What It Really Means to Multi-Thread

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Quality over quantity: One Economic Buyer + Champion beats five uninvolved contacts. Measure engagement depth, not headcount.

• Seller-side threading matters: Engage your entire team (execs, SEs, managers) to prevent single points of failure and add value.

• Risk mitigation: Multi-thread internally to avoid deal fragility from AE unavailability and validate customer perspectives.

I’m so tired of hearing:

“Stop being single threaded… you need at least five contacts.”

There are two things wrong with this statement:

The first is that if you are basing the quality of your engagement by the quantity of your contacts and not the quality then you’re measuring the wrong thing.

What if you are dealing directly with a CxO?

“Sorry Mrs. CFO. Can you people introduce me to some of your team? RevOps is going to run a report on my activity, and if I don’t talk to at least five people, they’ll tell my boss, and they’ll be mad at me…”

I am obviously not advocating for single threading, and of course, a CFO isn’t going to be very efficient to work with. But, I’d rather an engagement with one Economic Buyer and one Qualified Champion than ten Coaches with slopey shoulders and no influence or authority.

The second problem with the above statement is that it focuses on ‘single threading’ as being customer-sided.

That’s wrong!

If you are a salesperson working on a deal with lots of customer engagement, say you have:

• 2x Economic Buyers
• 2x Champions
• 1x Coach
• 2x Technical Buyers
• 4x Contacts

You are still single-threaded, unless your selling team is also engaged.

I.e.:

• Senior Exec/s connected to the EB/s.
• Your manager connected to an EB, and your Champion
• Your SE connected to the technical team

There are several reasons why this is important:

1. What if the AE is unavailable - all kinds of things can happen, from leaving the company, sickness, PTO
2. Triangulation / Second Opinions / Happy Ears prevention
3. Extra value - The customer feels more supported and receives multiple people's insights

So think:

What deals do you have in play right now?

How is the quality of the stakeholders?

Who else from your team is engaged?