The decision makers in a company are the people who shape, approve and fund a purchase. In B2B that is rarely one person. It is usually a group: someone who feels the problem, someone who advises, someone who negotiates, someone who signs, and someone who controls who gets access to whom. This guide names those roles, shows how to tell approval from influence, and covers what to do once you know who is in the room.
TL;DR
- A B2B purchase usually involves several roles: user, influencer, buyer, decider and gatekeeper. One person can hold more than one.
- Job title is a weak signal. Ask who approves a specific amount, and how the last comparable purchase was signed off.
- Mapping the whole buying group early prevents the most common failure: treating one enthusiastic contact as the buyer.
- Once you know who is involved, give each person what they need to see, in one shared place, instead of forwarding attachments.
- If your team runs on Attio, a deal room can hold that material and show which stakeholders are engaging.
Table of Contents
- Who counts as a decision maker?
- The roles in a B2B buying group
- How to tell approval from influence
- How to find decision makers in a company you want to sell to
- Mistakes that keep you away from the real decision makers
- Engaging every stakeholder, not just one
- Our perspective: treat the buying group as a shared workspace
- Turning stakeholder mapping into a repeatable process
- Put the buying group in one room with foyai
- A short worked example
- FAQ
- Sources
Who counts as a decision maker?
A decision maker is anyone whose yes, no or opinion changes the outcome of a purchase. That is wider than the person who signs the contract.
The Open University describes five B2B roles: the user articulates the need, the influencer provides specialist advice, the buyer negotiates and purchases, the decider controls approval and budget, and the gatekeeper controls access to the key decision makers. It also notes that one person may hold several roles, and that some purchases do not use every role.
This matters because most sales advice treats “the decision maker” as a single target. In practice, Forrester says major business purchases happen inside buying networks that include champions, decision makers and other internal roles. A Gartner figure reported by Shopify puts the average B2B buying decision at six to ten people, each gathering information on their own.
So the useful question is not “who is the decision maker?” It is “who is in the buying group, and what does each person control?”
The roles in a B2B buying group
Different frameworks use different labels, but they describe the same people. Here is a working set that combines them.
| Role | What they do | What they need from you |
|---|---|---|
| User | Lives with the problem daily and will use the product | Proof it fits their workflow |
| Influencer | Shapes specifications and recommends suppliers | Technical or functional detail they can defend |
| Champion | Advocates internally and persuades others | Material they can forward and reuse |
| Buyer | Selects suppliers and manages the buying process | Clear terms, timelines, a smooth process |
| Decider or economic buyer | Approves the purchase and releases budget | Business value and a number they can approve |
| Gatekeeper | Controls access to the people above | A reason to let you through |
| Blocker | Legal, IT, security, finance or procurement reviewers who can stop a deal | Early answers to their checklists |
A few of these deserve a closer look.
The economic buyer
The economic buyer holds the budget and gives final sign-off. ZoomInfo separates this role from champions, who advocate, influencers, who shape opinions, and gatekeepers, who control access and can slow progress. PeerLab defines it as the person, or occasionally a small committee, with authority to release the money.
The champion
Forrester describes a champion as someone who advocates for the purchase, has the credibility to persuade others and takes part heavily throughout the buying process. A champion is your most valuable ally and also your biggest risk. They often cannot approve anything.
The decider versus the buyer
Winning by Design draws a useful line: the decider makes the purchase decision, while the buyer selects suppliers and manages the buying process. The decider may lack formal authority and still carry enough influence to determine whether the purchase happens. That is why an org chart alone will not tell you who decides.
Technical reviewers and blockers
Abmatic’s buying committee guide points out that technical and blocker stakeholders can stop a purchase even when they cannot approve spending. A security reviewer who never gets a vendor questionnaire answered can freeze a deal that the CFO has already liked.
How to tell approval from influence
Titles mislead. Lucidchart’s guidance warns that decision authority varies with company size and structure, and that the highest-ranking executive may not own the decision. At a 20-person startup the founder approves everything. At a 2,000-person company a director may have a budget that the CEO never sees.
Apollo’s 2026 guidance adds a practical rule: roles overlap in practice, so track what people actually do, such as handling legal terms, requesting reviews or advocating internally, rather than inferring authority from a title.
Questions that surface real authority
These questions work in a discovery call without sounding like an interrogation.
- “How did your team sign off on the last comparable purchase?” ZoomInfo recommends asking how similar purchases were approved and who weighed in.
- “Whose budget would this come from?” Ownership of the budget is the clearest sign of final say.
- “If we land at a specific number, is that something you can approve, or does it need to go further up?” This is the test PeerLab describes, adapted to your own price.
- “What would you need to see before the budget review?” A real approver names specifics. An influencer is vague.
- “Can you bring the CFO or head of the function to our next call?” ZoomInfo suggests testing whether a contact can commit budget, timing or senior participation. Willingness, with a date, is a good sign.
Listen to the language too. Hedging and a repeated need to check back point to influence. Concrete commitments such as scheduling the budget review point to authority.
Triangulate with three signals
PeerLab recommends combining three signals: your champion’s reporting structure and budget remit, the approval process they describe, and who approved a comparable purchase before. One signal can be wrong. Three that agree rarely are.
How to find decision makers in a company you want to sell to
If you do not yet have a contact, start with research, then move to conversations.
- Research the company and its people online. Indeed’s guidance suggests using the company site, professional networks and org charts to spot likely decision makers.
- Look at responsibilities, not just titles. Lucidchart recommends studying the prospect’s business, their responsibilities and internal relationships, and whether they delegate research before deciding how to approach them.
- Ask for the right person. A simple question such as “who’s the best person to speak to about this?” is a standard tactic in Indeed’s guide, and it works because people like to route you correctly.
- Use common connections. A referral from a mutual contact skips the gatekeeper.
- Map the group as you learn. Keep a list per deal: who owns the problem, who benefits, who can approve and who can block.
What changes with company size? In smaller companies, expect the owner of the function, often a founder or department head, to decide. In larger ones, expect a committee, a procurement process and more blockers. Plan for more roles, and more time, as headcount grows.
Mistakes that keep you away from the real decision makers
Contactwho’s 2026 guide lists the recurring errors, and they match what sales teams see in stalled deals:
- Assuming the top title is the buyer. The CEO of a mid-size firm may never touch a software purchase.
- Confusing an enthusiastic user or champion with the approver. Enthusiasm is not authority.
- Relying on title alone. See the section above.
- Contacting one stakeholder only. Single-threaded deals die when that person changes jobs or goes quiet.
- Finding legal, IT, security, finance or procurement too late. These reviewers are slow, and they hold a veto.
The fix in each case is the same: map the full buying group and validate each person’s responsibilities and authority. Contactwho recommends mapping who owns the problem, who benefits, who can approve and who can block.
Engaging every stakeholder, not just one
Once the group is mapped, the work shifts from finding people to serving them. The Open University’s framework implies that you should address every participant’s interests rather than treating the person who places the order as the only buyer.
Forrester’s view is that role-based engagement should reflect each participant’s motivations, information needs and buying habits. A champion needs enablement. A decision maker needs credible business-value evidence.
In practice that means:
- For the champion: a short summary of the problem, the plan and next steps that they can forward without rewriting.
- For the economic buyer: a one-page business case with cost, expected impact and risk. Our free one-page business case template is built for this.
- For the technical reviewer: security answers, integration details and implementation steps.
- For the user: a demo or a walkthrough video of their daily workflow.
- For the gatekeeper: a clear reason the meeting is worth the executive’s time.
The problem is delivery. Five people receive five different email threads, and nobody sees the same version. Long cycles make it worse: stakeholders lose context, and the champion ends up as an unpaid project manager.
Our perspective: treat the buying group as a shared workspace
We build for sales teams that run on Attio, and one pattern shows up again and again: deals do not stall because buyers dislike the product. They stall because the people who were not on the call never get a version of the story they can act on.
The champion heard the pitch. The economic buyer heard a two-line summary. The security reviewer got a PDF three weeks late. Each person is deciding on partial information, and each is deciding alone.
Our answer is a single deal room per account. It is drafted automatically from call recordings and existing content, so reps do not start from a blank page. A seller reviews it before it is published, and after every interaction we prompt the seller to update it, so the room stays current instead of aging like a forgotten slide deck. Buyers see the proposal, the plan and the relevant assets in one place.
Two things follow from that for decision-maker mapping. First, a room invites forwarding. When your champion shares a link with the CFO, you learn the CFO exists and, through engagement tracking, whether they looked. Second, a mutual action plan turns “who needs to approve what, by when” into tasks that sync to Attio, so approval steps live in the CRM and not in someone’s memory.
We do not think software replaces the discovery questions above. Nothing replaces asking “can you approve this number?” We think software should make the answer visible to the whole team afterwards.
— Adam
Turning stakeholder mapping into a repeatable process
A map in a rep’s head is lost when the rep leaves. Put it into the system of record.
- Add every stakeholder to the deal. Record each person’s role, not just their title.
- Note the evidence. For each role, write down why you believe it: “approved last year’s tooling spend” is better than “VP, probably decides.”
- Flag gaps. If you have no economic buyer or no technical reviewer by the midpoint of the deal, that is the next task.
- Watch behavior. Who opened the proposal, who forwarded it, who has gone silent. Our buyer engagement tracking syncs this back to the Attio pipeline record.
- Review weekly. A saved Attio view of deals with buyer activity this week shows where interest is rising, and a view of late-stage deals with no recent buyer visits shows where a deal may be single-threaded or stuck.
For larger deals with many stakeholders, see how we handle deal rooms for buying committees.
Put the buying group in one room with foyai
If your team sells with Attio, foyai gives each deal a personalized room that drafts itself from your calls and content library, tracks which stakeholders engage, and keeps the plan in sync with your CRM. You can see a real room before you sign up.
Pricing as published on our pricing page: the Free plan costs $0, Pro is $49 per month per seat or $468 per year per seat, and Platform is $500 per month per workspace or $5,100 per year per workspace. Start on Free to try it on a live deal.
A short worked example
Imagine you sell to a 300-person logistics company. Your contact, an operations manager, loves the demo.
- Week 1. You ask how the team bought its last piece of software. She says the VP of Operations signs anything over a set amount, and finance reviews contracts. You now have a probable economic buyer and a blocker.
- Week 2. You ask whether she can bring the VP to the next call. She agrees and proposes a date. That is a commitment, a good sign.
- Week 3. The VP joins and asks about security. You add an IT reviewer to the deal and share your security answers in the room instead of an email thread.
- Week 4. Engagement shows the finance lead opened the proposal twice. You send her the one-page business case before she asks.
Nobody in this example was found through a title search alone. Each role surfaced because of a question or a behavior. That is the habit worth building.
FAQ
Who is the final decision maker in a company?
It is the person who controls the relevant budget and can approve the proposed amount without escalating. That might be a founder, a department head, a CFO or a committee, depending on company size and deal value. Confirm it by asking how the last comparable purchase was signed off.
How many decision makers are involved in a B2B purchase?
Often several. A Gartner figure reported by Shopify puts the average at six to ten people. Smaller companies and low-cost purchases involve fewer, and one person can fill more than one role.
What is the difference between a champion and a decision maker?
A champion advocates for your solution and persuades colleagues, but may not hold budget authority. A decision maker approves the purchase. Forrester notes that champions need enablement while decision makers need credible business-value evidence.
Is the CEO always the decision maker?
No. Lucidchart warns that the highest-ranking executive may not own the decision, and that authority depends on company size and structure. In larger firms, a function head or committee often decides, so validate responsibilities rather than assuming from the title.
How do you reach a decision maker through a gatekeeper?
Be clear about why the conversation is relevant to the executive’s goals, and ask the gatekeeper who the best person to speak to is. Referrals from common connections also help. Gatekeepers control access and can slow progress, so treat them as part of the buying group.
Sources
- Understanding your customers: Business decision makers, The Open University
- Get To Know Your B2B Buying Group, Forrester
- B2B Buying Process: Stages, Roles, and Steps, Shopify
- How to Find the Right Decision-Maker in B2B Sales, ZoomInfo
- Identify the Buying Committee in B2B Sales, Abmatic
- Decision Process Blueprint, Winning by Design
- Economic Buyer Identification Guide, PeerLab
- How Do You Map a Buying Committee’s Economic Buyer?, Apollo
- How to Find Decision-Makers in a Company, Lucidchart
- How To Find Decision Makers in a Company, Indeed
- How to Find the Right Contact at a Company, Contactwho