Avoid the long grass with the Economic buyer

You have done the hard work. You’ve identified a significant pain point that your product or service can solve. You have qualified this throughout the sales cycle and built your business case to demonstrate a compelling return on investment associated with your solution. However… your deal gets kicked into the long grass, and you must wait for next year’s budget allocation to get the green light. 

Why? 

The Economic buyer has yet to prioritise your project.

No matter how long you spend qualifying the pain, nurturing the relationship with your Champion and having them shout from the rooftops how good your solution is if you haven’t:

• Identified the Economic buyer.
• Related the pain and your solution to the company goals.
• Established your project as a priority.

You will remain in the long grass.

The Economic buyer is the ultimate owner of the budget and decision-maker. They can prioritise spending, which means prioritising projects within budgets, making investment decisions for unplanned or unbudgeted programmes and reorganising who gets the money first.

Companies reprioritise all the time

Budget cycles are planning cycles. They are a way for a company to determine long-term spending plans and strategies; however, while “budget” is often music to salespeople’s ears, you have just as much to lose as gain in these budget cycles.

Think COVID. It hit mid-March. Many companies with a December end-of-year had “budgeted” for items and allocated money to various departments and projects across the company on January 1st. By March, CFOs clawed back these monies to prioritise COVID-19 projects.

COVID was just the beginning, too. Added to this, we now have the many macro-level issues which have become the norm:

• Inflation
• Raising interest rates 
• Supply chain issues
• The cost-of-living crisis

Budgets are financial placeholders. With the changing landscape, finances are constantly assessed and deployed to maximise the limited funds available for any organisation to deliver the best return on investment.

If you are in a budget cycle (longer than six months right now), I’d say that you just are not important enough to top-line growth and margins.

Or perhaps you haven’t met the right person to make that link.

Red herrings

It’s easy not to talk to the right person to convey your solution’s importance to a company’s objectives. When we get a nod from anyone in an organisation, we can get fearful of asking too many questions or offending someone. However, qualifying is our job, so we must push through this fear to ensure our business case is compelling and our message is understood to accelerate our deals.

When identifying your Economic buyer, we recommend playing a little red-herring-bingo. Use these terms to trigger some extra qualification to find that ultimate decision maker:

1. The budget holder. Great, you think, they hold the budget; therefore, naturally, they are the Economic buyer. 
   Only sometimes.
   The budget holder can, in some instances, have their budget taken away from them. They are only the Economic buyer if they are the ultimate decision maker.
2. The signatory. Just because someone has the authority to sign documents on behalf of the company does not mean they are responsible for signing off on deals. Often, a signatory is nominated for regulatory reasons and, as a result, is far removed from the decision-making process.
3. The Champion’s boss. Depending on your having identified the correct Champion in the first place, simply going one level above your Champion without confirming that they are the ultimate decision maker does not guarantee that you will find the Economic buyer.
4. The project sponsor. This makes sense if the project sponsor is in charge of running the business and making investment decisions. However, we are often not looking for someone who runs an operational business unit; we are looking for someone with the discretion to move budgets based on changing business priorities without looking elsewhere for approval.

You must identify the ultimate decision maker to maximise the chance of your deal getting done. The ultimate decision maker is the person who can allocate or reallocate budget spending without seeking approval from anyone else. 

Qualify, like a Champion

By this point, you should have already identified and started to build your relationship with your Champion, so use them. Your Champion works in the organisation. They should be able to provide helpful information and clarify any mistakes you might have made when developing the org chart.

Ask them about the last project they had approved:

• What was the process they went through to get it done?
• Who were the other people involved in the process?
• How do these people relate to the Economic buyer?

Use all this information to help you verify the org chart that you made: 

• Who reports to whom? 
• Who has responsibility for what? 
• Who holds the pain that you have identified?

You will be looking for someone in the C-suite with a bonus aligned with board objectives. 

You will be looking for the holder of the profit and loss and, therefore, the holder of the pain you can solve. 

You will be looking for someone who talks about business outcomes during your business meetings. Someone who needs to know, and isn’t just casually interested in learning, the return on investment. 

The Economic buyer will focus on the benefit of solving the pain and be acutely aware of the downside of doing nothing. They will be motivated by the value the solution will bring once implemented in their organisation. They will count this value in terms of cost saving or revenue generation and the impact on their P&L.

Building relationships

Just like you did with your Champion, once you have identified who you think is the Economic buyer, you will have to build a relationship with them:

✔️ Lunches, dinners, meetings, and calls are all vital to building trust. 

✔️ Clearly articulate your value in line with their (and their company’s) objectives.

✔️ Be helpful to them, providing them with customer and industry knowledge they can’t get from within their organisation.

✔️ Make connections for them—industry peers, customers, speaking connections.

✔️ Do what you say you will and when you say you will.

At each stage, just like you do with your Champion, qualify whether this individual is, in fact, the ultimate decision maker and, therefore, your Economic buyer. 

If you get the impression that they will have to seek approval from someone else, requalify. 

Often, we need to be higher up the org chart. 

If you think you have your Economic buyer, check how they relate to the executive board, as that’s often who the genuine Economic buyer is.

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