Good morning,
On your biggest open deal right now, can you name every person whose yes or no moves it forward, and who actually has final say?
Per Gartner's B2B buying research, the average complex buying group now involves 6 to 10 decision makers, each bringing 4 or 5 pieces of information independently gathered.
Deals stall and die when you sell to the wrong person inside that group.
Do your intelligence work, know exactly who holds power, who would waver, and who could be turned in your favor.
In fact, access the Google Doc below. This is my “Customer Relationship Map” that I use to determine whether the deal will be won or lost based on who we are working with.
The same discipline separates sellers who close complex deals from those who keep losing them at the finish line.
FOR SELLERS | You get excited when your main contact says yes. You send the proposal. Then it goes quiet for three weeks. The person you were selling to never had the authority you assumed they had. |
FOR MANAGERS | Your team is burning pipeline on champions who cannot sign. Every forecast call, the same deal slides another month. Coaching ends when the rep learns to map power before they pitch. |
FOR OWNERS | Your company is selling to whoever answers the email. Deal cycles stretch. Win rates drop. A disciplined buyer-mapping standard across the team changes the shape of your revenue. |
The revenue impact is direct. When your team maps the real decision maker before the proposal goes out, cycle times compress, win rates climb, and forecast accuracy improves. Every deal sold to the wrong person is working capital tied up in a loss you have not booked yet. |
This Week's Challenge
Pick your three largest open deals and write the name of the economic buyer next to each one before Friday.
Turn to Best View Tables Below
Key Terms
Economic Buyer | The one person who can say yes and release the budget when everyone else has said no. Every deal has exactly one. |
Champion | Someone inside the account who wants you to win and has access to the people who decide. Not the same as a fan. |
Power Map | A written picture of who holds authority, who influences, and who can block. Built from conversations, not assumptions. |
Do's and Don'ts
One mindset builds real deals. The other builds pipeline that never closes.
DO | DON'T |
Ask directly who else needs to be involved before a decision like this gets made. | Assume the person taking your calls is the person writing the check. |
Validate your champion by asking them to walk you through how the last similar decision actually happened. | Confuse enthusiasm with authority - plenty of excited contacts cannot sign anything. |
The Workshop
MODULE 01 - FOR SELLERS
Map Power Before You Pitch
Identify the real decision maker on every open deal before your next proposal goes out.
You have a great contact at the account. The meetings feel productive. But every time you try to close, something shifts - more people get pulled in, the timeline moves, and your champion goes quiet. You are selling to someone who cannot actually buy.
On your biggest open deal right now, have you spoken directly with the person who will sign off, or are you relying on your contact to carry it up the chain? |
EXAMPLE A seller at a regional media group spent six weeks on a large integrated campaign with a marketing manager who loved the idea. The proposal went in. It came back stripped by 60% after the CMO, who had never been in a meeting, said the spend was too high. The CMO was the real decision maker the whole time. |
STEP 1 The mental model: every deal has one economic buyer and a circle of influencers. Your job is to find the economic buyer before you write the proposal, not after. Authority does not live where enthusiasm lives. |
STEP 2 In the regional media example, the seller should have asked the marketing manager early: who else needs to see this before you can greenlight spend at this level, and can we get them in the room. That one question would have surfaced the CMO and reshaped the entire pursuit. |
DO THIS TODAY Pull your top three open deals and write the name of the economic buyer next to each one. If you cannot name them, that is your first call this week. SHARE IT Send this exercise to one other seller on your team and swap lists - you will catch each other's assumptions faster than you catch your own. Q: What do I say to my champion to get the economic buyer into the conversation without going around my contact? A: Tell your champion: to move this forward at the size we are discussing, we need to get your approver in a room so they can ask the questions only they would ask. Frame it as protecting your champion, not bypassing them. |
MODULE 02 - FOR MANAGERS
Coach the Map, Not the Pitch
Build buyer mapping into every pipeline review so your team stops burning cycles on the wrong contacts.
Your 1:1s run long because the same deals keep coming up every week. Your reps are confident, the meetings are happening, but the forecast keeps slipping. The issue is almost never the pitch - it is who they are pitching to.
In your last pipeline review, did you ask each rep to name the economic buyer on every deal over your forecast threshold, and did they actually know? |
EXAMPLE A sales manager at a publishing company noticed three reps were all slipping six-figure deals into the following quarter. When the manager asked each rep to name the economic buyer, two could not answer. The manager stopped the review and made buyer mapping the only agenda item for the next week. |
STEP 1 The mental model: your job is not to close their deals - it is to make sure they are working deals that can close. A deal without a named economic buyer is not a real deal, it is an activity report. |
STEP 2 In the publishing example, the manager turned pipeline review into a map-the-buyer exercise. Every deal over threshold required a named economic buyer, a named champion, and a note on when the rep last spoke with each. Deals without answers moved out of commit. |
DO THIS TODAY Add two required fields to your next pipeline review: economic buyer name and last contact date. Do not let a deal stay in commit without both filled in. SHARE IT Walk one rep through a buyer map on their biggest deal this week - live, on a whiteboard or a shared doc. They will start doing it on their own. Q: How do I push reps to validate the economic buyer without making them defensive? A: Ask the question about the deal, not the rep: walk me through how a decision like this actually gets made at this account. You are interrogating the deal, not the seller. |
MODULE 03 - FOR OWNERS
Make Buyer Mapping a Standard
Install a company-wide buyer-mapping discipline that raises win rates without adding headcount.
You look at the pipeline every month and the numbers feel bigger than what actually closes. Deals that looked real in Q1 are still sitting there in Q3. The cost is not just the lost revenue - it is the time your best people burned on deals that were never going to move.
If you pulled every deal over a certain size from your CRM today, could you tell me who the economic buyer is on each one, without asking the rep? |
EXAMPLE A media company owner was frustrated with a 22% win rate on proposals over $100K. After requiring every deal at that level to have a named economic buyer and a documented conversation with that buyer before the proposal went out, the win rate moved to 41% in two quarters. Deal count dropped. Revenue climbed. |
STEP 1 The mental model: buyer mapping is not a seller skill, it is a company standard. When it is required at the deal-stage level, pipeline quality improves without asking anyone to work harder. You are changing what counts as a real deal. |
STEP 2 In the media company example, the owner made the standard visible: no proposal over $100K leaves the building without a named economic buyer in CRM. The rule did the coaching. Managers enforced it. Reps adapted within 30 days and the close rate followed. |
DO THIS TODAY Write a one-sentence rule this week: no deal over [your threshold] moves to proposal without a named economic buyer in CRM. Send it to your sales leader before Friday. SHARE IT Share the rule with the sales team directly, not through a manager. Ownership-level clarity removes any negotiation over whether the standard applies. Q: How do I enforce this without slowing down the team or killing momentum on good deals? A: The rule does not slow deals down - it reveals which ones were never moving. You are not adding work, you are removing self-deception from the pipeline. |
Recommended Reading
The Challenger Sale Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson · 2011 · Portfolio Shows why controlling the sale and mapping the right stakeholders wins more complex deals than relationship selling. |
The New Strategic Selling Robert Miller and Stephen Heiman · 2005 · Business Plus The original framework for mapping economic buyers, user buyers, technical buyers, and coaches inside a complex account. |
Revenue vs. Sales Mort Greenberg · 2023 · dcx.one Direct application to media sales - why selling revenue outcomes forces you to find the person who actually owns the number. |
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