7. Companies don’t make decisions. People do.

Successful brands don’t market to hospitals, or universities, or Fortune 500 companies.

You can’t sell anything to a company. You need to find someone inside the company who has the problem your creation solves. Then you can work on attracting that person’s attention. 

OK, so let’s say your creation solves a problem for someone inside a company. That’s great, because people can decide to work with you, and then you have a business. 

To make it work, though, your go-to-market strategy needs to identify three specific people: 

1. Who inside that company has the problem you solve, and ideally has it bad enough it keeps them awake at night, 

2. Who in the company controls the budget with the funds to deal with the problem, and

3. Who there would be responsible for actually implementing your solution, for putting it to work. 

Let’s start with the person who’s got the problem. She’s the first focus of your attention. She’s the one losing sleep wondering what she’s going to do about it. The more anxious she is, the more she’s aware her current system isn’t working, the more likely she will welcome your message and listen to what you have to say. Pretty much everything we’ve been discussing up to now is about her. 

The person in pain may not be the person with the budget to fix it. 

This is more often true than not, and it’s hugely frustrating. Your core audience, the person who’s problem you solve, is not the one who controls the purse. The bigger the company, the more likely the budget is controlled by someone else. And that’s important to you because these two different people almost certainly have different priorities. 

The pain experienced by your primary audience is probably not even on the radar for the person who would be the one to pay for it. 

This is a dark truth not often discussed. No matter how good your solution is to the overall welfare of the company, the problems you solve are likely not the top priorities for the people you need to get onboard to say “Yes, let’s do that.” 

Because everyone acts on their own personal incentives. 

And often, what matters to the person with the budget is not aligned with what matters to the person with the problem. The one in pain wants to fix the problem. The one who controls the budget wants to be careful with limited resources. And he may or may not care about the priorities of the person in pain. 

So what can you do to help your case with the person who controls the budget?