Follow the decision before trying to influence it.
Both sides are looking hard, and not at each other.
A commercial team is paid to find buyers. That is the job, it is measured, and a good team does it well. A business with a problem is paid to fix the problem, using whatever is nearest: its own people, its current suppliers, a workaround it already trusts.
Neither is looking at the same thing. One is looking for somebody to buy. The other is looking for something to stop hurting. Those two searches can run past each other for years, and often do, over a product that would have answered the problem exactly.
What would close the distance is somebody watching the problem take shape from the side it is taking shape on. No commercial role is measured on that, because nothing is sold while it happens and no pipeline moves. The space between the two searches has no owner.
This page is about what is in that space. Not the buyer’s private thinking, which nobody outside can reach, but what is happening to a business before it goes looking for anything.
A requirement is the end of the story, not the beginning.
Something changes for a business before it buys anything. A customer asks for something it has not done. A contract renews on different terms. A competitor moves, or a rule lands. At that moment there is no budget, no project and nobody to call.
One person feels it first, because they are accountable for whatever just got harder. What usually follows is not a purchase. It is a workaround: overtime, a manual step, an exception, a favour called in. Most changes stop there and never become anything.
Where the workaround costs something visible, a missed date or a complaint or a number somebody notices, it acquires a name and an owner. Only then do the options get compared, and buying is one of five. Doing it internally, pressing whoever they use now, waiting, and changing part of it are the other four.
A requirement gets written at the end of that, with the conditions set and the alternatives already ruled out. That is where every supplier arrives.
Most of it leaves no trace, and some of it leaves one.
The early stages are not secret. They are unremarkable. Nobody announces a workaround, and the person carrying it has no reason to talk about it until it becomes somebody else’s problem.
Some of it does surface. What a business has committed to publicly, what its own customers have announced, what it has started hiring for, what changed on its site, what it has told an inspector or a partner. None of that says a purchase is coming. All of it says what is being absorbed.
| What is happening inside | What a supplier can see |
|---|---|
| Something changes for their customers | Sometimes, if those customers said so |
| One person carries it | Nothing |
| A workaround absorbs it | Nothing |
| The workaround starts costing | Rarely, and by accident |
| Somebody becomes accountable | Sometimes: a hire, a change of role |
| The options get compared internally | Almost never |
| A requirement is written | Now, and only now |
A supplier answering a specification is answering a document the workaround wrote. Whoever was in the room while the options were compared shaped what that document would say.
Almost every approach stops at the first layer.
What a business sells, and to whom, is on its website. That is where most preparation begins and ends, and it explains nothing about why the business would change anything.
Underneath it: what its customers choose between, and what those customers in turn have to deliver. What it has already committed to and by when. Who inside is accountable, and what each of them would have to defend if a decision were questioned. What it has been burned by before, which explains requirements nobody can otherwise justify.
The first layers can be established from outside. The deeper ones cannot, and a question is the only way in. Knowing which is which is most of what separates a prepared approach from a plausible one.
You arrive at the end of it, and everything is already decided.
A requirement reaches you complete. The conditions are set, the timing is somebody else’s, the alternatives have been weighed without you, and the objections were answered before the document existed. You can respond well to it and you cannot change what it says.
Working the other way round is slower and there is no form to fill in. It means starting from what that business has to make possible for its own customers, what it has already committed to, and what it would have to be able to defend internally. Almost none of that is about what anybody sells.
What it produces is not a shortcut to a sale. It is a smaller number of accounts worth the effort, a reason to speak to each of them that comes from their situation and not from a campaign, and a short list of questions that only they can answer.
A supplier who understands the decision a business has to carry is easier to buy from. Not because it is persuasive, but because it is answering the question that business was already asking.