A salesperson emails the CEO of a 500-person company. The CEO replies:

Interesting. Speak to our Head of Sales Operations.

The salesperson celebrates. The CEO replied. But what actually happened? The CEO did not validate the problem. The CEO routed the message to someone closer to it. That reply was useful, but it also exposed the weakness of the original contact choice. The seller used seniority as a shortcut for relevance.

Titles are coordinates, not routes

A title tells us roughly where someone sits in the organisation. It does not tell us how a problem moves through the organisation. “Chief Revenue Officer” may sound like the decision-maker for anything related to sales. But a CRO may not know the details of account research, CRM hygiene, territory allocation, or sequence management.

A Revenue Operations manager may understand those problems deeply but lack budget authority. A frontline sales manager may feel the pain every day but not own the system. A finance leader may approve the spend without caring about the workflow.

The title is a coordinate on the map. It is not the route the decision takes.

Think of a buying decision as a circuit

An electrical circuit needs several components to work. A power source alone does nothing if the circuit is open. A switch cannot power the system by itself. A resistor, wire, and load each play a different role.

Buying decisions are similar. One person may feel the problem. Another owns the process. Another can build support. Another controls the budget. Another checks security or legal risk. Another will use the product. Another can quietly block the whole thing.

Finding the most senior person is not the same as completing the circuit.

The roles around a problem

The same person can play more than one role, especially in a small company. In a larger company, the roles often split.

The problem witness

This person sees the failure directly. A sales manager may see reps wasting time. A coordinator may see the manual work. A customer success lead may hear complaints. The witness can describe the problem clearly, but may not control the response.

The process owner

This person is responsible for how the work gets done. They know the current tools, steps, handoffs, and constraints.

The champion

This person believes the change is worthwhile and is willing to move it internally. A champion is not simply someone who likes the product. A champion spends political energy on it.

The economic buyer

This person can approve or strongly influence the money. They often care about business impact, risk, timing, and trade-offs more than product detail.

The evaluator

This person checks whether the solution is acceptable. Security, legal, procurement, IT, finance, or operations may enter here.

The user

This person will work with the product. Users notice practical friction that senior buyers may miss.

The blocker

This person can stop or delay the decision. The blocker is not always hostile. They may be protecting a system, budget, team, or policy.

“Contact the decision-maker” is incomplete advice

There may not be one decision-maker. A CEO can approve money but still defer to the team on whether the tool is useful. A department head can choose a product but still need security clearance. A manager can create internal demand but not sign a contract.

The phrase “the decision-maker” makes a group process look like a single-person process. It also creates bad outreach. Sellers chase senior executives with broad messages while ignoring the people who can actually explain the problem.

The closest credible owner

A better first-contact question is:

Who is close enough to understand the problem and credible enough to move the conversation?

That person is not always the most senior. Suppose the product helps standardise outbound prospecting across a growing sales team. The CEO is too far from the workflow. An SDR may be close to the workflow but unable to move the decision. The Head of Sales Development or Revenue Operations leader may sit in the useful middle: close enough to recognise the problem, senior enough to investigate it, and connected enough to involve others.

This is the closest credible owner.

Title-based outreach versus problem-route outreach

Title-based approach: search for VP Sales, add every matching person to a list, send the same message, hope the title implies ownership.

Problem-route approach: define the problem, identify who sees it, identify who owns the process, identify who benefits from fixing it, choose the first person most likely to understand and route the conversation.

The second approach may lead to different contacts in different companies. That is not inefficiency. It reflects the fact that organisations are organised differently.

Multithreading is not surrounding the account

Some teams hear that buying decisions involve several people and respond by emailing everyone at once. The CEO, CRO, VP Sales, RevOps leader, SDR manager, and procurement contact all receive similar messages within two days. That is not thoughtful multithreading. It is coordinated noise.

Real multithreading means the conversation expands as the problem becomes clearer. For example: the first contact confirms the workflow problem, a process owner explains how the current system works, a senior leader evaluates the business impact, a technical evaluator checks the implementation, and a user comments on day-to-day usability. Each person enters for a reason. The account is not being “surrounded.” The decision is being understood.

The same product has different value for different roles

Suppose a platform helps sales teams prioritise accounts using signals. For a sales representative, the value may be less time spent researching. For a manager, it may be more consistent prospecting across the team. For RevOps, it may be cleaner routing and better reporting. For a CRO, it may be more pipeline without simply adding headcount. For finance, it may be a clearer return on the sales technology budget.

One generic value proposition will not land equally with all of them. The product is the same. The consequence is different.

Map the route, not just the org chart

For any outreach problem, the useful map looks like this: who notices the problem first, who owns the current process, who loses when nothing changes, who gains when it improves, who can approve money, who can approve risk, who will use the solution, and who can block it?

That map is more useful than a list of senior titles. The biggest title may be able to say yes. The right first contact is often the person who can explain why anyone needs to say yes at all.

The Person With the Biggest Title Is Often the Wrong First Contact