The long tail of technology decision makers

One of the most common questions we get as analysts is “Who are the decision makers for <type of technology product or service>?” And, the answer is often, “it depends” — or if it is not, it probably should be.

Our most recent buying study, that will be featured in the opening keynote and many sessions at our virtual Tech Growth and Innovation Conference in July, proves that out quite clearly. We studied the biggest technology purchase that respondents (manager or higher in their organisations) had participated in within the last 24 months. And we decided to get super granular on decision making.

For several years, we’ve had respondents clarify if buying team participants were actively involved (participating in the bulk of the meetings and discussions) or occasionally (brought in for their expertise or to make a decision). We’ve already talked about the challenge of occasional decisions makers  — but there is more to the story that we will share in July. But we took it farther than these two groupings — we also had respondents tell us the specific role (for leader positions) or functions that acted as active and occasional decision makers. Then we asked which of the decision makers had the “final say.” The results illustrate the challenge facing tech marketing and sales teams today.

We’ll explore this by looking at 4 decision makers sets. First, we’ll look at a collection of purchases where cloud services were purchased alone or as one piece of a bigger solution purchase. We’ll break that down by the objective of the purpose — to enable (internal) operational efficiency or productivity first, then for a most external, customer facing, objective. We’ll then do the same for business applications. For clients, we can discuss the mix for many markets and are in the process of generating research reports that dive into this and other elements for a wide variety of categories and purchase objectives.

Let’s start with the internally focused cloud projects:

And now, here is the chart for Cloud for more external focus:

As the two charts show, the diversity of decision making is very high. For these large purchases, a top executive (CEO, Regional President, etc) is the most likely participant and final decision maker, but from there, the variety is quite diverse. And it changes based on the objective (a reason we are suggesting the need to focus on value scenarios not just tech categories. Here is a research note from my colleague, Derry Finkeldey on that (clients only). But even with that focus, there can be quite a bit of inconsistency from company to company. The other interesting thing for me is that for cloud purchases focused on customer use cases, the roles of Chief Customer Officer, CMO, and representatives from sales did not make the decision team. This could be our sample but it is still interesting, particularly when we continue to see challenges in generating High Quality Deals (more on that in a future post). I think buyers need help and guidance in assembling their decision teams.

Now, let’s look at business apps, first for inward facing goals:

And then for more customer facing use cases:

Here there is some consistency in the top 3 roles — it is the top executive or P&L centres being the most common decision makers. We also see, for example, sales being more involved in customer facing use cases (no surprise).

As these charts reflect, managing and targeting decision makers is a daunting task. They are diverse; they are distributed; and they appear inconsistently across companies.

Your best bet:

1. Focus primarily on the most commonly found decision makers.
2. Spend more time on clarifying a critical value scenarios that will help you and the customer focus on a shared objective. This will also guide suspected, and recommended involvement.
3. Find the common ground around organisational objectives vs. trying to appeal to each decision maker individually.
4. Much of this is advise we have given for years. Now the data bears out how important it is — to be effective and maintain sanity.

This article was republished with permission from Gartner Blog Network.