The four reasons businesses buy — and why one pitch has to tell all four
Roughly seven people have to agree before B2B software gets bought, and they are measured on different things. A pitch that makes one argument is a pitch that convinces one of them.
There are exactly four reasons a business buys anything:
- Make more money.
- Save money.
- Increase efficiency.
- Mitigate risk.
Most sales advice tells you to pick the strongest one and lead with it — usually "make more money", on the theory that revenue beats cost. That advice is wrong, and the reason is structural rather than rhetorical. Here is Stephen Steers:
None is better than the others, because roughly seven people need to agree to buy a software solution and each carries a different KPI — the CEO cares about making more money, the CFO about saving it, the end-user department about efficiency. Your product must be able to tell all four stories, and you must know which one to tell to whom.
Stephen Steers
The number is the important part. Seven people. Not one buyer with one motive — a committee, mostly invisible to you, each member of whom is measured on something different and none of whom is persuaded by the argument that persuades the others.
Who is measured on what
| Reason | Who it lands with | What it sounds like in their words |
|---|---|---|
| Make more money | Founder, CRO, GM, anyone carrying a number | "More pipeline, same headcount" |
| Save money | CFO, procurement, finance-adjacent ops | "Cheaper than the alternative, and I can show the line" |
| Increase efficiency | The team that will actually use it | "I stop doing the part of my job I hate" |
| Mitigate risk | Security, legal, compliance, and any exec who has been burned | "This does not become my problem later" |
The two most commonly neglected are the ends of that table. Efficiency gets skipped because it feels unambitious next to revenue — but the person who feels it is the person whose sign-off you need to survive a trial. Risk gets skipped because it feels negative, and it is often the one that actually kills the deal: nobody says no because of risk, they simply stop replying.
The trap in leading with efficiency alone
There is a caveat that sits underneath this, and it is worth naming because "increase efficiency" is where most tooling pitches naturally land.
A pitch built purely on saving time has two structural weaknesses. First, as Cohen puts it in a live teardown, "something that saves money is not that interesting of a proposal" — it competes with doing nothing, which is free. Second, and worse, it creates internal opposition. If the work you are automating is currently somebody's job, that somebody is on the evaluation call.
On the one hand, you have something that saves money, which is not that interesting of a proposal. And you just named people who will push back on this and say it's not very good, whether it is or not. That's headwinds going against you.
Jason Cohen
The fix is not to drop the efficiency argument. It is to pair it — efficiency for the team, revenue for the person above them — and to reframe efficiency as capacity rather than replacement. Your people stop doing the reading and keep doing the judgement is an efficiency argument that the affected team can support rather than resist.
The version that outperforms all four
There is a fifth framing that is not on the list because it is not a business reason at all. It is a personal one, and in practice it beats the four:
If you can explain to the marketer in three words, you're gonna keep your job because you're gonna be this critical person — that's what I'm talking about. Not just, you won't hate this as much as you hate the current thing.
Jason Cohen
Businesses do not buy things. People inside businesses champion things, and the question a champion is silently answering is does this make me look good, or does it make me the person who introduced the tool that failed?
Rob Walling's version, aimed at a smaller-company buyer where job security is not the lever:
If you're a founder running a five person company, well, I don't need to save my job, but what I do need is results. I need more leads.
Rob Walling
Same structure: a personal stake, not a corporate one. The four reasons get the purchase approved. The personal reason gets someone to spend their credibility pushing it, and nothing gets bought in B2B without somebody spending credibility.
What this means for the artefact you send
The practical consequence is that one pitch is the wrong unit. A pitch pack addressed to a single reader is a pitch pack that will be forwarded to six people it was not written for.
What travels well:
- A one-pager for the champion built on the personal stake plus the reason that matches their function.
- A cost line for finance — even a rough one. If you do not supply it, the champion invents it, and they will invent it badly.
- A "what could go wrong" section for the risk reader. Counter-intuitively this strengthens the pitch: naming your own failure modes is the cheapest credibility available, and a specific stated weakness converts better than a page with no weaknesses on it.
- A concrete before/after for the team who will use it, in their own vocabulary, showing what stops being their job.
Four short blocks, not four documents. The test is whether the pack survives being forwarded — because it will be, and you will not be in the room when it is.
Before your next first call
Write one sentence for each of the four reasons, specific to the account, in that account's language. If any of the four is blank, that is the objection you are going to lose to — and you have found it for free, before the call, instead of three weeks later when the thread goes quiet.
Keep reading
- Personalisation that works, and personalisation that costs you trust Using someone's first name is not personalisation — and the people you most want to reach read it as proof that a machine sent the email. Here is the line between the two.
- The only prospects worth emailing this quarter Most lost deals were never deals. They were people who agreed the problem was real, took the meeting, and then went back to the two things their job actually depends on.
- What to say when everyone already knows the problem Naming a pain your prospect discusses openly proves nothing — they hear it from every vendor in the category. There are two deeper levels, and the third one is where deals are actually won.