Economic buyer
ek-uh-NOM-ik BY-ur
The person with the authority and budget to approve the purchase. Not the user, not the evaluator, but the one who signs the check.
The economic buyer is the person who can say yes and write the check. In a $50k deal, that might be a VP. In a $500k deal, that might be a C-level executive. In a $5M deal, that might be the CEO or the board.
Selling to the economic buyer is different from selling to the technical evaluator. The evaluator cares about features, integration, and performance. The economic buyer cares about business outcomes: revenue impact, cost savings, risk reduction, competitive advantage. If you pitch features to an economic buyer, you lose.
Many deals die because the sales team never gets to the economic buyer. They sell the technical team, win the evaluation, and then a VP they never met kills the deal because nobody presented the business case. Identifying and accessing the economic buyer should happen in the first third of the sales cycle, not the last.
Examples
A deal stalls because the wrong person was sold.
The engineering team loves the product and recommends purchase. But the CFO, who is the economic buyer for anything over $100k, has never heard of the vendor. She rejects the purchase request. The AE needs to start the business case from scratch.
The champion arranges an executive meeting.
Your champion, an engineering director, schedules a 30-minute meeting with the CTO (economic buyer). The AE prepares a business case focused on developer productivity improvements and time-to-market acceleration. No feature slides.
Multiple economic buyers in a large deal.
A $2M deal requires approval from both the CTO (technical budget) and the CFO (overall spend authority). The AE runs parallel tracks: technical value story for the CTO, financial ROI story for the CFO. Both must say yes.
In practice
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Frequently asked questions
How do you find the economic buyer?
Ask your champion: 'Who has final sign-off on purchases of this size?' Research the company's org chart. In discovery, ask about the approval process and budget ownership. If the person you are talking to says 'I need to get approval,' the economic buyer is above them.
What is the difference between economic buyer and champion?
The champion advocates for your solution internally. The economic buyer has the authority and budget to approve it. Sometimes they are the same person. More often, the champion is one or two levels below the economic buyer and needs to sell upward on your behalf.
Related terms
An internal advocate at the prospect's company who wants your solution to win and actively sells on your behalf inside their organization.
The group of people at a prospect company who collectively decide whether to purchase. Enterprise deals involve 6-10 stakeholders on average.
A sales qualification framework: Metrics, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identify pain, Champion.
A cross-functional team that reviews and approves non-standard deal terms, pricing, and contract structures.
The department responsible for negotiating vendor contracts, terms, and pricing. The last stop before a signed deal.
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