’re in a must-win pursuit or trying to grow the accounts that drive most of your revenue, we can help you man-mark every stakeholder and shape the deal in your favour. Speak to our Growth and Strategy Director James Mollard to put forensic man-marking into your next live pursuit.
