.jpg)
Erik King here! I’m a Global Strategic Accounts rep at People.ai. I’ve been in enterprise sales as both a leader and an Account Executive for nearly two decades. Over the last two years, the transformation of B2B sales is like nothing I’ve experienced in my career, all thanks to AI. I'm walking you through one example of how AI has transformed my day-to-day as an AE for the better.
I’ve been creating relationship maps (or org charts) since I started in sales, and not much has changed, until now! Previously, relationship mapping was simply a necessary evil, but now I find myself leveraging my maps weekly, if not daily. See what changed with People.ai's Relationship Maps.
Let's go!
Relationship Mapping
Before People.ai: Unused Org Charts and Powerpoint Puzzle
Creating and maintaining relationship maps was another manual, time-intensive task. I used to do all of this in PowerPoint, usually for a QBR. Then it would never be looked at again.
Due to the manual nature of updating the deck and having to go into another tool, the org charts quickly became outdated.
Another reason my org charts weren’t used throughout the life of an account was they weren’t easily accessible to my account team.
Time: 8 hours to multiple days
With People.ai's Relationship Maps: Real-Time, Collaborative Stakeholder and Influence Mapping
People.ai's Relationship Maps has changed how I understand and manage customer relationships. Nobody on my account team has to ask for anything because it's right there in the CRM on each account.
The ease of use is remarkable. Today I had a call with 10 new people. Our contact capture automatically creates the contacts and then I just grab them and add them to the account's Relationship Map. I can include lines of influence, positive and negative relationships with other stakeholders, and see their last engagement. This is true stakeholder and influence mapping that is fast and actually valuable.
The real-time updates and team visibility have made relationship mapping an ongoing, collaborative process rather than a periodic, isolated task. The information is invaluable to the entire account team: solution engineers, sales leaders, and CSM.
Time: 30 minutes - 2 hours (a couple of minutes to make updates)
"With Relationship Map open in front of my customers, I like to make assumptions to get answers. I might ask, 'Mark, here you are, and you report to the CRO, Jane,' and the customer will validate that or correct it and usually add some additional context." - Erik King
Before and After Relationship Maps
🚫 Challenges and frustrations with traditional org charts and relationship mapping:
- Highly manual and time-consuming
- Done for QBRs then not used again.
- Lack of access and visibility across the organization.
- When a new rep inherits accounts, they have to start from zero.
- Loss of institutional knowledge when someone leaves.
✅ Benefits of People.ai’s Relationship Maps:
- Living, breathing documents that the entire account team can access.
- Relationship Maps are robust and full of valuable information.
- AEs and renewals teams can expand accounts more easily by understanding their org structures.
- Proactively surface all new contacts that have been interacted with on the account and prompt you to add them to the Relationship Map.
- Increases the usefulness of stakeholder mapping by visualizing complex org structures, adding influence and relationship lines, and easily understanding the last time each person was engaged.
- Customers are more forthcoming with Relationship Maps open in front of them.
The Impact: Up-to-date and focused engagement strategies
People.ai's Relationship Maps transformed my sales process from a manual grind to an automated, efficient workflow. By simplifying relationship mapping and keeping the task in my CRM, I can validate engagement with key buyer personas and deeply understand the roles of stakeholders (including their inferred win rate and predicted purchasing power). From there, I can identify engagement gaps and focus my engagement strategy on those most likely to get a deal done. Sell Smarter, not harder.
Next ▶️: Explore how I keep an up-to-date CRM without manual data entry.