GCS Turn Your Stakeholders into Advocates:

Learning Objectives:

• Identify stakeholders and decisions makers
• Classify stakeholders relationships and organise them using a stakeholder map.
• Improve your key stakeholder relationship and insert your influence.

Summary:

Build a 360-degree view of your customer and/or agency and their organizational structure. You can become a trusted adviser when you understand who plays a critical role in achieving your customer's objectives, their role in the buy-in process, and where their relationship currently stands with you and Google.

Improve relationships by turning stakeholders into champions:

To start filling out his map, Luca needs to use stakeholder management strategies to find the decision makers and build authentic relationships that can help Kancode achieve their business goals. He'll use the framework below to get started.

1. Identify Stakeholders: And understand their role.
2. Classify: The type of relationship with each stakeholders
3. Improve relationship: By finding the decision makers and turning stakeholders into champions both within their org and win Google.

Stakeholder Map: Can be split out into the following area's:

• Identify the Stakeholders: Contact / Role / Org .
• Classify the relationship: Relationship status / Current Status with you / Notes on how to maintain or improve this relationship.
• What do they car about: What do they have influence over / How much are they responsable for / Business KPI's.

Identify the advertiser stakeholders:

• Founder: Business owners typically care about revenues, profit, competitors and share prices. Examples would include Alice & Fionnuala.
• C-Level: CXOs typically care about business objectives and look at a range of investments opportunities to achieve these objectives: talent, mergers and acquisitions, business development, supply chain efficiency, product innovation and marketing. Tends to have access to budgets.
• VP: Typically care about strategies to reach business goals.Eg the VP of Marketing could care about awareness, consideration, purchase, loyalty
• Directors: Typically care about the implementation of strategies. Their budget maybe capped annually or quarterly. Eg Marketing Director could care about reach and frequency, engagement and conversions.
• Managers: Typically care about specific KPIs and day to day concerns. They may not make decisions on budget. For example the campaign manager could care about effective audience targeting and bidding or profitability.
• Frontline: Like managers , frontline staff typically care about specific KPIs, they may not be the decision makers on budget.

Identify the agency or Client side partner

Account director : Account directors at agencies are usually board level directors. They are product and market sector experts. They have a strategic overview of the accounts, and maintain regular contact with the customer at the director level. They care about visibility, new business (technology, global scale), and awards.

Creative Director: A creative director develops the brand as well as its campaign ideas and narrative based on the brand strategy briefed by the customer.

Account Planner: Strategic brand planners come in early to work with the customer to understand market, audience, pain points, and the solution. The output is a brand brief. A media planner (or connection planner) works with the customer to understand which channel the brand should choose and how much budget to allocate. Google sellers should come in early and work with the planner before campaign assets are created. If your first point of contact is a media planner, it may be too late!

Media Buyer: The buyer manages all client investments, getting the best value for money out of the customer’s media budget. They are expert negotiators.

Account Manager/Account Executive: Account managers typically handle the day-to-day liaison and running of account. One AE may work on several accounts. They keep in touch with the customer’s marketing department on a daily basis, coordinate agency departments (creative, media, production), and fulfill short-term objectives.

Roles in the buy-in process

• Advisor: A trusted confidante who is willing and able to guide you on the buy-in process. Generally, it is someone in the client or agency with whom we have a long standing relationship and who is a strong advocate for Google. They can provide guidance on buyer values (what is important to people), process, pricing, budget cycles and competitive context. Often, the guidance you get from the advisor can determine success.
• Approver: The person who must consent to the purchase or decision for it to happen. The approver has the power of veto but is not the buyer per se. Typically, this is a financial controller/CFO or CMO. It sometimes can be the CEO.
• Blocker: Someone who is against the deal or decision and could cause the whole deal to come tumbling down or fall apart.
• Decision Maker: The person who ultimately makes a final choice for your client. This person could be within your client or at their agency. It could be the person who has the budget and ultimately signs the order and pays. This person could also be much higher-level, someone who decides whether or not to partner strategically with you/Google.
• Influencer: This person is formally or informally going to influence whether the buy/decision happens through their opinion. This could be someone who sits on an evaluation panel or someone outside the realm of the formal buy-in process whose opinion is nevertheless influential. It could also be an external party like an agency or adviser, or someone outside the marketing org. An influencer could also be someone who is a supporter of a big idea or project and is motivated to see it to fruition.
• Recommender: This is a person who evaluates (a beta-tester), assesses and validates a purchase or decision – sometimes procurement, could be a technical evaluator, or may be a beneficiary who wants the service outside marketing (e.g. business division or product owner).

Relationship Level

• First Contact:
• Collaborator:
• Opponent:
• Acquaintance:
• Advocate:

Stakeholder Map: This should include ; name, title, organisation, type, role in buy-in process, relationship status.

Visual Mapping:

• Visual mapping is an exercise you can use to further determine which stakeholders are most useful to engage and build a relationship with.

• Luca creates a simple matrix where the X axis measures the stakeholder's interest in the project from low to high. The Y axis measures the stakeholder's influence over the project from low to high.

• Help Luca by placing his stakeholders into the appropriate quadrant of the matrix, based on what their profile suggests about their influence and interest in the project.

Priortise

• High Interest, High Influence: This is the most important group of stakeholders. These people have high power in the project, that either comes from their operational role or their role on the project. For example, the sponsor and your manager. You want to manage this group closely, build trusted relationships and ensure that they stay interested in the project as it progresses.
• Low Interest, high influence: This is your next priority group, which might seem strange as people who fall into this category have already expressed their lack of interest in your project. The reason you want to work with this group is that they are powerful people in their own right. They have the opportunity (potentially) to cancel your project or to block its progress. Equally, if you keep them on side, they could help you move the project forward.
• High Interest, low influence: Your project coordinator falls into this category, and perhaps other people on the very outskirts of the project. They are people who can’t really shape the future evolution of the project, but they are very interested in the outcome.
• Low interest, low influence: This is the group that you will spend the least time working with. However, that is not to say that you won’t spend any time engaging this stakeholder group. They may want less information, but you can’t ignore them. You will want to monitor their involvement to check that their position hasn’t changed. That’s because one day someone in this group may find themselves in a position of power, and they are far more likely to help if they have some idea of what the project is all about.

Make it actionable:

• High interest / High influence: Anticipate and meet all needs. This is the group that you should try to keep satisfied: they are your main stakeholders when it comes to this project.
• High interest / Low influence: Keep completely informed. The strategy with this group is to keep them informed of what is going on. Ideally, you want to spend enough time with them to ensure that they don’t have any major issues to raise (or that they have spotted something that you haven’t) but not so much time that it drains your ability to actively engage the high power stakeholders.
• Low interest / High influence: Manage thoroughly. Working with this group is a fine line – you want to give them enough information to ensure that they have all the data and background that they need, but you recognize that they don’t really care so you don’t want to make a nuisance of yourself by sending too much information.
• Low interest / low influence: Regular, minimal contact. You'll want to monitor their involvement to check that their position hasn’t changed.

Classify: Relationship Types

New relationship: A “new relationship” is someone who is unknown to you or Google. Build a rapport with this person to learn more about them, leading with a true desire to understand their business and personal goals. Influencer: An “influencer” can help make the marketing deal with Google happen (positive influencer) or cause the deal to fail (negative influencer). You can also refer to a negative influencer as a "blocker. "Decision maker: Often a higher-level stakeholder within the company or agency, a “decision maker” ultimately makes a final choice for your customer. Gatekeeper: A "gatekeeper," such as an administrative business partner or secretary, is someone who can provide access to and schedule time with key team members.

Strategies to get past blockers:

Use the following strategies the next time you encounter a blocker.

Ask your positive influencers how to better approach a blocker

• Show the blocker why it's worth meeting with the decision maker. For example, if they can’t tell you what the company's business objective is, demonstrate why you need to know that
• Ask other Googler, such as colleagues in LCS or Google Cloud, for a warm introduction to the decision maker you can't reach
• Use third-party validation with the blocker to show your value and the value of a partnership

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Questions:

• Who will be the decision-maker(s)?
• Who has the budget authority?
• Who needs to be involved if we want to get the sale?
• Who is going to be affected by this solution when we go to implement it and move forward?
• Who did the pod engage on previous deals?
• Who at the advertising agency should we partner with to develop a recommendation?

Four Key Phases for developing your stakeholder map:

Identify: Analyse: Role & Relationship Level & Relationship Status Visualise: Priortise: Visual mapping based on stakeholder influence and stakeholder interest.

Resources:

• Basic client here
• Global Client here
• Complex Client here
• Map you stakeholders here
• Powerful CXO questions here Know your customer guide here Map you stakeholders here