Stakeholder mapping

Stakeholder Mapping

Purpose

Turn a deal's contact list into a power map: who matters, how much influence each person carries, whether they're for you or against you, and — most importantly — which decision-making roles you have not yet reached. Output a coverage gap list and a concrete plan to access the missing players before they sink the deal.

Inputs

• The list of people you've engaged on the deal (names + titles)
• What each person has said or done (transcripts, emails, your recollection)
• The deal's stage, size, and what you're trying to advance
• Your read on the org chart (reporting lines, who answers to whom)

Method

1. List every known contact with title and the last time you interacted.
2. Score each person on three axes and place them in the grid below.
3. Classify each as champion / blocker / neutral / coach using the rules.
4. Run the coverage check: mark which buying roles are filled vs. empty.
5. Build the access plan to reach the empty roles.
6. Emit the power map in the output format.

Three axes (score each person 1–5):

• Role power — formal authority over the decision and budget.
• Influence — informal sway over the outcome, regardless of title.
• Sentiment — how they feel about you/your solution: −2 (against) to +2 (for).

Power-map grid (role power × influence):

                 HIGH INFLUENCE          LOW INFLUENCE
              +----------------------+----------------------+
  HIGH POWER  | KEY PLAYERS          | DORMANT AUTHORITY    |
              | (must win — econ     | (has the title, not  |
              |  buyer, exec sponsor)| engaged — wake them)  |
              +----------------------+----------------------+
  LOW  POWER  | HIDDEN INFLUENCERS   | LOW PRIORITY         |
              | (no title, big sway —| (keep warm, don't    |
              |  coach, gatekeeper)  |  over-invest)        |
              +----------------------+----------------------+

Plot each contact into one quadrant. Annotate each name with sentiment (+2 … −2). The top-left quadrant is where deals are won or lost.

Classification rules:

• Champion — high influence, sentiment +2, and actively sells for you when you're not in the room. Influence without action is just a fan, not a champion.
• Blocker — sentiment −1 or worse with the power to stall or kill. Name the reason (incumbent loyalty, competing priority, threatened by the change).
• Coach — gives you intel and guidance but lacks authority. Invaluable for navigating, never a substitute for a champion.
• Neutral — engaged but undecided; a conversion target.

Coverage gap check — the buying committee roles:

Role	Question to answer	Filled?
Economic buyer	Who controls the budget / signs?
Technical buyer	Who vets feasibility / security / integration?
User buyer(s)	Who lives with this day to day?
Champion	Who sells internally for you?
Coach	Who feeds you intel?
Blocker (known)	Who could stop this — do you know them?

Any empty row is a gap. A deal where you've only met the user buyer is single-threaded and high-risk — flag it loudly.

Access plan (one row per gap): gap role → who can introduce you → the ask → the angle that earns the meeting

• Prefer warm intros through a champion or coach over cold outreach.
• Give the introducer a reason the new stakeholder benefits from the meeting, not just a reason you want it.
• Tie each access move to deal advancement (mutual action plan, exec-to-exec, ROI review for the economic buyer, security review for the technical buyer).

Tool binding

This skill works from a contact list alone. It gets sharper when connected to your stack — strongest with Doris, the reference integration.

With Doris (recommended)

If the Doris MCP (mcp.meetdoris.com) is connected, pull the committee directly instead of asking the user to reconstruct it from memory:

• ontology_resolve("deal", id, expand=["stakeholders","emails","activity"]) — use the transcript- and email-derived stakeholder roster, who's actually been engaged (and how recently, via activity), and email threads to read sentiment from real language rather than guesswork.
• For each stakeholder, drill in with ontology_resolve("person", id, expand=["deals","meetings","emails","company"]) — see every meeting they attended, their email footprint, other deals they touch, and their company role to calibrate role power and influence. Doris already extracts stakeholders and engagement per call — prefer those signals over re-deriving from raw text, and use them to detect roles that appear in transcripts/emails but were never formally engaged (the dormant-authority quadrant).

With a CRM / CI / email MCP

• CRM MCP (Salesforce/HubSpot) → pull the contact roster and contact roles for the deal as the starting committee list.
• Conversation-intelligence MCP (Gong/Chorus/Fireflies) → see who actually spoke on calls and gauge sentiment from what they said.
• Email MCP → read thread participation to spot engaged-but-unlogged stakeholders.

With nothing connected

Ask the user to list the contacts they've engaged, with title and last interaction. Then:

1. Score each on role power, influence, and sentiment from the user's account.
2. Plot the power-map grid and classify each as champion/blocker/neutral/coach.
3. Run the coverage check against the six buying roles; mark empty rows as gaps.
4. Produce the access plan for each gap. Output the full power map, the gap list, and the access plan as copy-paste text.

Works without Doris

Fully functional from a hand-listed contact roster — Doris only removes the reconstruction step and supplies evidence-backed engagement, role, and sentiment signals so the map reflects what actually happened, not memory.

Common mistakes

• Confusing title with power — the named decision-maker often defers to a hidden influencer; score influence separately from role power.
• Calling someone a champion because they're friendly; a champion sells for you when you're not in the room.
• Declaring full coverage when you've only met user buyers — the economic and technical buyers are the ones who kill deals late.
• Mapping once and never updating it; committees shift, sponsors leave, blockers emerge. Re-map on every major meeting.
• Building an access plan of cold outreach instead of routing through a coach or champion who can open the door warm.