Who owns the decision?

While it might be fun to bucket buyers as influencers, KDMs, or champions, labeling them isn’t essential. All of them count.

However, not every buyer has an equal share in the buying decision, and it’s your job to determine how much of their vote counts amongst the buying power base.

To repeat, your job is to discover how much of the buying decision each of them owns.

The only way to handle this is to ask each directly about their decision power.

Today, write down the following questions verbatim in your notebook to help prompt you to ask your buyers in your meetings. (If not written down, you may forget to ask.)

"How much decision power do you have on this <contract/deal/campaign>?"

And/or…

"So if you had to define how much decision you have for this deal, what percentage would it be?"

Asking prospects to define their decision power may not be easy, but you risk focusing your selling efforts on the wrong buyers if you don’t.

You’ll start nodding up and down the second you watch this silly short parody on ordering pizza for lunch.

Who owns the frickin’ decision in that room???

Be glad you’re not selling pizzas to those guys.