The gap that quietly kills pipeline
There's a version of this I see constantly: a company has great product engagement, strong NPS scores from users, enthusiastic champions in every deal — and still a conversion rate that doesn't make sense given how much people seem to love the product.
The cause is almost always the Buyer-User Gap. The product is built for the user. The messaging is built for the user. The demo is designed to delight the user. But the person who signs the contract is not the user — and no one has spent any time figuring out what they need to hear.
Why the gap exists
In consumer software, the user and the buyer are usually the same person. You buy what you use. B2B is different. A developer tool might be used by engineers and bought by a VP of Engineering or a CTO. A workflow platform might be used by ops teams and bought by a CFO. A sales tool might be used by SDRs and bought by a CRO or Head of Revenue Operations.
The user has opinions about the product. The buyer has opinions about the business outcome. These are different conversations — and conflating them produces GTM motions that are optimised for the wrong audience.
Diagnosing the gap in your own motion
The diagnostic questions I use:
Who typically initiates the evaluation? If the answer is a specific role or persona, that's likely your user champion. It's not necessarily your buyer.
Who signs the contract? Follow the signature. That person is your buyer — and if your sales process hasn't explicitly involved them and addressed their specific concerns, you have a gap.
What does your current messaging assume the reader cares about? If it's primarily about product features, workflow improvements, or time savings, it's probably written for users. Buyers care about outcomes: revenue impact, cost reduction, risk mitigation, competitive advantage.
Where do deals most commonly stall? If deals consistently stall after the champion is won but before the contract is signed, that's a classic Buyer-User Gap symptom. The champion loves it. The buyer isn't convinced.
Rebuilding around the economic buyer
The fix is not to abandon the user. User champions are critical — they create internal momentum, provide social proof, and help navigate the buying organisation. The fix is to build a parallel motion that directly addresses the economic buyer's concerns, without routing everything through the user champion.
Messaging: Create a version of your positioning that speaks the buyer's language. Users care about how it works. Buyers care about what changes — in revenue, cost, or risk — when it works.
Sales motion: Identify the buyer early and find a way to engage them directly. Not through the champion, in their place. Alongside the champion, with your own conversation. Champions can sponsor you. They can't sell you to someone with different concerns.
Success metrics: Define what success looks like in terms the buyer tracks. If your customer success motion is reporting on feature adoption and the buyer evaluates you on revenue impact, you're creating an expansion problem before the ink is dry.
The bridge: keeping user advocates
Rebuilding around the economic buyer doesn't mean ignoring users. Users are your internal salesforce. They create urgency, they provide testimonials, they reduce resistance from peers. The goal is to have both conversations running in parallel — not to choose between them.
The companies that do this well have explicit material for each audience. The user demo is different from the executive business case. The onboarding KPIs are different from the renewal metrics. The champion enablement pack (what you give your internal sponsor to sell the deal internally) is different from the product documentation.
Internationalisation and the gap
When expanding into new markets, the Buyer-User Gap often shifts. In some markets — particularly in parts of APAC and some European markets — the economic buyer sits at a higher level in the organisation than in the US. The same product, sold to the same user persona, might need to be approved by someone two or three levels more senior.
Cross-border GTM motions that don't account for this either get stuck waiting for approvals no one mapped out, or they build champions who can't close their own deals. The gap analysis needs to be run market by market — not assumed to be consistent.