Have you ever worked a deal that, by every metric you trusted at the time, really looked like it was going to close? Multiple strong contacts, regular calls, positive engagement, a verbal commitment to progress in the next few weeks, then it randomly stalled, and you had to mark it closed-lost.  

I know I have! 

Maybe you weren’t provided a reason, or someone’s name popped up that you hadn’t heard of. 

The instinct most of us start with is to identify the main decision-maker by their title. Head of, VP, Director etc. Then we naturally build the deal around that person. However, job titles are becoming increasingly difficult to decipher and sometimes have no relation to buying roles.  

In this article I’m going to walk through the five key roles that often shape a B2B buying decision. The Economic Buyer, Champion, Influencer, Blocker, and End User. I’ll explain how to spot each one, the best practices for tracking them inside Salesforce and how to use the intelligence you capture to help you close deals.  

1. The Economic Buyer 

The Economic Buyer signs off on the spend. They own the budget, they have the authority to approve the deal, and nothing happens without them being on board. In most B2B deals, they will be senior.  

They’re easy enough to spot once you’re talking to them. They ask broader questions about product fit, future roadmap, risk, they’re trying to gauge whether the investment is worth it. They don’t always get into the nitty gritty detail of how the product works. They often drop in and out of the process. And when they say, “I’ll need to speak with [name],” that name is usually someone they trust (an influencer).  

What I try to do with the Economic Buyer is straightforward. I want to know what success looks like to them, what their priorities are at a business level, and what would make them comfortable approving the deal. I’m not trying to walk them through every feature; that’s a waste of their time and mine. I’m just trying to make sure that I’ve answered the questions they care about. 

I want to get in a position where the Economic Buyer doesn’t see the deal for the first time when they’re expected to sign the contract. They should already have heard about it, know what it’s for, and know the value of our solution.  

It can be extremely difficult to reach your economic buyer, usually because they are senior. This is one of my favourite use cases for OrgChartPlus. As I work a deal, I map every single little bit of information I learn, as do my colleagues.  

Let’s take the screenshot below, taken from a Salesforce opportunity record. 

Alfred Chiefton is my EB, and he is marked as a target contact, he doesn’t really have an opinion of us. Basically, I’ve never spoken to him. However, I have spoken with Aleks Rosa and Carrie Kaufman.

If we look at my notes and attributes, we can see Aleks isn’t our biggest fan right now and I learned from Alex Drew that he has a poor relationship with Alfred. So, I know not to use him to get to Alfred. I know I need to build my relationship and prove our solutions value to Aleks. I can also see that Carrie socialises with Alfred, and that she has a high opinion of us. So, there’s a route to have a conversation with my economic buyer.  

Without using OrgChartPlus to capture this intelligence, it would live in my head, it wouldn’t be visualised and it wouldn’t live on the opportunity/account record inside Salesforce.  

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2. Champion 

The Sales champion is the person inside the buying organisation who wants the deal to happen and is willing to do something about it. They don’t just nod along on calls, but actually move things forward when I’m not there. They share internal context, introduce me to other stakeholders.  

The way I spot a real one is by what happens in-between calls. If I come off a meeting and a week later the same person has introduced me to two more contacts, told me about an internal email, or told me what their procurement process looks like without me asking, that’s a Champion. If they’re warm and responsive in the meeting but they haven’t done anything to progress the deal, that’s a friendly contact. The difference matters because I’ll treat them differently depending on which one I’m dealing with. 

With a Champion, give them what they need to sell the deal internally. That means making sure they understand the value clearly, they’ve got the materials they need, and they know who else in their organisation should be looped in. I’m essentially handing them the case to make on my behalf, because they’re going to have conversations that I won’t be in. 

I want my Champion actively building the deal inside their organisation, not waiting for me to do it from the outside.  

OCP helps me check whether the Champion claim holds up. The contact card shows me sentiment, but more importantly, it shows me engagement recency and the relationship lines. If I’ve tagged someone as my Champion and the chart shows that they are isolated with no lines to other contacts, then I can see they might not be as useful as I once thought. A real Champion is connected in the chart, not sitting on their own. 

Deals that rest on a single, weak Champion candidate are fragile. If they leave or new priorities come up, you should always have a contact available to fall back on.  

3. Influencer 

The Influencer can shape how others in the buying group think about your solution, even when they don’t own the budget or sit at the top of the chart. Their weight in the deal comes from credibility, not authority. People value their opinion.  

They can be difficult to spot, but something I listen for is repetition. If three different stakeholders mention the same name on different calls, that’s not coincidence. If  someone says “we’d want [name] to weigh in on that,” the name being mentioned might have more influence on the buying decision than their job title might suggest.  

Once I have identified a likely influencer, I try to engage them directly so I can ‘control’ their opinion and gauge their view. I open the conversation up to any questions or concerns they might have. If they’re hearing about the deal second-hand from other stakeholders, the version they get is whatever the person briefing them happened to emphasise, I don’t want that.  

Using OrgChartPlus I’d map influence lines to show exactly who this person(s) influences. Sometimes, when a deal stalls in the late stage, I’ll go back to my influencer and find they’ll often have the power to kick things along again. It also allows me to remove the natural title bias we all have.  

4. Blocker 

The Blocker isn’t usually someone trying to kill the deal. Most of the time it’s just a function inside the buying group doing exactly what it’s supposed to do – procurement checking commercial terms, legal looking at the contract, etc. None of them are necessarily opposed to the deal, but they introduce friction as part of their job. 

I spot Blockers by the tone of their questions. Most stakeholders I’m speaking to are interested in what the solution enables, a Blocker will ask what it disrupts. 

 What does this replace? What’s the implementation risk? Where does the data live? What happens if it doesn’t work? What are the contractual exit terms?  

I treat a Blocker in a similar way to the influencer – be proactive and contact them myself early. If I know procurement will need to be involved, I’ll ask the Champion to introduce me now, while there’s time to work through it. I also try to ask a difficult question during discovery – where do deals like this usually get stuck internally? This answer helps me with my target.  

You want to have the difficult conversations before the contract is sent for signature.  Don’t expect everything to be cleared, that’s not always possible, but I aim to at least meet the people, understand what they’ll need from me, and give them what they’re going to ask for. 

I use stakeholder templates in OrgChartPlus to help with this, in every deal I add placeholder contacts to the chart for Blocker functions before I’ve met anyone. The reality is every deal is going to have some kind of blocker, and by leaving this placeholder empty, everytime I open my org chart in Salesforce I’m reminded I still need to figure out who they are and engage them. Sometimes, I’ve already mapped them and they’re performing two roles, but even in this case, I’m still reminded I need to engage with the blocker. 

It stops me from finishing discovery thinking I’ve got a solid deal when I’ve only covered the enthusiastic half of it. 

5. End User 

End Users are the people who’ll use the product day to day. There are usually several of them – a team, a department, multiple departments. I always try to find out exactly who will be using our solution during discovery.  

I don’t need to get every End User on a call, but I want to know who they are, what their role is, and to make sure there’s a clear way for them to engage with the product and with me before and after the deal closes. That usually means sharing the right resources, pointing them at self-serve materials, and making it obvious that support is there if they need it. Some End Users will want to dig in and try things themselves. Others will want a human to walk them through it. I want both routes open for them. 

End Users don’t always have the highest influence on a deal, that’s the Economic Buyer and the Champion’s territory. You never know though, your Champion might be an End User. But they will have high influence on whether it renews. A product the End Users hate probably won’t get renewed regardless of how good the original business case was. So, the work I do with them isn’t about closing the current deal; it’s about making sure the next one isn’t a fight. 

OCP helps me here by making the End User group visible as a group, not as a single contact. I can add multiple End Users to the chart, tag their roles, and see at a glance whether I’ve mapped the team that’ll actually use the product. If the chart shows me one named End User out of an obvious group of twenty, the chart shows my gap. 

Summary

So those are the five roles I’m always trying to account for on every deal, and the thing I’d leave you with is that none of it works as a one-off exercise.

I don’t sit down at the start of an opportunity, tag everyone neatly, and consider the job done, because the picture never stays still long enough for that.

A contact I had pegged as a friendly face might turn into a genuine Champion a few weeks in, or a name I’d never heard of gets mentioned on two separate calls and suddenly I’m working out where they sit and who they answer to.

The stakeholder map is only worth anything if I keep updating it inside Salesforce as I learn 

The other point I’d push hardest is that all of this has to live somewhere other than my own head. Everything you pick up working an account, who gets on with who, who owes who a favour, who you should never use to reach the Economic Buyer, that’s genuinely valuable intelligence, and most of the time it’s unusable.

If I move on, or hand the deal off, none of it was ever written down, so the next person starts from a blank page and learns the same lessons all over again.  

Mapping it inside Salesforce with OrgChartPlus is how I stop that happening, because my manager can open the opportunity and see exactly what I see, and whoever inherits the account inherits the relationships and the politics along with it rather than just a list of contacts. 

If you’ve read this far there’s a good chance you’ve already got a deal in mind where you’re not certain you’ve covered these five roles.

We’d be happy to take a proper look at how you can start mapping stakeholder relationships with org charts inside Salesforce. Get in touch.