Six-figure cybersecurity deals don’t close on features. They close when you understand who needs to say yes and who could say no.
Stakeholder mapping isn’t a spreadsheet task. It’s the operating system behind any GTM strategy that works in enterprise. And yet, most teams treat it as a late-stage sales activity. That’s a mistake.
At a past role, we were pushing into regulated mid-market and enterprise accounts, sectors with long sales cycles and plenty of internal complexity. The pattern was clear: great demos got buried, not because the tech failed, but because we mapped one buyer and missed four others.
Don’t be like us so build a playbook around the map, not the pitch!
Start at the frontline. The practitioner who lives with the pain your product solves. Often overlooked, but critical. They’re not signing cheques, but they’re shaping the shortlist. Win them early and quietly — no pressure, just value. Get them to care, and they’ll fight for you internally.
Next, locate the operational buyer: the security lead or IT director who owns the budget envelope. They’re measured on uptime, vendor rationalisation, and incident response. They care less about innovation and more about friction. Show them how you reduce noise, shrink SOC workload, or avoid another platform login.
Then, find the economic buyer. CISO, CIO, or a regional GM. They’re thinking about strategy, compliance posture, and political capital. Don’t sell features. Show business impact. This is where your business case must hold up — risk avoided, time saved, cost contained.
Now the blockers. Legal, procurement, compliance. They don’t care about your product. But they can kill the deal with one clause. Map their timeline. Pre-empt their flags. We once lost a six-month deal over a data residency clause that surfaced too late. Never again.
And finally, the sleeper influence: the partner or prior vendor. Maybe they brought in the incumbent. Maybe their credibility is tied to the last purchase. If you win, they lose face. You need to position yourself as complementary or transitional, not as a threat.
Once you start mapping every deal this way, the GTM strategy will change. Marketing will stopp writing for personas and start writing for power centres. Sales stop wasting cycles on the wrong contact. Product learns which features actually moved decisions, not just demos.
Stakeholder mapping isn’t just about enterprise sales. It’s about designing a strategy that respects how organisations really buy.
If your deals keep stalling, maybe it’s not the pitch. Maybe it’s who you’re not seeing. Map that, and your close rate changes. Quietly, consistently, and without adding a single new feature.
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