Our Principals do a lot of deal and account coaching. One of the frequent mistakes that we see is spending too much time trying to salvage the vote of stakeholders that are already too far gone. These people have already made up their mind which vendor they want earlier in the process and although you can bring political peer pressure to change their vote you're probably not going to change their mind.

Inexperienced salespeople tend to try to change the preference at this point by sending them more and more information. It either goes straight in the trash, or worse, straight to the competition. Psychological research shows that it's up to 10 times easier to help someone make up their mind in the first place then it is to change it.

Positioning is the art of saying it first. Unless the stakeholder has used another solution at another company, their mind is somewhat a blank slate for you to write on. By good consultative selling, salespeople can build preference by aligning personalities, asking the rights questions in discovery, knowing their industry, building relationships and linking solutions to business problems.

Some salespeople actually gain the lead in the first meeting during the discovery phase. If your competitor has been better at this with an individual stakeholder, you either have to have a strategy to change their vote or live without it.

Depending on the decision-making process, you may not need all the votes. If you have the votes of the more powerful people you can still win. They may vote by department. it might be a two-tiered evaluation where you only have to make the cut and executives will pick the vendor (and in issues can change).

A stakeholder analysis could be a software plug-in to your CRM system or it could just be done on a cocktail napkin. What is important is to identify who has influence and which pains are more strategic. Knowing the decision-making process of the client will tell you whose votes you need; the salesperson that identifies them first and builds preference early has a very high percentage of winning. Otherwise you quickly becom column B or C, but you won't know it because the customer never tells you.