How to sell to the CTO, the finance head and the user in the same deal

In a technology sale you win a committee, not a person, and each member is asking a different question. The CTO asks whether it will break something. The finance head asks what it costs over time and what happens if it is wrong. The daily user asks whether their Monday gets harder. Prepare one answer per person, and watch for the member who has been quiet since the demo.

Who are the people, really?

Titles vary by company, so listen for the role, not the label. In a small or medium Indian firm the "CTO" may be an IT manager, a relative of the owner or an outside consultant. The "finance head" may be the practising CA who signs off the books, the accounts manager or the promoter. The user may be a team of six.

For each deal, write down four names: who feels the problem, who judges the technology, who controls the money and who will use it daily. Sometimes one person fills two seats. Sometimes a promoter's relative holds a veto nobody mentions, so ask for that name too.

What does each person need to hear?

Use this sheet as the base of your notes for every deal. The last column holds signs to watch for, not rules; check them against what you see.

The owner or sponsor is the fourth seat, and what that person needs is one page: the problem, the result expected, the risk and the decision date. If the owner delegates the follow-up to someone junior, find out why.

What do mid-size Indian buyers ask for that vendors forget?

A few practical items come up again and again, and each belongs to one of the seats above.

• Vendor registration. Many mid-size firms, and most larger ones, want a vendor form with your PAN, GSTIN, bank details and a cancelled cheque before they can pay you. The finance seat asks for this late. Send it early.
• The GST invoice. The accounts team will check that your invoice and GSTIN details match what they hold. A mismatch can hold a payment even after the deal is signed.
• The pilot on their own data. The CTO and the user both tend to want to see the product work on the firm's own files, not on your sample set. Offer to scope it in writing before they ask.
• The signing authority. In owner-run firms the promoter signs, but the CA often advises on whether to proceed. Ask who the CA is and what they will want to see.

How do you keep all of them moving?

Run two tracks: the conversation with your champion, the person who wants the change, and the material for the others, handed over through the champion or in a meeting you arrange.

Give your champion things they can forward without explaining: a one-page summary for the finance head, a security note for the CTO and a short "what changes on Monday" sheet for the team. A champion who has to explain your product from memory will lose the argument in a meeting you are not in. For the meeting itself, our post on building a presentation for a buying committee covers the slide order.

Ask the champion, directly and politely: "Who will push back, and on what?" Many will tell you. A question the champion cannot answer is itself a finding: it means the committee has not yet been spoken to. Write the answers beside the names in your table.

For example: a cybersecurity firm and a Surat textile mill

Take an invented cybersecurity firm in Ahmedabad, every detail made up, pitching a managed endpoint protection service to a textile mill in Surat. The IT manager is keen and has seen the demo. The firm sends its proposal to the IT manager alone, who forwards it. A month passes.

Meanwhile the mill's accounts head has never heard of the firm and sees an annual figure of ₹6 lakh with nothing to compare it with. Why, the accounts head wonders, does IT want more spending? The owner's family member who once lost a week to a ransomware scare would have backed it, but nobody asked. The firm had treated one keen contact as the whole deal, and it shows.

To repair it, the firm asks the IT manager three questions. Who signs? Who will ask about the cost? Who cares most about the risk? It then sends a one-page note that sets the service fee against the cost of a day's downtime. The downtime figure is left blank, for the accounts head to fill in from the mill's own daily output. The accounts head arrives at the next call with that number in hand, and the IT manager invites the owner's relative. Each person now has something to say yes to. The deal still shrinks, from the full mill to one unit as a pilot, and closes two months late.

What if the user is against it?

Users can sink a deal after purchase, because they can simply ignore a system. Suppose a mill's accounts clerks fear that a new billing tool will expose their errors. Do not go over their heads. Ask what they fear, then change the plan: a smaller first group, training that respects their time, or a role for the clerks in choosing the report layout. A small deal with a single decision maker does not need any of this; the sheet is for deals where you have heard "I need to check with" more than once.

Mapping the next deal

Pick your most important open deal and fill in the table: four names, four questions, four items of proof. Mark where you have no name or no proof. That gap is where to spend your next call. Account-based selling is the related work for deals with several buyers, and technology is the wider section for software and IT sellers. If you want help mapping your deals, tell us what you need.