Customers & Research

Should my ideal customer be the person who pays or the person who uses the product?

A starting point

Separate the two early because they often aren't the same person, and your whole go-to-market shifts depending on who you center. Whoever holds the budget and feels the pain enough to sign off is who you sell to, but if the daily user hates the product they will kill renewals, so you design for the user and pitch to the buyer. When they conflict, follow the money for who your ICP is, then treat delighting the user as the thing that keeps the money. This is a judgment call, not a rule, so map both explicitly for your specific deal.

Go deeper

Hand-picked from around the web, each with a note on why it earns your time.

3 resources 3 link-checked Listen Read

Listen

🎧 Podcast
✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

Why we picked it Elena Verna has built growth at SurveyMonkey, Miro, and others, and this episode is a founder-level walkthrough of exactly the tension in your question: you design and win the individual user first, then convert the person or company who pays. She unpacks product-led sales versus product-led growth and how usage signals turn into a buying decision, so you stop guessing whether to optimize for the adopter or the payer. Treat it as one experienced operator's map, not a verdict for every business.

The ultimate guide to product-led sales (Elena Verna)

On Lenny's Podcast by Lenny Rachitsky with Elena Verna About 1 hour 16 minutes

  • In a product-led motion you earn the user first through real usage, and only then does the paying buyer enter, so the two are sequenced, not opposed.
  • Usage signals (the acronyms PQA, PQL, MQL) are how you spot when an engaged user is ready to trigger a purchase conversation.
  • The user's day-to-day value is the asset the buyer is actually paying to keep, so designing for the user is not at odds with getting paid.
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Read

📄 Article
✓ Link checked Free Beginner

Why we picked it This is the cleanest breakdown we found of who is actually involved in a purchase: economic buyer, champion, end user, technical buyer, and more, each with different priorities. It makes the core point behind your question, that the person who pays and the person who uses the product are usually different people, and treating them as one is where founders misfire. Read it as a map of the room, not a rulebook.

The 6 Types of B2B Buyers (and how to sell to them)

From Dock by The Dock Team About a 12 minute read

  • A single purchase usually involves 6 to 10 people, and the economic buyer (who signs) is rarely the end user (who lives in the product daily).
  • Each role cares about something different: the buyer wants ROI, the user wants workflow fit, the champion wants a win they can sell internally.
  • A generic pitch aimed at nobody in particular loses, because the buyer and the user need to hear different things before either says yes.
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📖 Book
✓ Link checked Paid Intermediate

Why we picked it Van der Kooij's Winning by Design frameworks are the practical standard for thinking about who you sell to in a real SaaS deal, not in the abstract. The book gives you a concrete way to separate the buyer, the user, and the champion inside an account and design your motion around each, which is the working answer to whether your ideal customer is the payer or the user (it is both, playing different roles). Reach for this once you are past the idea stage and actually running deals.

Blueprints for a SaaS Sales Organization: How to Design, Build and Scale a Customer-Centric Sales Organization

From Winning by Design by Jacco van der Kooij and Fernando Pizarro About 211 pages

  • The buyer, the user, and the champion are distinct roles in one account, and a repeatable sales motion has to speak to each one deliberately.
  • Customer-centric selling means designing around the user's outcome, since usage is what the economic buyer eventually pays to keep.
  • The frameworks are meant to scale, so what you decide about buyer versus user early hardens into how your whole go-to-market runs later.
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People also ask

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