Authority to approve is usually shared. Authority to refuse is usually concentrated. Most pursuits are built around the first and lost to the second.
A capable pursuit team can run a large opportunity for eleven months, meet everyone who returns their calls, produce a proposal that survives every internal review, and never once be in a room with the person who could have said yes without asking anyone. This is not a failure of effort. It is the predictable result of following the path of least resistance through another organisation's governance, and that path leads reliably to whoever is paid to talk to suppliers.
The question worth asking before the next major pursuit is narrow: are we negotiating with someone who can decide, or with someone who can only decide how much? The two conversations use the same vocabulary. Only one of them has any variable available other than price.
This is the counterpart to a question ERANORTH treats elsewhere on the internal side of the ledger — who is actually in the room when a number is set inside your own organisation, and how work arrives in your portfolio without anyone having decided to take it. Those concern your own governance. What follows concerns the buying unit across the table, which you cannot redesign and must instead read accurately.
The Strategic Context
Organisations of any scale do not buy through a person. They buy through a distributed structure in which different roles hold different powers, and the signatory is frequently not the chooser. The concept of an organisational buying centre — purchasing as a set of roles rather than an individual act — is generally credited to Frederick Webster and Yoram Wind, in work published in 1972 [SOURCE DETAILS REQUIRED]. The distinction it drew between those who use, influence, transact and decide remains the most useful lens available for a pursuit review.
What makes this an enterprise question rather than a sales-management one is where the consequences land. A commercial motion that habitually enters at the transaction layer produces a recognisable revenue profile: smaller initial orders, deeper concessions, longer cycles, and a book of business in which no relationship sits above the level at which it began. That profile is stable, it looks like normal trading conditions, and it is expensive to change once the account base rests on it.
It also constrains what strategy is available. An enterprise whose access stops at procurement cannot pursue outcome-based commercial models, cannot price on value the buyer books, and cannot shape requirements — because all three need a counterparty whose mandate includes the outcome.
Mistaking Access for Authority
The first misreading is that responsiveness signals importance. The people most available to a supplier are frequently those whose role is to be available to suppliers, and their availability is a function of their mandate rather than their influence. A pursuit team measures progress in meetings held and questions answered, and both metrics rise steadily while the pursuit goes nowhere.
The second treats seniority and authority as the same thing. They correlate loosely. In many organisations the person who can stop a purchase is not the most senior in the process — it may be the technical authority who must certify fitness, the risk function that must accept a residual exposure, or the operating lead whose team absorbs the change. Each holds a veto, none will announce it, and several are discovered only when they use it.
The third misreading treats the buying unit as static. Its composition changes as the purchase moves — wider during problem definition, narrower at specification, wider again at approval. A relationship built with the right person at the wrong moment is worth little, and this is one reason pursuits that appear to be progressing reverse without warning: the room changed and nobody on the sell side noticed.
The fourth assumes a well-built value case travels through the organisation on its own. It travels only as far as someone is willing to carry it, and only in the form they can restate from memory in a meeting you will not attend.
Reframing the Issue
Stop asking who will buy and start asking who can refuse. Approval in a large organisation is consensual and diffuse — several people must agree, and identifying "the decision-maker" is often a category error, because no such person exists. Refusal is concentrated, individual and rarely delegated. One person withholding a certification, an approval or a budget line can end a pursuit alone.
The asymmetry has a practical consequence. Mapping who must agree produces a long list you cannot service. Mapping who can refuse produces a short one you can, and it decides whether the pursuit survives. For every name on it you should be able to state what would make them say no, and whether anyone has asked.
It also reframes what a discount request means. A request arriving from someone whose only lever is price is not evidence that your price is wrong; it is evidence about where in the structure your proposal currently sits. Reading such a request as a signal about competitive position rather than as a negotiating move is a discipline in itself [Related article: What a Discount Request Is Actually Reporting].
Procurement's Mandate Is Price, and That Is Correct
The central structural claim of this article is uncomfortable and worth stating plainly. Entering a pursuit through procurement does not raise the risk of discounting. It guarantees it.
The reason has nothing to do with the people. A well-run procurement function is measured on unit cost, terms, supplier risk and process integrity. That is its mandate, properly defined, and an organisation whose procurement function did otherwise would be badly governed. Given that mandate, the only variables available to a procurement lead are price and terms. Present a value argument and they will listen carefully, then negotiate the number, because the number is what they are authorised to move and will be assessed on.
Two consequences follow, both visible in the revenue profile long before anyone diagnoses the cause. Orders are smaller, because scope expansion needs someone who owns an outcome and can find budget for it, which is not a procurement power. And concessions are deeper, because the whole negotiation occurs inside the one frame in which your differentiation is invisible.
This is also where value quantification meets its structural limit. A rigorous statement of the value a buyer will book is only an argument in front of someone whose performance depends on that value; in front of a mandate defined by unit price it is simply a longer document preceding the same conversation [Related article: Price Is a Share of Value Created, Not a Markup on Your Cost].
None of this argues for circumventing procurement, which is both unwise and frequently improper. It argues for reaching the outcome owner before the requirement is fixed, so that what reaches procurement is a specification your offer answers well, and for treating procurement thereafter as what it is: a function with a legitimate mandate that your commercial model must satisfy rather than defeat.
When the Rules Set the Sequence for You
In Australian government, defence and many regulated procurements, the sequence is not yours to choose. Probity requirements commonly restrict who may be approached and when, particularly once a tender is live, and contact intended as relationship-building can compromise a bid or the process itself [FACT CHECK REQUIRED]. These obligations vary by jurisdiction, agency and contract type, and any commercial approach in this territory requires verification by a qualified professional adviser — ERANORTH is neither a law firm nor a financial adviser and nothing here is legal advice.
The strategic implication is significant rather than incidental. Where engagement is constrained during a procurement, the only period in which the buying unit can be understood and influenced is the one before it begins. Enterprises that treat pre-market engagement as a marketing activity rather than a strategic one arrive at tender with no map, no advocate, and one available variable.
The Adviser Problem Inside the Buying Unit
Every consequential purchase has at least one person whose reading of the market the decision-maker trusts — an internal specialist, an external adviser, or a long-serving operator with no formal standing at all. Their influence is real and rarely documented.
This creates a judgement problem pursuit teams routinely get wrong. Investment in an influential adviser only pays if their advice is competent: an adviser who is confident and wrong will carry your case into the room and lose it there, having first assured you it was going well. Distinguishing genuine expertise from fluent confidence is difficult, consequential and largely unpractised as a discipline [Related article: How Do You Tell a Competent Adviser From a Confident One?]. The practical test is narrow: does their account of their own organisation's constraints match what you observe independently, and have they ever told you something you did not want to hear?
Decision Framework
Before committing pursuit resource above a defined threshold, map the counterparty's buying unit against four questions per role: what can they move, what can they stop, what evidence changes their position, and what happens if we enter here.
| Role | Can move | Can stop | Entry consequence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Outcome owner | Scope, budget, urgency, specification | Yes, alone | Value argument is available; price becomes one term among several |
| Trusted adviser | The decision-maker's reading of the market | Usually, informally | Access improves markedly, but depends on their competence, not their access |
| Technical or risk authority | Acceptability, conditions of use | Yes, absolutely | Compliance is settled early; commercial terms remain open |
| Budget or compliance holder | Timing, process, documentation | Yes, procedurally | Process is clean; the value conversation never begins |
| Procurement | Price, terms, supplier selection within a fixed specification | Yes | Discounting is structurally certain; scope is fixed before you arrive |
| End user | Adoption and satisfaction after the fact | Rarely | Strong evidence, no authority; useful only if carried upward |
Three tests apply the map. The veto test: name every individual who could stop this alone, and state for each what would make them do so. If the list is short and vague, it is not a map. The carrier test: who inside the counterparty will restate our case in a meeting we do not attend, and what exactly will they say? If nobody can be named, the case does not travel. The mandate test: for the person we are currently spending most of our time with, what can they authorise that is not price? If the answer is nothing, the pursuit is a price negotiation whatever it is called internally.
From Strategy to Execution
Immediately, audit entry points across the current pipeline. For each pursuit above a threshold, record the role of the person who was first engaged and the role of the most senior person engaged since. The distribution is usually worse than executives expect, and it explains the concession pattern more convincingly than any analysis of pricing discipline.
Over the next several quarters, change what qualification requires. No pursuit should pass without a named veto list and a named carrier, and those failing both should be resourced differently or declined — a portfolio decision about where capacity goes, not a sales decision. Build the pre-market engagement capability that regulated procurement makes indispensable, and staff it with people credible to an outcome owner rather than to a buyer.
Over the longer term, the constraint is who your organisation is able to send. Access to an outcome owner is granted to someone who can discuss the outcome, which is domain depth rather than commercial technique. Enterprises that solve this do so by sending operators and specialists into pursuits rather than training commercial teams harder — with consequences for capacity, capability development and how senior technical time is allocated.
Signals to Monitor
- The mandate of first contact, tracked by pursuit. The best available predictor of eventual discount depth.
- Whether relationships in major accounts have risen above the level at which they began. Accounts that never rise were entered at the transaction layer and stayed there.
- How often the specification is fixed before you are engaged. A rising proportion means competitors are reaching outcome owners earlier than you.
- Named carriers per pursuit, and whether they are still in role. A pursuit resting on one departing person is more exposed than the pipeline shows.
- Changes in the counterparty's own governance — new approval thresholds, centralised procurement, category management — each redraws the buying unit without notice.
Questions for the Leadership Team
- In our five largest live pursuits, who can stop this alone, and can we name them?
- For each, what can the person we spend most time with authorise that is not price?
- When our case is discussed in a meeting we do not attend, who states it and what do they say?
- What proportion of our major accounts were entered at the transaction layer, and has any of them risen since?
- Where regulation constrains engagement during procurement, what are we doing in the period before it begins — and is that work resourced as strategy or as marketing?
- Do we have the people an outcome owner would agree to meet, and if not, is that a hiring question or a deployment one?
Closing Perspective
The structure of a buying unit is not something a supplier can change. It can be read accurately or badly, and reading it badly is the more expensive option by a wide margin, because the cost arrives as a permanently lower price on a permanently smaller scope and is recorded as a competitive market.
What a leadership team can decide is where its commercial motion enters, who it is capable of sending, and whether qualification may approve a pursuit in which the only available variable is the one that costs most to concede. Those are capability and portfolio decisions, made well before any particular negotiation, and they settle its outcome more surely than anything said in the room.
The uncomfortable version of the question is worth putting to a leadership team directly. If every person you are currently speaking with in your largest opportunity were unable to move anything except the price, how would that opportunity look different from the way it looks today?
About the author
Kevin Jogin is Founder & Principal Advisor at EraNorth. Meet the Founder.