B2B Sites Talk to the User Buyer and Miss the Economic Buyer

The user buyer works with a product every day and wants to know if it makes the job easier. The economic buyer holds the budget and answers for whether the purchase was worth the money and the risk. In the economic buyer vs user buyer split, marketing tends to speak to the user buyer.

Users are easy to find: they run the searches and turn up in the usage data. So the website and the content fill up with features and ease of use.

The economic buyer weighs cost and risk, and whether the purchase fits the company's priorities. Often nothing has been written for that person, so sales meets them cold, and late in the deal.

Most writing on the two roles treats the difference as a sales qualification step: who signs, and how a rep gets to them. The question for marketing comes earlier. Whom is each page written for?

Each role answers for a different outcome

The terms come from Strategic Selling, the sales book by Robert Miller and Stephen Heiman. What matters for marketing is what each role answers for, because that decides what each person reads for.

The user buyer answers for their own work, so they read for whether the product makes that work faster.

The economic buyer answers for the result. They read for cost, risk and fit with the company's priorities, and if the purchase goes wrong, they're the one asked why it was bought.

Approvers such as IT, security and compliance can stop a purchase. Their question is narrower: can we allow this?

Which people fill those roles depends on the market you've picked. Choose the companies first, then work out who inside them the marketing has to reach, and expect more than one person. Choosing those companies from who actually buys has its own guide.

Economic buyer vs decision maker: the money and the choice can sit apart

The economic buyer releases the money. The decision maker shapes which option gets picked. Sometimes they're one person, and sometimes they sit in different parts of the company.

Ilan Frank, Slack's VP of Enterprise Product, splits buyers into users and choosers. The chooser, he said on a 2021 podcast about users and choosers, is the person who "is actually going to make the buying decision." The podcast is run by WorkOS, which sells enterprise-readiness software. In this post's terms, his chooser is the decision maker.

Influencers sit a step further back. They steer a decision without making it, and they can do so without ever meeting the vendor.

Edelman's article on hidden buyers in B2B reports a 2025 survey by Edelman and LinkedIn and describes these influencers as "the unseen stakeholders in finance, legal, compliance, procurement, or operations." Both firms sell thought leadership and marketing services, and the page doesn't give the survey's sample or method, so treat its figures as a rough guide.

The same article notes that "we're conditioned to focus on the visible decision-makers." In decision maker vs influencer in B2B sales, the decision maker makes the call and influencers shape it from the side. Marketing has to reach both, and an influencer who never meets the vendor may know it only through what the vendor has published.

Slack won its users first and met its economic buyers later

In February 2015, before Slack's push into large companies, Stewart Butterfield, Slack's co-founder and CEO, explained how the product spread. A mid-level manager could say, "This thing sounds cool, let's try it out for our team," and if the team liked it, the cost was low enough to expense.

"We didn't have to convert the whole company and facilitate committee-level decisions," he told First Round Review about Slack's launch. In big companies, team-by-team buying scattered Slack across separate paid teams: "you end up with a situation like Adobe, with nine paid Slack teams."

By December 2015, Slack's CTO, Cal Henderson, told CIO magazine that IT chiefs were coming to Slack: "CIOs are coming to us and saying, 'we see that this is being used inside our organization.'" The people now asking about Slack were the ones who answer for control and cost across a whole company.

Slack had little in place for them.

Frank says that in early 2016 "for the most part there were 20 people that were called account managers and we were taking orders." He adds, "We really didn't have a sales team," and single sign-on was the only enterprise feature Slack had.

Slack then had to build what those buyers needed: provisioning and de-provisioning, eDiscovery, data-loss controls, and admin features around users and permissions.

Slack's user-first growth worked. It also shows the economic buyer and the decision maker coming apart: users chose Slack team by team, and the company-wide contracts depended on CIOs, who answer for control and cost across a company and arrived later with different questions.

Tagging each page by role shows how far the site leans to users

Pull the homepage, the pricing page if you publish one, the case studies and the ads running now. Next to each, write down which role's question it answers:

• the user buyer's: will this make my work easier?
• the economic buyer's: is it worth the money and the risk?
• an approver's: can we allow this?

Say a firm sells inspection equipment to factories. Its case studies describe technicians finishing inspections sooner. A plant's finance director reading them finds nothing on what the equipment costs to run or what happens if it fails, so every one of those case studies gets tagged to the user.

Expect most of your own pages to be tagged to the user as well, since users are the people the marketing can see.

The pages a team has now are a record of whose clicks it could count. Whether those are the people it should be winning is a decision worth making on purpose. For the homepage in detail, see this line-by-line homepage teardown.

Put the economic buyer's question on the pages they read

Once the tags show the gap, write the cost, risk and control question into the pages the economic buyer reads. For the made-up equipment firm, that could be one paragraph per case study on running costs and what happens when a machine breaks down.

Leave the user's story intact: the technician reading the same case study still needs to see the faster inspection.

For Slack's CIOs, the question was control. Henderson summed up what they asked for: "we want better consolidated controls for permissions, and billing and sign-on." Those questions arrived before Slack had the answers built. A company that can answer them, in writing, on the pages a CIO reads, doesn't wait for the CIO to call.

Users also need something to carry upward. A user who likes a product still has to make the case to the person who signs, and without help they make it in their own words. A short page written for the economic buyer, and easy to forward, gives them better ones.

Once the roles are clear, how a B2B buying committee decides is the next question.

Winning the users still leaves the contract to someone else

The strongest objection to writing for the economic buyer comes from Slack's own story. It grew by winning users and letting them pull the product into their companies, without marketing to executives first.

If users will sell it up anyway, why write for the budget holder?

A product cheap enough for a team to expense can go a long way on users alone, as Slack did. Users got Slack in the door. The company-wide contracts still went through the CIOs, whose first questions were about control and cost.

Material written for the person who signs also helps whoever carries the case upward. In Edelman and LinkedIn's survey, 51% of hidden decision-influencers say high-quality thought leadership helps them convince C-level executives.

Write one page for the person who signs

A practical start is one page. Pick the one the economic buyer is most likely to see before a sales call, and rewrite it around their question: is this worth the money and the risk?

If you're working out which of these people your own marketing should speak to first, we're glad to talk through what it means for your brand.

The economic buyer still answers for the purchase, and the page a user forwards may be the only thing from the vendor they read before deciding.