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Wow. This is shockingly good and easily actionable advice.

• bmelton 14y ago
  It is great advice -- to complicate the matter slightly, one should also be aware that pitching to the economic buyer is much different than pitching to the technical buyers. When speaking to technical buyers, they want to know that what you're going to do will work, from a technical perspective. If you're building widgets, will those widgets use LDAP to authenticate via our existing means? Will those widgets support the Oracle DB that we already use, etc. Your economic buyers generally care much less about this and much more about how much ROI they'll be getting. How will this save time? How will this provide the CTO more actionable insight into operations? How will this empower decision-making. This is why often the products that large companies buy are not the best technical solutions, because they can sell to those with purchasing power more effectively. If you've ever worked for a big company, you've seen it first hand -- "Why are we rolling out <product_x> when <open_source_product> does everything it does and far better?" - and the answer is that they were better able to speak to the concerns of the economic buyer, generally.