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Sales Stakeholder and Champion Map
The map comes out of your call transcripts: every person named, who named them, and whether the mention handed them a decision.
Every stakeholder mapping template asks for the same six columns. Name, title, buying role from a fixed list, influence high medium low, sentiment, last contact. The better ones add an evidence field and a coverage score. All of it depends on a rep sitting down and filling in what they believe. So the map is a record of the rep's assumptions with formatting on top, and those assumptions are exactly what turns out to be wrong when a deal dies at the org chart.
The transcripts already contain the answer. Every time somebody says a name they reveal something: that the person exists, that they matter enough to mention, and, in the grammar of the sentence, whether they hold a decision. River reads all of it and builds a directed graph of who named whom, then ranks people by how many other people routed a decision through them, which is a measurement rather than an opinion.
The two outputs that follow are uncomfortable and useful. Your champion usually falls several places once self-mentions come out, because a lot of what he said was about himself. And the highest gating citations in the deal usually belong to somebody nobody has met. Built for the account executive at week nine, wondering why a deal that sounded fine has stopped. The call itself is the discovery call pack, whether the deal is real is the qualification scorecard, and the tool index has the rest.
Some decision rights are published, so stop inferring them
Half of a good map is what people said. The other half is what is already a matter of record. Selling to a government buyer, the person who can bind the agency is a contracting officer. One may bind the Government only to the extent of the authority delegated to them, and the regulation goes further, since information on the limits of that authority is to be readily available to the public. Whether the person across the table can actually sign your contract is not a judgement call. It is a lookup.
Selling to a public company, the officer list is filed. A registrant must list the names of all executive officers and indicate all positions and offices held by each. That sounds procedural until you run it against a transcript. In the worked example four calls refer to the COO. The officer holding that title at Corvale has never been named, and the person everybody means runs one division. The map had a title in it that pointed at the wrong person for nine weeks.
So the map has two halves that get reconciled rather than merged. What people said, weighted by who said it and how. And what is published, which is narrow but certain. Where they disagree, the disagreement is the most valuable line in the document. A seller working from a title that does not match the filing is preparing for a meeting with somebody who cannot help, and preparing hard, because the title sounds senior.
How it works
Paste the calls
Transcripts and email threads, including the ones nobody thought were about people at all.
Describe the deal
The buyer, roughly what it is worth, and where you are in their process.
River builds the graph
Who named whom, in what frame, how often, and who has never been in a room.
Take the questions
One named ask per gap, phrased for your champion rather than added to a plan.
What you get
- Every person named across your calls and emails, with who named them
- Self-mentions separated out, which usually moves your own champion a long way down
- Every mention read as informational, consultative or gating, with each frame counted separately
- The people cited as a gate by several others and never once met
- The functions never named at all, checked against your own won deals
- Published decision rights looked up rather than inferred, wherever a record exists
Common questions
We do not record our calls.
Then it runs on whatever exists. Email threads are surprisingly good, because names get typed rather than mumbled and the copy line is itself a signal. Meeting notes work. The graph is thinner and the tool says so rather than presenting a two-source map with the confidence of a twenty-source one.
Why do self-mentions matter so much?
Because a champion who talks about their own role for an hour generates a lot of text and no independent evidence. Strip them out and you are left with the times somebody else routed something through that person. In the worked example that moves the champion from first place to fourth, cited by two people in nine weeks.
What makes a mention a gate rather than an opinion?
The verb. Priya runs the finance team is informational. We would want Priya's view is consultative. Priya signs anything over two hundred and fifty thousand is a gate. Only the third describes a decision right, and it is worth counting separately because the first two are common and the third is rare.
How does it know which functions should be there?
From your own closed-won deals of a similar size and shape, if you give it any. Otherwise from what the buyer's own process implies. Either way the zeros are named as questions rather than assumed absences, because a purchase running without procurement is possible and worth confirming rather than guessing about.
Is this a replacement for asking our champion?
It is what makes that conversation short and specific. Instead of who else is involved, which produces a shrug, you ask who signs the order form once finance approves. The map gives you four or five questions like that, each aimed at a named gap, which is a very different meeting from a general stakeholder interrogation. Turning those gaps into dated asks is the access plan.
The org chart we were sent contradicts this.
Then say so on the map and keep both. A sent org chart shows reporting lines, which are not decision rights, and it is usually a year old. Where a public filing is available it settles the officer question outright. Where nothing settles it, the disagreement is the thing to resolve on the next call.
Does it write the CRM records?
It produces them in a shape that loads, one row per person with the evidence attached to each classification. Turning a single call into a structured update is the call transcript summary, which is the faster job to run after every conversation rather than once at week nine.
Sales Stakeholder and Champion Map
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