Notes for owners · Sales management
Primary and secondary customers: who pays, who decides, who uses
In many sales the person you pitch is not the person who pays, decides or uses the product. Map the four roles on one real deal and find the buyer you have never met.
The GullySales team · Updated 17 Oct 2026 · 6 min read
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You send the quotation, the contact sounds keen, and then nothing happens for weeks. Every sale has four roles, and one person can hold several: someone pays, someone decides, someone uses the product, someone influences the others. Here the primary customer is the one whose refusal ends the deal, often the payer but not always. The secondary customers can delay it or kill it quietly. Some lost deals were lost to one the seller never met.
What do the four roles mean in practice?
The payer releases the money. The decider says yes. The user lives with the product after it arrives. The influencer is asked for an opinion, whether or not anyone invited them.
In a kirana the owner is all four. In a school, a hospital, a housing society or a factory, they are four different people, and your pitch has been aimed at whoever replied to your WhatsApp.
For example: play equipment for a housing society
This is an invented example. A supplier of outdoor play equipment in Pune gets an enquiry from the society manager, who sounds keen. The supplier sends a quotation and then hears nothing for three weeks.
Mapped properly, the deal looks like this:
| Role | Who it was | What they cared about |
|---|---|---|
| Payer | The society's maintenance fund, signed by the treasurer | Cost per year, and whether it needs a general-body vote above a limit |
| Decider | The managing committee | Safety, a cheaper rival, and whether anyone has complained before |
| User | Children of different ages | Whether it is fun, and whether the swing is too high |
| Influencer | The parents' WhatsApp group | Rust, injuries, and noise near their windows |
The manager was only the person who wrote in. The deal stalled because the committee had two members who wanted a quote from a known brand, and the parents' group had already shared a photo of a cracked slide at another society. The supplier had never spoken to either audience.
A lower price would not have helped. Instead the supplier asked the manager for ten minutes at the next committee meeting and brought a one-page safety sheet in plain language, giving the material and ground-surface details, with the committee's questions answered in Marathi as well as Hindi and English. The supplier also left the contacts of two reference societies. The parents' group was offered a site visit. The deal moved because the people who could say no were finally answered. The result was partial: the committee cut the order from six pieces to four, and one parent still objected because of the cracked-slide photo. The time cost the supplier two evenings of travel and printing.
How do you map the roles for one live deal?
Do it on a single open deal, not in theory. Take the quotation that has been sitting longest.
- Write the name of the person you have been dealing with, and ask yourself which of the four roles they hold. Be honest: often it is one.
- For each of the other three roles, write the name or, if you do not have it, "unknown".
- Mark the unknowns. Each one is a conversation you have not had.
- Next to each person, write the one thing they would check or fear before saying yes.
- Ask your contact directly. "Who else needs to be comfortable with this?" is a better question than "Who is the decision maker?", because it does not make them feel they are not one.
A rule worth keeping: if a deal is over the value your contact can approve alone, you have a secondary customer you have not met. The limit is usually known to your contact. Ask what it is.
Why the primary customer is not always the payer
Ask whose refusal ends the deal. In a hospital the management may pay, but a department head who will not use the equipment kills the order. In a school the principal decides, but a bad bus-contractor experience among parents can flip a renewal. A user can also make a product fail quietly: a cook who dislikes a new burner, a technician who bypasses a safety guard. The product gets a bad name inside the building and the repeat order never comes.
When is the map too much?
Skip it for small, quick, repeat purchases where one person does everything. A tea stall buying a gas regulator does not have a committee. Spending an hour on a four-role map for a purchase decided in two minutes is the kind of process that makes owners give up on process.
Use it when the order is large for you. Use it when the buyer says "I will have to check with someone", or when a deal has gone quiet after a good start. And use it when one person buys the product and another lives with it.
Changing the pitch once you have the roles
In the society case, each unknown became a different handout. The treasurer got the yearly cost and the vote limit. The committee got the safety sheet and two references. The parents' group got a site visit and a photo of the ground surface to forward. Do the same for your deal: one thing per person, sized to what that person would check. For a committee buyer you need a persona per role, not one for the company. Our post on who decides in an EV charger purchase runs the same exercise in another trade, and the sales process pages show where each person comes in.
Keeping the map in the quotation file
Add three columns to wherever you keep quotes: payer, decider, user. Fill them in before the second quotation goes out. Write "unknown" where you must. An "unknown" in the decider column is the day's first call. If your buyers are institutions, buyer persona development is the work that builds a persona per role, and for a stalled deal that needs a second pair of eyes, tell us what you need.
