Stakeholder Mapping

Reach for Stakeholder Mapping before a deal strategy session, before a key meeting, or when a deal has one contact and a close date.

• Only one or two people are on file for a real buying committee. The map shows the empty slots, so the next call goes to the gap.
• A deal is single-threaded, and the forecast assumes it is not. The threading score gives a number the rep can recompute.
• A BDR has found an account and needs the right entry point. The map names the people to find first and the roles that are still missing.
• A meeting is coming with a room full of people nobody has mapped. Run the map first, then the meeting prep.

The map names roles it cannot fill with a name. It never guesses a person, and it never sends anything.

A stakeholder map is the honest picture of who decides, who can stop the deal and who is still unknown. Most accounts show the contacts a rep has already met, and the missing people are often the ones who decide the outcome. This skill maps the buying committee for one account, so the empty slots are visible before the next meeting rather than after the slip.

Seven Buying Roles And Non-Buyers

Every contact gets exactly one buying role: Economic Buyer, Champion, Technical Evaluator, Influencer, End User, Blocker or Coach. Each contact also gets an influence level and an engagement status, both drawn from the logged record. A friendly tone in a note does not count as engagement.

Five non-buyers also shape a deal without approving it: the technical reviewer, the systems administrator, general counsel, the operations head and procurement. A non-buyer is never given the Economic Buyer slot. Every stance a non-buyer takes is a hypothesis until a named conversation confirms it, and the call date sits beside the confirmation.

Seven-Dimension Threading Score

Each dimension is scored 0, 1 or 2 and then weighted. Economic Buyer Engaged, Champion Identified and C-Level Access count double. Department Breadth, Technical Evaluator, End User Validation and Blocker Mitigation count once. The seven weighted scores add to a raw total from 0 to 20. With all seven rows scored, the threading score is that total divided by two, rounded half up, from 0 to 10. A row with no evidence on file is marked INSUFFICIENT and left out of both the total and the weights, and the score is then worked out over the scored rows, shown as "scored n of 7". No score is given below 5 of 7 scored rows. Every output shows all seven rows, so the reader can recompute the total. Scores of 9 to 10 read as Excellent, 7 to 8 as Good, 5 to 6 as Developing, 3 to 4 as Weak and 0 to 2 as Critical.

Ghost Nodes And The Political Map

A ghost node is an expected position with no named contact on file. It is written as UNKNOWN, followed by the role, such as "UNKNOWN, family board chair", and the reason it exists is shown beside it. A ghost node never carries a name, because a guessed name becomes the buyer on the map and the next email goes to the wrong person.

Influential contacts are placed on two axes, influence and support. The top right holds the allies to work with first, the top left holds blockers with real sway who need neutralizing, the bottom right is for keeping informed, and the bottom left is for monitoring. Only a HIGH influence contact takes a quadrant. A MEDIUM contact sits on the centre line, and a LOW contact is not placed on the map. A position with no evidence is written Unknown, never Neutral.

Core Workflow

Check the user's role first, since BDR and AE framing differ. Read the account record and the contacts, ask before the CRM read, and pull every contact rather than a filtered list. Classify each contact, map the hierarchy and mark the ghost nodes, and score the threading. Map the politics, then build the engagement plan with urgency levels, owners and dates. The map comes back inline, and a file is written only when you ask for one.

What It Reads

This skill reads the Buyer Personas, Qualification Criteria, Value Propositions and Buying Committee sections of the client profile. The Buying Committee section holds the role-title map, the non-buyer rows, the ghost patterns and the available plays. From the Context OS knowledge base it opens the account's folder for its contacts, notes and calls, and the personas under people. The CRM contact read is offered, asked for and read only, and it is never written back. Pasted contact lists work the same way.

Where It Fits

Stakeholder Mapping sits in the Work The Deal chain, after MEDDPICC Analysis. It checks the Champion and Economic Buyer elements against its own ghost nodes and champion status. Its threading score, buying roles, ghost nodes and champion status pass to MEDDPICC Analysis and Meeting Prep by name. For a thin account with one or two contacts on file, the skill points to Account Snapshot first for broader research.