One deal, many people: who is in the buying committee

A company purchase is rarely one person's decision. The people who influence, check or approve it form the buying committee, and any one of them can stop the deal. Each member guards a different risk, so one enthusiastic yes tells you how one person feels, not what the company will do.

At Veloria, Pavlo from HR and learning loved the demo and asked for a proposal. That is real progress: he wants the purchase and offers to push it inside. But he said nothing about who pays, who signs the contract and who checks the employee data the platform will store. Those questions are still open.

So the honest status after a meeting like this is "we have someone who wants it", not "the deal is nearly closed". Recording enthusiasm as a decision makes the pipeline look full while the real decision hasn't started. The opposite mistake, shrugging the yes off, wastes your most useful ally.

A typical buying committee for a corporate training program has six roles, and each one fears something different:

• Users (Veloria's dispatchers and account managers) fear losing time: will lessons eat into their shifts?
• The champion (Pavlo) fears for his reputation: if it flops, it was his idea.
• The economic buyer controls the budget and gives the final yes. The worry: is this worth more than anything else the money could buy?
• Procurement compares price and terms with other suppliers.
• Legal reads liability and data clauses.
• IT security asks where employee data and lesson recordings live and who can see them.

Knowing the worry tells you what each person needs from you: a schedule that fits shifts, material for Pavlo's internal case, cost against the expected result, a clear quote, an early contract draft, written answers about data. A proposal that calms only one of these worries can still be stopped by any other role. Klasna lost a deal like this last spring: HR loved it, procurement renewed the old supplier.

The champion wants the purchase and moves it forward; the economic buyer owns the budget and gives the final yes. They are rarely the same person. The champion's yes opens the door, but it doesn't pay the invoice: a deal with no route to the budget owner is a hope, not an opportunity.

That gives you a practical test for any deal. Is the champion still the only person doing anything, or have other members of the committee started acting? At Veloria, real progress looks like this: the finance director agrees to a call about cost and the expected result; procurement receives the proposal and sends its questions; IT security sends a questionnaire about where data is stored.

Signals that stay inside the champion's head don't count, however pleasant: Pavlo repeating that the program is exactly what Veloria needs, asking for more brochures, praising the platform's design. So the status is not "Pavlo said yes" but "Pavlo wants to sell this internally, and we don't yet know to whom".

Treat a champion as a partner, not a target. Pavlo will have to sell the program inside Veloria to people you may never meet, so your job is to help him win that argument: give him what each role will ask for before they ask.

In practice that means preparing his case together. The finance director needs cost next to the expected result. Procurement will want a clear quote it can compare with other offers. IT security will want written answers about data. Ask Pavlo what usually stalls purchases at Veloria and prepare for exactly that.

Two moves look tempting and backfire. Going around the champion straight to the finance director without telling him costs you his trust, and he is the person who knows how decisions really get made. Asking the champion to sign or commit to things he can't control puts him on the spot and changes nothing. Equipping him works because his risk is personal: the better armed he is, the safer he feels pushing.

Before the first meeting you can sketch a prospect's committee from its website and professional profiles. That draft is useful for preparing, but job titles mislead about who holds the money and who really decides.

Training budgets are a good example. In one company they sit with HR and learning; in another each department head owns a budget for their own team; in a third, any spend above a threshold needs the finance director. The title "Head of Learning" tells you none of this. Pavlo's title says he works on training at Veloria; it doesn't say whether this program fits his budget or needs new money from finance.

So treat a title-based map as a list of hypotheses to check. The reliable version comes from someone inside describing how a real purchase went: who found the supplier, who approved the money, who compared offers, who read the contract and how long each step took. Until someone confirms a cell, mark it as a guess.

The fastest way to learn who decides is to ask someone inside, but the wording matters. "Are you the decision-maker?" puts the person on the spot; many will say yes just to save face, and you learn nothing. Leading questions ("Wouldn't your finance director love this?") and pressure ("Can you sign this week?") don't tell you who decides either.

Ask about a real past purchase instead. People describe a process easily, because it isn't about their status. When Pavlo was asked how Veloria approved its last training program, the story came out at once: Pavlo found the provider, the finance director approved the money, procurement compared three quotes, and legal got the contract at the very end, which took three weeks.

One honest answer filled four cells of the map: the likely economic buyer, procurement's role, legal's timing and the fact that Klasna will be compared with other offers. Questions about next steps work the same way: "What would need to happen for this to start in January?"

A committee map is a simple table: for each role, who it is, what worries them and what they'll need from you. Its value is in the blanks: a blank cell is your next question, not something to fill with a guess.

The steps run in a natural order. Sketch the likely roles from what you already know, such as titles and how the company is organized. Ask the champion how the company made its last similar purchase and correct the draft. Fill in each role and mark the blanks. Turn every blank into a question for the next conversation. Only then agree with the champion who should hear from you next and what they need to see.

Veloria's first draft has Pavlo as champion, the finance director as the likely economic buyer (to confirm), and question marks against procurement, legal and IT security. The biggest blank is the budget: does the program fit Pavlo's training budget, or does it need new money from the finance director? That becomes the question for Thursday.

A committee map is not only a list of people; it shows where the deal will lose time. Gatekeepers such as legal, procurement and IT security usually work at the end, one after another, and each check can take weeks. If you already know a step is slow, start it early and run it in parallel with the rest.

At Veloria, legal got the last contract at the very end and needed three weeks. If Klasna sends its contract draft in the first week instead, those three weeks run alongside the other conversations rather than after them. Likewise, procurement compares three quotes, so Klasna will be compared whatever Pavlo thinks: a clear, comparable quote is part of the plan from the start, not a last-minute task.

How it fits together: a company buys as a committee; each role guards its own risk; the champion opens doors but doesn't pay; you learn the real process by asking about past purchases and turn the map into questions and a timeline. Next lesson: the same committee acts differently when it buys for the first time, renews or switches.