The order names the buyer and not the person who chose
A competitive intelligence team at a coatings business could see who bought its products. Purchase orders come from procurement, and the sales records showed those relationships clearly. What the records did not show was who had chosen the coating in the first place. In many cases that choice is made earlier, by different people in a different room, and it ends up written into a specification before anyone raises an order.
That gap matters because effort follows the picture a company has. Selling to the buyer is worth doing. It works better when the specification already names your product. Which role holds the pen changes from one application to the next, so it could not be described in general terms. It had to be counted.
We surveyed specifiers and buyers across every application
We built the survey with the client’s intelligence team and put it to a screened panel of specifiers and procurement leads. It asked who decides which coating is used and on what basis that decision gets made. Everyone on the panel was screened by application type and by role, so the answers could be cut the way the business is actually organized.
The panel was sized to be quotable rather than indicative. That mattered because a number the team can quote goes into a plan, while an impression only goes into a discussion. Specifiers and buyers were both included, since the whole question was how far apart the two sit, and asking only one side would have answered nothing.
The choice is made earlier than the order suggests
The survey established where the decision is made in each application, and how much that varies between them. Commercial effort had been weighted toward procurement relationships, on the assumption that the buyer was also the chooser. The evidence pointed further up the chain, to the people who set the specification.
The team moved its commercial effort to those people. Because the answer was counted rather than described, the survey can be run again later against the same panel design, and the picture refreshed rather than rebuilt.
