Champion Vs. Decision Maker: Whom to Target in B2B Customer Discovery?

The foundation of customer and product discovery hinges on two fundamental questions: What do we aim to learn, and who can provide us with that knowledge?

This is why discovery in the B2B context is often considered more complex. Instead of selling to just one person, you're dealing with a collective—a company—ensuring your product adds value to the group as a whole. This can lead to decision fatigue for teams embarking on the discovery process as they don't know who they start with interviewing.

In general, product development requires consideration of three key groups: decision-makers, champions, and other stakeholders.

The decision-maker is the individual who has the authority to decide whether a solution should be purchased and implemented within a company. This is typically a higher level manager or in smaller companies the C-Suite. It's obvious why the decision maker is important for your products success: Without her support, you can't succeed.

The champion is the person who deeply understands the problems you want to solve with your product. They have the time and motivation to figure out a solution - like your product - and advocate to buy it. Sometimes the champion got the explicit order from the decision maker to search for a solution, sometimes the champion is the driving force, who has to pitch in front of the decision maker. The champion is important to your product, as she understands the problem space the most and has probably the most motivation to talk to you about it.

Last and least there are the other stakeholders. They influence the problem space of the champion and decision maker and can halt the decision making process to buy a new product. You can't afford to ignore them, but when you start out, they are definitely not the focal point of your discovery.

In small companies, the decision-maker and champion might be the same person. But when that's not the case, a crucial question arises:

Should our discovery focus be on the decision-maker or the champion?

Generally, your discovery work should be steered by your most significant risks—with a goal to mitigate them. When starting out, if uncertainty looms, it's wise to focus on the champion. The role of the champion is to drive his company to buy and use the solution, the role of the decision maker is more of a gate-keeper, which has to be overcome. This champion not only understands the problem better but is also more approachable. The insights gained from her can subsequently pave the way for easier access to the actual decision-maker.

Champions have a deep understanding of the problem

The champion is by definition the person who is in search of a solution.

The champion's role involves finding a solution—a task explicitly assigned by a manager, a responsibility inherently tied to her role, or a challenge she is intrinsically motivated to tackle. But let's use an example. One of the offers of my team is to do product discovery coaching (meta, right?). So the three options might play out as:

Explicit task from manager: "Make sure your team does good product discovery" or even "Search for a product discovery coach for your team" Results from her responsibilities: The champion is responsible for the product discovery practice of this team. Intrinsic motivation: The champion is the manager of the team and wants to introduce product discovery, but lacks time or skills to coach them.

In each case, the champion thinks through the problem space and the different options they have to tackle resolve that problem.

This engagement results in a deep understanding of the specific challenges her company faces when applying product discovery, rather than a broad understanding of product discovery in general. She assesses the core challenges the company faces, connects with various stakeholders, and gathers their perspectives on overcoming these hurdles.

This means not only, that the champion is your ally in solving the problem, she already collected valuable insights you want to collect in your discovery: What triggered the company's awareness of the problem, and how is the company framing this issue? What are the different needs and desires in the process of overcoming the problem? What are the constraints different stakeholders place on the solution?

The champion will help you gather the biggest part of the data you need.

Champions are more approachable

We've already discussed that champions are responsible to understand the specific challenges for their company and find a solution to it.

Sometimes champions invest a substantial amount of time into understanding these challenges and finding solutions, while other times they may neglect this responsibility due to being overwhelmed with other tasks. Either way, they are interested in any assistance that can help them understand the challenge, explore different options to solve it, and determine the criteria they should use to evaluate a solution.

This is exactly what you can offer champions, when you do discovery with them.

In an interview, you use your domain expertise to ask questions that shed light on previously overlooked aspects and criteria of their challenge. While you concentrate on past behavior in your interviews to overcome psychological biases, you often connect the dots for them. You can also reserve some time at the end of the interviews to share what you already have learned about this problem space and give a glimpse on your solution, which offers a new way of working where some of their needs, desires or problems are taken care of.

Champions care deeply about the problem you solve, they'll help you so you can help them.

The insights from the champions lead to easier access to the decision makers

To round this up, the question to focus on champions vs decision-makers is so hard, because we have to satisfy both needs to be successful with our product.

However, the champion plays a more central role in our discovery process and is typically more approachable. She also gives us the insights we need to do discovery with the decision-maker. Unless you have connections in your target industry, it's harder to approach decision-makers. The problem we solve is typically a smaller part of their responsibilities compared to those of the champion. This means our messaging, when reaching out to them, must be much more specific to appear relevant. This will show them that we've done our homework and that we respect their time.

My point of view here is supported by marketing and positioning experts as well.

In early product discovery what we learn is the foundation of a good positioning. April Dunford spoke in her new podcast "Positioning with April Dunford" in the episode Single-Product vs. Multi-Product Positioning: A Comprehensive Guide, about the importance of the champion for the effective positioning.

For positioning work, the champion matters like literally times a thousand versus everybody else. [...] The champion is the only one who can make the deal happen. Everybody else has the ability to kill the deal.

And if your organization relies on Inbound-Marketing, I have two other thought-leaders for you. Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah emphasize in their book "Inbound Marketing":

To be successful and grow your organization, you need to match the way you market your products to the way prospects learn about and shop for your products. And you do that by generating leads through inbound marketing.

For effective inbound marketing you need to know how your prospects learn about your product. And who does this? The champion.