B2B Buyer Roles

B2B Buyer Roles

When selling to some, anyone, there are a few roles that they take on either personally, as a group or as an organisation. These roles can exist in one person, think of the devil and the angel on the shoulder; or in a company, think manager, accounts, employees etc. The roles I am talking about are a theoretical concept called the buying centre:

The Initiator

This is the person or persona that begins the buying process, they have identified a need and while they may not have decision power they are usually an advocate for your product or service. Think of the voice that wants you to buy that chocolate bar.

The User

This is the person who actually needs the product or service. Marketers need to inform the user of the benefits of time saved or effort reduced. They will also help to sway the decision maker.

The Gatekeeper

This is someone that controls the flow of information to the other members. This can be reception, an admin or someone in the core group with strong personal opinions about the product or service. It is important for salespeople to develop strong personal relationships with these people and to try and provide information to at least one other role of the buyer centre to mitigate this. Think of the voice that says no to chocolate bars before you even assess then range available.

The Influencer

These are usually someone with experience or skill in a related area that can weigh in with their thoughts and potentially influence the other buying centre roles favourably or unfavourably.

The Decider

This role makes the final decision, they have the power to allocate funds towards that particular product or service. If it is a frequent purchase, there may be permissions given to a manager or purchasing officer. If its high ticket and infrequent then it may go to the CEO for example.

The Buyer

This is the person who has the responsibility for executing the purchase and may be responsible for evaluating and alternative suppliers. They can be accounts or a purchasing officer for example so providing fantastic service may ensure that you get repeat business in future.

In summary, the key to driving home the sale is to ensure that you communicate X 1000. All of these roles need convincing, whether they exist within one person, two people or a team of 10. All roles exist in all sales and the key is to ensure that you can get more than one engaged in the sales process. Next time you hold a sales meeting, try inviting several people. There is a higher chance of convincing at least one of them to buy from you. Alternatively, you could automate the information flow and educate everyone about your product or service before they even walk in the room.

    • Related Articles

    • Typical Buyer Decision Process

      The buyer decision process is outlined below to help you understand if you are targeting each stage effectively. Problem recognition - The first part is identifying whether they have a problem. This problem may not be causing them any trouble because ...

    • Fractional CMO/CDO/CPO

      Our Executive-as-a-Service offering covers the need for a senior executive in an organisation without the administrative and cost elements associated with a permanent function. Our Fractional executive service provides broad-based and on-demand ...

    • Automation

      In a world where Marketing and Sales work together as a single function with the same objective of either acquiring new customers or maximising revenue from existing customers, an effective funnel is one that combines all elements of the customer ...

    • Customer Relationship Management

      Customer Relationship Management/Marketing Implementation & Operations We are certified on Salesforce, Keap/Infusionsoft, Zoho One Microsoft Dynamics Kartra Active Campaign We are experts in CRM and can work in any platform you have. We help with ...

    • Email deliverability

      If emails are not arriving in your inbox from your bulk email platform you need to consider making a few changes. Over the years email has become a widely used marketing tool. It has one of the lowest costs of all marketing channels. Unfortunately ...

    • Popular Articles

    • Migrating from Chrome to Edge

      You might be in a situation where you'd just like to have all of you favorites or auto-fills moved over from one browser to another. Some reasons may be that you're more interested in using Edge now because of that handy little AI that all the cool ...

    • Email deliverability

      If emails are not arriving in your inbox from your bulk email platform you need to consider making a few changes. Over the years email has become a widely used marketing tool. It has one of the lowest costs of all marketing channels. Unfortunately ...

    • Relevate People Recruitment FAQs

      Welcome to Relevate People, This article will guide you through some common questions about working with us: FAQs Am I working for Relevate People? Relevate People is a Technical Virtual Staffing organisation. We provide the facilities for our ...

    • Information Security Incident Management

      Introduction This policy covers incident management of Information Security Breaches. Preparation This policy covers the outline of requirements to ensure that we are ready to respond to incidents rapidly and minimise the impact of any issues or ...

    • Dev as a Service

      CRM Development, or any software development, can be a large project. Often, when creating software or implementing projects, the underlying business case changes over time. We find that an Agile development process is the best way to deliver real ...