1/16/2025-Who owns the decision?

Don’t take no from someone who can’t say yes – probe to uncover how much power each of your buyers possess.

While it might be convenient to bucket buyers as KDMs, influencers, or champions, labeling them is irrelevant because all of them count.

It is essential to determine how much each counts.

Your number one job in appraising decision-makers is uncovering the strength of their power and how much of the decision each owns.

Hope is a terrible business strategy, so is assuming who has decision power and who doesn’t.

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

Today, write down the following questions verbatim because it may be difficult to ask them in a pitch meeting unless you read them from your notebook:

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

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 on the wrong buyers unless you ask.

A crusty old sales mantra suggests you should treat all buyers as queens and kings. And hey, sometimes old, crusty sales mantras carry a lot of weight and stand up over time…as this one does.

It’s smart to treat everyone on the buy side like royalty…but that doesn’t alleviate the burden of finding out how much decision power each buyer wields. Until you know who on the buy side can say "yes" and who can’t, you risk spending time with those who won’t ultimately matter in the decision process.

Stop assuming everyone you work with on the buy side has equal decision power. They don’t. And stop assuming that titles infer decision power…often they don’t.

Don’t take no from someone who can’t say yes.

The easier route is to find out where the decision power is on each account and spend your time appropriately.

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

Who owns the frickin’ decision in that room??

Who in the heck would you focus on if you sold pizzas?