I was assigned to support sales people in a job long ago. I learned a lot about sales but it was enlightening to see their strategies for maximizing their reward to effort ratio.

A key strategy was to find someone in the company with decision making power or influence but who also was not really spending their own money/budget directly. You were wasting your time talking to anyone without power to make or influence decisions, but you didn’t want to go too high up the chain because the closer you got to the people who owned the business or the P/L of a division, the more questions they asked to make sure they were getting the best value.

So the optimal sales target was a middle manager who wanted an easy solution that felt like it would help their KPIs but who also didn’t really care if it was a good value as long as the number wasn’t so high that people started asking questions.

If you got pushed up to the business owner level you were going to get grilled on value and efficiency, so they would actually try to push down the chain to someone who didn’t feel like they were spending their own money. Middle managers will spend as much money as the business will let them to build their empires and hit those KPIs for the next raise. There is also a mentality that you need to spend a lot of money every quarter to avoid having your budget cut next quarter, which consultants are happy to help them do.

So it makes sense that any provider looking for the easiest clients wouldn’t want to go up to the business owner level.

this is a pretty brilliant analysis that I've never heard before, and it definitely rings true to my experience as a freelancer

"show me the incentive and I'll tell you the outcome" or however that saying goes