Amy Hrehovcik | How to Multi-Thread Throughout the Organization

A common problem for salespeople is interacting solely with just one stakeholder. But in reality, involving multiple people is the perfect strategy to help deals go through (and make more people excited about them.) In today’s episode of The Sales Evangelist, Donald is joined by Amy Hrehovcik to discuss her strategy to apply multi-threading throughout your sales process.

Amy’s sales experience is extensive.

• After selling for nearly a decade, Amy finished at Thomson Reuters before transitioning to marketing consulting (eventually working in a startup as the Chief of Customer Value.)
• She later pivoted to sales enablement, realizing she had a passion for teaching sellers and empowering sales leaders.
• Amy now hosts the podcast Revenue Real Hotline, where she discusses uncomfortable conversations in sales.
• Why did she start the podcast? She wrote an article (Mental Health, The Greatest Competitive Advantage That You’ll Ever Know), and it was viewed by the great Andy Paul.
• He invited her onto his show, and participating in that made her realize the importance of podcasting in sales. (Check out Donald’s guest appearance on her show.)

Today’s topic: Multi-threading

• Multi-threading describes liaising with multiple stakeholders and executive sponsors throughout an organization. 
• The average number of buyers involved in the buying motion was 6.7. Since that time, it has increased.
• Because her main selling vertical was big law, Amy realized the importance of proactively engaging with multiple stakeholders early on to minimize the objections buyers would have when moving the deal forward.

Why should you consider this selling approach?

• Not to sound cliche (but we will anyway), it’s the same reason you don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
• Amy began to hold off on doing deep-dive demos until at least three executive sponsors were in the room because it diversified the risk for the individuals involved. 
• They were no longer the sole advocate for a product (assuming they like it), thus limiting the amount of blame and buyer’s remorse people might feel after implementation.
• Because the buying process is getting longer, executives will invariably drop out of the acquisition process. But when you have two or three other executives who want to see the deal move forward, it is much more likely to move through.

How can you begin to develop this approach?

• Communicate with the original executive sponsor that you want to help them make the right decision, and you can do that by demonstrating the business case on your behalf. 
• Ask permission to have conversations with others or other departments to learn how others reach a particular goal.
• The Heath Brothers wrote in one of their books (Made to Stick) the idea of bright spots.
• Because of the relationships she developed throughout this discovery phase, she could return to her original executive sponsor and deliver a detailed report that helped both of their causes.

One major takeaway from multithreading? Just do it. It’s like anything else- you might not be good at it at first. But with practice, you’ll begin to see success. To contact Amy, connect with her on LinkedIn to learn more about her process with multithreading.

This episode is brought to you in part by Skipio.

Are you sick of crickets? As a salesperson, the pain of reaching out with phone calls or emails and not