Economic Buyer

The Economic Buyer is the one person who can release the funds for your deal. They have discretionary control of the budget, they can veto a decision the rest of the organisation has already made, and they can find money that officially does not exist. Everyone else in the deal is influencing. The Economic Buyer is deciding.

The question this letter answers is simple: who actually signs this off, and have we met them?

The mistake, and I have made it myself, is to accept the first senior person who talks to you as the Economic Buyer. A VP who manages the budget is not the same as the person who owns it. Procurement is almost never it. Your Champion will sometimes tell you they are it, because admitting otherwise feels like admitting they lack power. Ask the question that settles it: if this decision were made today, whose name would be on the approval? If the answer is a committee, keep digging. Committees do not own budgets. People do.

How I use it. In twenty years I have not seen a complex deal close without the Economic Buyer engaged somewhere, either directly by the seller or through a Champion who could get in front of them. So I treat access as a qualification test. If I cannot get to the Economic Buyer, and my Champion cannot either, I ask why. Usually the honest answer is that the deal is not as important to them as it is to me. That is a deal to qualify out, or to fix before it costs me a quarter.