Map the users, champions and budget owners

Three roles, three different questions

For a first outbound test you do not need an org chart. You need three entries in a table: a user, a champion and a budget owner. They may be one person in a ten-person company and four people in a bigger one. The point is to ask, for your chosen segment, which job title most plausibly fills each seat.

• User. Touches the workflow daily. Can describe the pain in concrete terms. Often cannot buy.
• Champion. Wants the change enough to argue for it internally. Has some standing, and something personal to gain.
• Budget owner. Can approve spending, or knows the route to approval.

Find the user

Start with the person who does the work your product replaces. Public signals help: job titles in postings, the tools named in those postings, how the company describes the process in its documentation or case notes. Look for the title that appears next to the verbs of your use case.

Then write what that person is trying to get done in their words, not yours. Kurt Bostelaar, “How to capture customer jobs, pains & gains that aren’t subjective,” Strategyzer, July 25, 2016 recommends asking about past behavior rather than hypothetical opinions. Our practical adaptation is to ask what the user did last time the problem appeared, who they told, and what they used. A reported episode is still a report, not independently verified behavior.

Find the champion

In this working map, a potential champion is someone willing to help explain the problem internally. The user might play that role, or another person might be better positioned. Do not infer influence from seniority alone or assume a manager experiences the same problem. Ask how decisions were made in a recent comparable purchase.

Use three provisional questions about the candidate. Do they own an outcome the problem threatens? Do they have access to whoever approves spending? And do they have a reason to pursue a change? These are prompts for discovery, not a validated qualification score. A friendly conversation alone is not proof of sponsorship or purchasing intent.

Find the budget owner

The budget owner may be the founder, a finance lead, a head of operations, or in larger firms someone you will never email directly. In small companies, make the first contact the person who can say yes, if you can identify them. In larger ones, aim at the champion and design the message so it is easy to forward.

Write provisional questions about spending: cost against a line item, risk, headcount and contract terms may matter differently to different roles. Ryan Junee, “Enterprise Sales for Hackers,” Y Combinator, May 11, 2016 describes finance and legal concerns in its Fortune 500, $1M+ qualification-to-close context. It does not establish that these functions appear late, or even appear at all, in your segment. Ask the prospect about their actual process rather than importing that enterprise sequence.

Name the blockers early

A blocker is anything that could stop a yes even when the pain is real. Common categories: existing contracts, a security or vendor review, a missing integration, a reluctant owner of the current process, or simply no one with time. List two or three you can plausibly anticipate for your segment. Blockers shape the offer. If the likely blocker is a security review, a first message asking for a demo is premature, and a message offering a short written summary might fit better. That is a hypothesis to test.

Do not treat blockers as objections to overcome with a script. Treat them as facts about the segment. If every conversation hits the same one, that is the most useful finding your experiment can produce.

Build the map in four lines

For the segment you chose, start with four lines. User role and work. Possible champion and motivation. Budget owner and approval route, if known. Possible blocker and where it could appear. Four lines are a useful starting constraint, not a complete account of every buying process. Expand the map when real conversations show that you need to.

Then build a manageable list of named companies from the segment and look for the role you identified. Where you cannot find a plausible contact, mark that as an unresolved research question rather than inventing a person. Record each contact's source and your uncertainty; this helps you distinguish contact-selection questions from message questions, though silence alone cannot settle either.

A founder-run routine is a counter-option to outsourcing. Directly checking a small list may help you notice which titles exist and how this segment describes its work. That learning benefit is a practical hypothesis, not a guaranteed result. If you delegate research, specify the segment boundary and ask for sources and unknowns. Neither outsourcing nor founder ownership is established here as universally better.

Next step

With a segment, a map and a list, you can write one message and run one bounded test.

Continue: Run OutboundOpen the worksheet

Sources for this guide

• Ryan Junee, “Enterprise Sales for Hackers,” Y Combinator, May 11, 2016. Stated context: Fortune 500, $1M. Used for roles only.
• Kurt Bostelaar, “How to capture customer jobs, pains & gains that aren’t subjective,” Strategyzer, July 25, 2016. Used for the past-behavior principle only.