Why are stakeholders important?
The most important issue regarding your stakeholders is that they all have different interests in your business and sometimes their interests might be in conflict with one another.
It is your job to make an assessment and analysis of your stakeholders and develop strategies which take into consideration the pros and cons of various decisions on your stakeholders’ needs.
While they are all important, their importance varies on different initiatives or projects and every important decision in your business should take into consideration the stakeholders analysis. Stakeholders should be included in many critical decisions in your business from an early stage in order to avoid any misunderstanding and conflict of interests.
Stakeholder analysis
- The start of every analysis includes creating a list of your key stakeholders. You can use your team to brainstorm each and every important stakeholder.
- Once you have identified them you can develop a simple matrix or table where you can rank their importance along with their interests and needs regarding the particular issue you are working on – this might be a project, strategy development, buying a business, developing new product, expanding into new markets, and any important business decision for your company.
- Now you can analyze and identify the most important stakeholders and their demands. This allows you to predict how each of them would react on various decisions and alternatives.
- Your overall goal is to get the support from your key stakeholders so you can finalize your analysis by adding the key message you need to communicate with each of them in order to get their support.
- The important part here is that your priority is to satisfy your most important stakeholders and you’ll always start working with them, however sometimes you’ll have to manage the conflict between different needs and demands and make tough decisions.
Now let’s take a look at some examples:
Projects
Whenever you are about to develop a new project in your organization you should involve your key stakeholders from the very beginning. This will help you get the support you need for the project and it’ll save you time going back and forth with your project needs.
Management
When you need to plan and manage an important change in your business you need to identify the key stakeholders both internal and external and analyze their needs. Examples of internal stakeholders here are the business owners and executives, while external stakeholders are the community organizations which can be affected by the changes you are about to implement.
Sales and Marketing
In sales and marketing it is crucial to understand the importance of different stakeholders. With the right stakeholder analysis you can drastically improve your marketing and sales performance.
For example in B2C there are various entities on which you have an impact such as the final users of your product, the buyers, the decision makers… – which in some cases they are all different people. In B2B when you sell to large organizations you need to identify the key stakeholders and their needs. For example CFO, purchasing manager and operations manager are examples of stakeholders with different needs which might have a conflict among each other.
The CFO looks at the financial structure of the deal, while the operations manager looks at the changes in the process and the reliability and quality of the new approaches – you need to approach them with different strategies and communicate different messages in order to get their support.
While the above examples are totally different, the approach to stakeholder analysis is exactly the same – as described earlier. Identify the key entities, evaluate their importance, define their needs and develop the strategy to work on the fit between your interests and their interests.
For example in B2B sales you can develop a stakeholders map with detailed analysis of each individual and organization along with their needs and demands. This would be a perfect foundation to start developing your strategy.