Every B2B purchase has more than one person in it, and sales training has a vocabulary for them: champion, economic buyer, influencer, technical buyer, blocker. At Growth Bully, a Malta performance marketing agency, we care about those labels for one narrow reason. They tell you who your advert, your landing page and your follow-up are talking to, and most campaigns we inherit are talking to one of them.
The glossary pages that rank for these terms were written for sales representatives working large enterprise deals, where a committee holds eight people and approval takes two quarters. That is not the firm reading this. In a company of twenty to two hundred people, one to three humans hold all of the roles between them. The roles still exist. They just stack.
What is the difference between a decision maker and an economic buyer?
The economic buyer releases the money. The decision maker decides the thing should happen. In large organisations those are two people with two different fears, which is why the sources disagree. In a smaller firm they are one person wearing both hats, and the distinction only matters when a board, a parent company or a finance director sits above your contact.
The practical test is one question: who can say yes and have it stay yes. If your contact can commit a budget line without going away for a week, you are speaking to the economic buyer. If their yes has to survive somebody else's review, you have a champion and the money sits elsewhere. Treating the second as the first is the most expensive misread in B2B marketing.
What is a champion in sales, and are they the decision maker?
A champion is the person who wants the problem solved and will carry your case internally when you are not in the room. They are rarely the decision maker, and almost never the budget owner. They are the one who found you, filled the form, took the call, and now has to explain to somebody else why this is worth money.
That makes the champion the most important person in your funnel and the least likely to close. They do not need persuasion, because they are already persuaded. They need ammunition: a page they can send and a description of the outcome that survives being pasted into an internal message. Marketing that sells only to the champion produces warm conversations that stall.
Who are the influencers and blockers in a buying committee?
An influencer shapes the shortlist without owning the outcome. A blocker protects a standard and can stop a deal without ever being a buyer. Both are invisible in your analytics and both decide more than your cost per lead does.
- Influencer. A colleague or a peer at another firm, whoever gets asked "have you heard of these people". Responds to visibility, not to offers.
- Technical buyer. Judges whether the thing will work: the IT lead, the compliance person, the operations manager. Responds to specifics and detests vagueness.
- Blocker. Has a rule to defend, usually procurement, legal or data protection. Not against you, against surprises.
- Economic buyer. Judges whether the outcome is worth the cost. Responds to commercial framing and to risk being removed.
In a firm of thirty people the managing director is frequently economic buyer, decision maker and blocker at once, and the champion is the marketing manager who found you. That is the committee: small, real, and your campaign is probably addressing a quarter of it.
Who should your marketing reach first?
Reach the budget owner first and build everything else behind that. It is counterintuitive, because the budget owner is harder to reach, slower to respond and less likely to fill a form. Reach them anyway: a deal that starts with the person who signs moves at a different speed from one that starts two levels below.
The reason is mechanical rather than psychological. A purchase that begins with the champion has to climb: they learn the case, rebuild it in their own words, lose half the detail, and present it to someone who never had your conversation. One that begins with the economic buyer descends instead, and a request from above needs no internal selling. The targeting side of that is how to reach B2B decision makers.
What does each role need to see from you?
Different evidence in a different order, which is why one landing page addressed to everyone converts badly. The outcome belongs to the economic buyer, the mechanism to the technical buyer, and the forwardable summary to the champion.
- Economic buyer: the outcome, the cost of not acting, and what happens if it does not work. Short, commercial, no mechanism.
- Champion: a page they can forward, a sentence they can quote, and a reason this makes them look right rather than reckless.
- Technical buyer: how it works, what it touches, what you need from their team, and what breaks.
- Blocker: contract terms, data handling, notice periods and ownership, available before anyone asks.
Most B2B advertising stops at the first line and wonders why the second call never happens. Pre-answering the blocker is the cheapest of the four: a clear position on who owns your ad accounts removes an objection before it reaches procurement.
Does reaching the budget owner shorten the cycle?
Yes, and that is the measurable part of all this. Every internal handover adds a wait: the champion's next one to one, the finance review, the week the decision maker is travelling. Starting higher removes handovers rather than steps, and handovers are where the weeks go.
It also changes what a slow deal tells you. If you are reaching budget owners and the cycle is still long, the length is real and should be planned for. If you are reaching champions, it is mostly queueing, and no amount of follow-up discipline fixes that. Both diagnoses are set out in how long a B2B sales cycle should take.
How do you tell which role you are speaking to?
Ask on the first call, in plain language, early. The question that works is not "are you the decision maker", which invites a yes from anyone with a job title. It is "who else would need to be comfortable before this goes ahead". Nobody is offended by that, and the answer names the committee for you.
Then record it. A lead whose role you know is a different asset from one whose role you assumed, and treating them the same is what turns a pipeline forecast into fiction. Role is the strongest field you can score an enquiry on, which is why it sits at the centre of what makes a lead qualified.
Can paid advertising reach a decision maker at all?
It can reach them, and it is poor at reaching only them. Targeting narrows to seniority and company size, but a budget owner is not reliably identifiable and not reliably in a scrolling mood. What paid media does well is make you familiar to everybody around the decision, so the champion's recommendation lands on a name the buyer has seen.
That is the honest version of B2B paid social, and it is still worth buying: the mechanics of running it for a buying committee rather than a single persona are in Meta ads for B2B. The part advertising cannot do is the direct approach to a named list, which is why our lead generation programmes run the Decision-Maker Pipeline alongside the ads rather than instead of them: one builds familiarity across the committee, the other gets the budget owner into a conversation. Tell us who signs off in your market and we will show you which of the two is missing.