Who gets fired because they didn't have your product?

Connecting with the right buyers — which means not just approaching the right companies but also talking to the right people inside that company — is a critical part of any successful sales campaign. So how do you figure out if you should be talking to the director of development, director of DevOps, director of SRE, director of platform engineering or someone else entirely?

There can be an element of trial and error. If you find that the directors of development keeps saying that they aren’t the ones in charge of purchasing products like yours, you should certainly ask them who is. If there’s ambigiuity about who is the right purchase persona, it makes sense to talk to people in all the possible job titles and see where your product gets traction.

In addition, you should also think about the value you provide and how it matches up with the incentives and success metrics for each job title. To put it another way, who gets a bonus because your product works as promised and is so amazing? Who gets fired when a problem your product could have prevented happens? Those are going to be the people most interested acquiring / using your product, and you should be talking to them.

Of course, to get there you need to be totally clear about what unique value you provide. But once you’re clear on that, it should be pretty easy to tell who is going to care most about that value.