The key customer-side people to build relationships with during the sales process

Selling B2B SaaS is different from B2C.

At 29, I built and ran the sales engineering team for Thomson Reuters' most profitable software division in Asia (10+ markets).

My team and I were brought in to support hundreds of deals, averaging 20-30 meetings a month per person.

These are the key people you will encounter during the B2B sales cycle:

• Economic Buyer
• Decider
• End User
• Influencer
• Champion
• Technical Buyer
• Gatekeeper

ECONOMIC BUYER

This person owns the budget and assesses whether the purchase makes sense from financial and ROI points of view.

DECIDER

Decides whether to proceed with the purchase itself.

Will often be the same person as the Economic Buyer (though not always the case).

END USER

They will be the ones using the product on a daily (or at least regular or semi-regular) basis.

INFLUENCER

They influence the purchase with their opinions and assessments of your product (which may be positive or negative).

The Influencer often overlaps with the End User and has the necessary expertise to provide a credible assessment for their colleagues.

CHAMPION

A subset of the Influencer. Someone who (for professional or personal reasons) supports adopting your product and will actively lobby for it.

In other words, your internal advocate at your prospect's company.

Make this person your best friend.

TECHNICAL BUYER

For solutions that require implementation (for eg. integration, security, scalability, data migration etc), this person assesses your product from a technical point of view.

They are another subset of the Influencer.

GATEKEEPER

Controls access to key people on the customer-side.

The Gatekeeper could be a chief of staff, secretary, receptionist or executive assistant.

Make sure you're on their good side or you can find yourself locked out of key relationships to close the sale.