A champion can love your product, defend it internally and still have no authority to buy it. Before treating enthusiasm as demand, identify who owns the budget, who can approve the purchase and what evidence that person needs.
At a Lagos hackathon, Kunle’s team had built a working prototype for sorting customer requests and routing them to the right operations staff. Kunle, an invented composite founder, was still wearing his event wristband when a manager from a large company pulled him aside near the closing session.
“This could solve our backlog,” the manager said. He asked for a demo the following week.
The meeting that sounded like a sale
The manager, Bayo, brought four colleagues to the video call. He described the current process, pointed out where requests disappeared and asked detailed questions about connecting the prototype to their existing tools.
Kunle heard buying signals everywhere.
His team spent the next two weeks cleaning the interface, writing a proposal and preparing a pilot plan. One engineer paused paid client work to handle the changes. Another cancelled a weekend trip because Bayo wanted a revised demo on Monday morning.
The second demo ran well. Bayo called the product “exactly what the team needs” and asked Kunle to send the commercial terms.
Kunle made a runway decision based on that sentence. He kept the engineer assigned to the pilot because moving her back to client work would delay the proposed start date.
Then the proposal stopped moving.
Bayo replied quickly, but every reply introduced another person. His director needed to review it. The director said technology procurement had to see it. Procurement asked which business unit owned the budget.
Bayo did not know.
The team had treated access to the problem as access to the money. Those are separate forms of authority.
Excitement travels faster than authority
A champion usually understands the pain better than the budget owner. That is why the first conversation can feel unusually strong. The person has lived with the broken process, can describe its cost in human terms and wants relief.
Their urgency can be genuine. Their signature may still mean nothing.
In Kunle’s case, the purchase sat three levels above Bayo. The budget owner had never watched the demo, had no personal experience of the backlog and was comparing the pilot against other planned spending. Kunle had built his case around Bayo’s daily frustration. The actual buyer needed a different case: what the delay cost, which team carried that cost, what the pilot would require and what decision would follow if it worked.
This distinction matters even when the champion says, “Send me the invoice.” An invoice does not create a budget. A positive meeting does not reveal the approval path.
I have learned to ask earlier: “If this works exactly as you hope, who approves the spend?”
The question can feel premature when the relationship is new. It is less awkward than discovering, after several weeks of unpaid work, that your contact must begin selling the project from the first floor while the budget sits on the fourth.
Map the decision before building the pilot
Kunle called Bayo with one goal: stop discussing product changes and map the purchase.
They wrote down the people involved. Bayo owned the operational problem. His director could sponsor the request. A senior business lead controlled the relevant budget. Procurement would review commercial terms. The technology team would assess access and implementation.
The map exposed another gap. Nobody had defined what the pilot would prove.
That changed the next proposal. Instead of offering a broad implementation, Kunle narrowed the pilot to one request type, one team and one measurable decision. The document stated what data the company would provide, who would review the result and what question the pilot was meant to answer.
This is the same discipline behind turning seven contract gaps into a smaller pilot. When authority, scope or evidence remains unclear, shrinking the commitment can make the next decision possible.
Three questions now matter before I count an opportunity:
Who feels the problem strongly enough to keep the process moving?
Who can allocate the money?
Who can block the purchase, even after the budget owner agrees?
Sometimes one person holds two of those roles. Rarely should I assume one person holds all three.
The next demo had a different audience
With the team’s runway tightening, Kunle gave the opportunity one final week. If Bayo could not bring the budget owner into a conversation, the engineer would return to paid client work and the proposed start date would lapse.
For two days, the calendar remained empty.
On the third afternoon, an invitation arrived. Bayo’s director and the budget owner had joined. Kunle did not open with the polished product tour his team had spent nights refining. He opened with the current request path, the point where work stalled and the narrow result the pilot would test.
The budget owner did not approve the full purchase. She authorised a smaller internal review and named the conditions for a pilot decision.
That was less exciting than the conversation beside the hackathon stage. It was also the first real movement toward a purchase.
Kunle reassigned the engineer until those conditions were met. Bayo remained the champion, now with a defined job: help gather the evidence and keep the right people in the room.
The next time someone says, “We need this,” do not rush back to the product. Ask where the money sits, how a decision reaches that desk and whether the person speaking can take you there.
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