For years, I’ve seen quite a few salespeople, people who should know better, making a mistake, and that is thinking that in a B2B sale, there’s one decision-maker, and the higher the better.

What I mean by that is that they know there are others involved, but they think that in the end there is one, and only one, decision-maker, and the higher up that person is in the organization, the better. In other words, the CEO is a better “get” than the CTO.

This is usually wrong, and even when you hear them describe the organization and the way it is acting, you know it is wrong, but for some reason, the salesperson is still visualizing the organization via the “singular decision-maker, higher the better” model.

After all, when we are making a B2B purchasing decision, high on our minds is usually that our jobs are the way we put food on the table, and so we don’t want to get fired. And so we spread the decision-making amongst, usually, about 3 “core” members who absolutely have to say yes, and then a periphery of people who might not be directly affected, or they are too low in the organization to be “core,” but they still need to predominantly (almost like a democracy) give a thumbs-up to the move.

And the CEO or C-level thing, that’s also often a myth, because part of the job of a CEO or C-level officer is usually to delegate much of, not only the executional work, but the decision-making too. So you might think you’re cool because the CEO sounds friendly, but actually the purchasing decision is being made by the “core” group, and the CEO is just listening to their logic to verify they are making a decent decision.

I go into this a bit in the LinkedIn Live I did with Rick and Jennifer of Sales Force Europe. Below is a clip where I begin to discuss this: