This chapter is built on the perspective of Sam Jacobs, founder and CEO of Pavilion, who has spent a decade presenting spending requests to CEOs, CFOs, and boards. He teaches Pavilion's P&L Fluency course, which trains revenue leaders to defend a budget request to a CFO, and writes the Sundays with Sam newsletter.
The structure comes from John McMahon's Economic Buyer meeting framework in The Qualified Sales Leader. McMahon has served as CRO at five public enterprise software companies (PTC, GeoTel, Ariba, BladeLogic, and BMC), and at PTC he inspired and led the team that created MEDDIC. The chapter pairs McMahon's framework for building the meeting with Sam's view of how the Economic Buyer receives it.
How to win
The Economic Buyer presentation is the meeting where the person who controls the funds confirms that the problem is worth solving and agrees to how solutions will be evaluated. It happens before the proof of value and the decisions made in this meeting set the terms for the rest of the deal.
In McMahon's framework, the Economic Buyer meeting does three jobs:
The meeting confirms that solving the pain is a priority, that funds are available, and that the Economic Buyer has authority for a purchase of this size.
It frames your differentiators into the decision criteria. Reps meet the Economic Buyer before the proof of value to frame and finalize their product differentiators into the decision criteria.
It secures commitments. The Economic Buyer agrees that all vendors test to the same validation criteria, gives permission to call if anyone tries to change them, and confirms the timeframe and the remaining decision-process steps.
McMahon's framework has six stages: Discovery, Scoping, the Economic Buyer meeting, the Validation Event, the Business Case and Final Proposal, and Negotiate and Close. The Economic Buyer meeting is stage three.
Most sellers meet the Economic Buyer after the proof of value, when the results are in. McMahon puts the meeting before validation. The purpose is to frame your differentiators and finalize them into the decision criteria before any vendor is tested. The business case at stage five then proves what the Economic Buyer agreed to at stage three.
Who is the Economic Buyer?
The Economic Buyer is the person with discretionary use of the funds. They can move budget between projects and they hold final decision authority. Once they approve a decision, the remaining signatures are formalities.
What is the Economic Buyer weighing?
The Economic Buyer has more problems than budget. When evaluating if a problem is worth solving, The Economic Buyer's questions fall into four groups:
Question
What the Economic Buyer wants to know
How much?
How much does it cost, and how much will it save?
How soon?
How soon can it be implemented and show value?
How sure?
What is the cost justification, and who are the references?
How easy?
How easy is it to implement, and how easy is it for people to learn?
The presentation should answer each of these before the Economic Buyer has to ask.
What does the Economic Buyer need?
A problem large enough to fund now. The pain is quantified and tied to the measures the Economic Buyer owns.
A gain that far outweighs the pain.
New information about their business. Skip the business issues the Economic Buyer already knows. Tell them about issues they had not considered that affect what their business could be doing.
Sam adds a requirement from his own experience pitching initiatives to decision makers. Show why the decision is in the Economic Buyer's interest: what it saves, the results they will see, how they will know it is working, and how often you will report on progress.
The Economic Buyer presentation is prepared with the champion, delivered in nine parts, and success is judged by what you leave with.
A finished Economic Buyer presentation has nine parts:
Part
What it establishes
1. Summary of findings
What Discovery and Scoping found
2. Current state
How the work happens today, with metrics
3. Negative consequences
What the current state costs, and who it affects
4. Proposed future state
The business outcome
5. Benefits of the future state
The value of the outcome, quantified
6. Required capabilities
What any solution must do, written as decision criteria
7. Customer success stories
Comparable customers, with quantified before-and-after metrics
8. Your solution
A high-level description, based on the criteria
9. Remaining decision steps
Every step left between this meeting and a purchase order
1 Prepare the champion
Agree with your champion on the meeting deliverables and the talk track before the meeting. The talk track sets the topics, who presents each one, and the guardrails for the conversation.
In most cases, the champion briefs the Economic Buyer in advance. When that happens, the meeting confirms what the Economic Buyer has already heard, and it becomes ceremonial.
Sam prepares for his own board meetings with dress rehearsals, keeps the dashboards open, and works out in advance the number he expects to be asked for. Apply the same preparation to the champion before they brief the Economic Buyer. A champion who can only recite the numbers will lose them the first time finance pushes back.
2 Build the presentation from Scoping
Scoping produces three documents, and the presentation draws on all of them:
A cost justification with as-is and to-be metrics
A proof of value plan tied to the proof of value criteria and the preliminary cost justification
A preliminary pricing proposal, based on the preliminary cost justification
Every rep should be able to answer one question before the meeting: what price point will you set during your meeting with the Economic Buyer? The price comes from the preliminary cost justification and is introduced in this meeting.
Sam's guidance on structuring the price is to match it to how the customer gets value: "align how you charge with how your customers experience the value."
3 The presentation
Part 1: Summary of findings
What to include: A high-level summary of what Discovery and Scoping found, in the customer's words. Lead with the pain discovery statement: what is wrong in the business today. Then state the Three Whys:
Why they have to buy
Why from you
Why now
Include at least one issue the Economic Buyer had not considered, because a summary of what they already know gives them no reason to act.
Part 2: Current state
What to include: Describe how the work is done today and what it costs. Then, build the quantified pain statement from the as-is metrics in the Scoping cost justification, and tie it to the measure the Economic Buyer owns that the pain affects most. Every number should come from the customer, because quantified pain is what supports a higher price point.
Part 3: Negative consequences
What to include: Lay out the implications of leaving the pain unsolved: who suffers and what suffers. Connect them to the Economic Buyer's own measures, because implicated pain is what creates urgency. Without urgency, the customer concludes they can keep operating as they are. The goal is to show a problem too large for the Economic Buyer to leave in place.
Part 4: Proposed future state
What to include: The to-be state, defined as a business outcome: what the company can do once the pain is solved. Use the Economic Buyer's words, since their desired business outcome is one of the commitments you leave the meeting with. Parts 5 and 6 build on it: the benefits quantify this outcome, and the required capabilities are what it takes to reach it.
Part 5: Benefits of the future state
What to include: The preliminary ROI from the Scoping cost justification. Express each benefit the way the customer expresses business value, with a material measure. "Increased productivity," "reduced headcount," and "quicker time to market" do not count on their own. Instead, frame it as:
Increase annual revenue by twenty million dollars.
Eliminate fifty million dollars in production scrap.
Decrease time to market by ten percent, resulting in fifteen million dollars in cost savings.
This is the part the Economic Buyer will test hardest. Sam's standard is that every number in front of an executive is one the presenter can defend under questioning. Build the preliminary ROI so that your champion can explain each input and where it came from.
Part 6: Required capabilities
What to include: First, include the required capabilities and differentiators: based on diligence with the customer's team and on customers with similar issues, the minimum capabilities a solution would need. Second, the decision criteria for the validation event: those same capabilities, written into the criteria every vendor will be tested against.
This is the part that decides the deal. Your differentiators have to be documented in the final decision criteria, and the seller who controls the criteria controls the deal.
Part 7: Customer success stories
What to include: Customer success stories with quantified before-and-after metrics. A story without numbers does not answer the Economic Buyer's sureness question.
Part 8: Your solution
What to include: Each element of the solution, tied to a required capability from Part 6. Keep it at the level of business outcomes.
A seller who speaks in technical product terms gets moved down the organization to the level they sound like.
Part 9: Remaining decision steps
What to include: Every step between this meeting and a purchase order: the validation event, the business case, legal, security, procurement, and the paper process. Procurement's job is to reduce your price, and a late competitor will contact the Economic Buyer to delay the decision. Steps confirmed in this meeting are your defense against both.
Putting it together
Let's look at an example. Corvane is a B2B software company with $400 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and 1,200 enterprise customers, invented here so that every part is demonstrable. The CEO has said publicly that the company will raise gross revenue retention from 88% to 92% this year. You sell a customer health and renewal forecasting platform. Your champion is the VP of Customer Success. The Economic Buyer is the Chief Customer Officer, who owns the retention target and the customer success budget.
Part
Corvane
1. Summary of findings
Churn is the largest controllable cost in the growth plan. At-risk accounts are identified at the renewal conversation, about 60 days before contract end, when there is little time left to change the outcome.
2. Current state
Customer success managers track account health in spreadsheets updated once a month. Gross revenue retention is 88%, so $48 million of ARR churns each year.
3. Negative consequences
The 92% target requires keeping $16 million more ARR each year. Without earlier warning on at-risk accounts, the target is out of reach this year, and the Chief Customer Officer owns that target.
4. Proposed future state
At-risk accounts are flagged six months before renewal, while the customer success team still has time to act.
5. Benefits
Scoping estimates retention rises to between 90% and 91%, keeping $8 million to $12 million more ARR each year. The preliminary price is $900,000 a year.
6. Required capabilities
Health scores built from product usage, support tickets, and billing data, integration with the existing CRM, and alerts sent to the account's customer success manager. All vendors will be tested on how accurately they predict last year's churned accounts six months out, and on CRM integration, during a 60-day proof of value on the mid-market segment.
7. Customer success stories
A comparable software company raised gross revenue retention from 87% to 91% in its first year (named in the real version).
8. Your solution
Usage-based health scoring, CRM integration, and alerts to account owners, each mapped to a capability in Part 6.
9. Remaining decision steps
The proof of value, the business case review, security review, legal review, procurement, and a purchase order by December 15.
The Chief Customer Officer leaves this meeting having agreed to the criteria in Part 6 and the steps in Part 9. Sixty days later, the business case reports the proof of value results against those same criteria. In a real presentation, every number comes from the customer's reports and the Scoping cost justification.
4 Leave with commitments
The success of the presentation is measured by what you leave with. Leave the meeting with:
Confirmation of the Discovery and Scoping findings, the Three Whys, and the before-and-after scenarios
The Economic Buyer's desired business outcome, and which of their measures the pain affects most
Agreement that all vendors test to the same validation criteria
Permission to call the Economic Buyer if anyone tries to change those criteria
Confirmation that the Economic Buyer has authority for a purchase of this size
A review of the preliminary cost justification, and whether they will allocate budget against it
The timeframe they want a solution in, and the reason for that timeframe
Confirmation of the remaining decision-process steps
Agreement to a follow-up meeting if the proof of value results materially change the cost justification
When a competitor's champion is in the meeting, walk through the validation criteria, the pains being solved, and the cost justification. Then ask the Economic Buyer, in front of the group, whether you can call them if anything changes from what was just agreed. Everyone in the room now knows the criteria are set and that any change will go to the Economic Buyer.
After the meeting, record what questions the Economic Buyer asked and what the champion said afterward.
The first two mistakes come from McMahon's framework. The third comes from Sam's experience on the receiving side of the meeting.
Meeting someone who is not the Economic Buyer. The rep reports an Economic Buyer meeting, but nothing qualifies the person. Often the meeting was arranged by a coach, who has information but no influence and no access to the person who controls the funds. The criteria agreed in that meeting bind no one. Qualify the person on discretionary use of funds and authority for a purchase of this size before you present.
Skipping the meeting before validation. The rep goes straight to a proof of value and plans to meet the Economic Buyer with the results. The decision criteria were never locked, so a competitor can change them, and procurement can reopen the price. Skipping steps leads to smaller deals, sold to lower levels of the organization, and to inaccurate forecasts.
Cheerleading. The presentation covers only the upside. Sam calls this a hard lesson for sales leaders who see their job as cheerleading. The Economic Buyer finds the weak points eventually, and every claim that came before loses weight.
"Inevitably the truth will come out anyway, and you'll lose credibility."
Present the risks and the open questions alongside the value, and show how the proof of value will test them.
Sam treats AI as leverage. In the hands of someone who knows the customer, knows how to sell, and knows what good looks like, it makes them better. Without that knowledge, it produces mediocre work at scale.
"AI will make the gap between good and bad wider than it's ever been."
His shorter version: AI does not raise the floor. It makes weak sellers "bad 10x faster with 10x the output." The mistake is using AI as a substitute for judgment.
The Economic Buyer judges who stands behind the case
Sam's newsletter makes a point that applies directly to this meeting. People judge communication by who said it, why they said it, and whether they will stand behind it.
"Interestingness is a property of content. Connection is a property of relationship."
The Economic Buyer is approving a case that the champion and the seller have put their names on. A generated presentation can read well and still have no one who can defend it under questioning.
AI cannot supply the customer's numbers
The quantified pain statement and the preliminary ROI come from the as-is and to-be metrics gathered in Scoping. A number generated by a model has no source in the customer's business. The Economic Buyer will check it against their own reports, and the champion's reputation is attached to it.
AI defaults to general terms
A model asked to describe benefits writes "increased productivity" and "faster time to market." Those are the terms the framework rejects without a material measure. Check every benefit in Part 5 for a dollar figure the customer gave you.
Where AI belongs
Use AI to assemble what the customer has already confirmed: Discovery notes, Scoping metrics, the proof of value plan, and the decision steps. Use it to check that every benefit carries a material measure and every capability in Part 6 maps to the solution in Part 8. Then trace every number in the presentation to something the customer said or showed you. If you cannot, remove it.
