What job seniority tells you about who can approve a purchase
Who has buying authority in B2B deals is set by spending limits, not titles. Where approval really sits, and what to verify before you invest.
By The Coaching World
Published October 18, 2026 · 7 min read
Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash
In most organizations, the person who can approve your purchase sits lower on the org chart than you would guess. Who has buying authority in B2B deals is set by a spending limit written into a finance policy, not by a title. A learning and development manager with a discretionary budget can sign faster than a vice president who has to route every new vendor through procurement.
That gap explains a common stall. You have had three good calls with a head of people. The conversations are warm, the problem is real, and nothing moves. Nobody is lying to you. You are talking to someone with scope over the problem and no authority over the money.
This article is for coaches who sell into companies: leadership programs, team workshops, retained coaching for a group of managers. If your contacts keep nodding and nothing gets signed, this is about why.
It covers what a title actually tells you, where approval authority usually sits, why the most senior contact is often the slowest route, how to tell a blocker from a gatekeeper, and what to confirm before you spend months on one relationship.
Job titles describe scope, not budget
A title tells you how many people someone oversees and which part of the business they answer for. It says very little about what they can sign for. Scope comes from org design. Spending power comes from finance policy, and the two are written by different people for different reasons.
A director of talent at a 4,000 person manufacturer may own six teams, a headcount plan, and a discretionary budget of ten thousand dollars a year. An operations manager two levels below her may approve seventy-five thousand in contract labor without a second signature, because that spend is routine in her function.
Title inflation makes this harder to read. At a 40 person startup, a head of people may be the only HR employee and may control real money. At a large bank, vice president is a mid-career rank held by hundreds of people, many of whom cannot approve a fifteen thousand dollar engagement.
So read the title for two things: which problems this person is accountable for, and whose attention they can get. Treat the money as unknown until somebody tells you.
Who has buying authority in most companies
For an engagement priced between a few thousand and a few tens of thousands of dollars, buying authority usually sits with a director or senior manager who owns the affected budget. A finance or procurement step follows the decision. Above a certain price, a b2b buying committee forms.
Most companies set signing limits by level. A manager approves small amounts, a director more, a VP more again, and anything above the top tier goes to a committee or a CFO. The numbers differ wildly between a 200 person agency and a hospital system.
Purchase approval authority also splits by type of spend. Someone may have a large limit for suppliers already on an approved list and almost none for a new one. A coach is almost always a new supplier.
The director vs VP decision maker question comes down to price. The director usually has the smaller limit and the stronger motive, because the problem sits on their performance review. The VP has the bigger limit and nine other priorities. Below a certain number, motive beats limit.
Why the most senior contact slows things down
Senior people delegate evaluation. When a VP gets interested in a coaching proposal, they rarely run the process themselves. They hand it to a director, who starts the evaluation from the beginning, now with a boss waiting for a recommendation.
That handoff costs weeks and sometimes costs the deal. The director inherits a vendor they did not pick. Some treat that as an assignment to validate. Others look for a reason to pass.
Senior interest also produces deals that look alive and are not. A VP says this is exactly what we need, names no owner, and the thread goes quiet for a quarter.
None of this argues for avoiding executives. For purchases that cross departments, or that change how managers are measured, you need a senior sponsor. The mistake is treating sponsorship and approval as the same thing.
Blockers and gatekeepers are not the same
A gatekeeper controls access. A blocker controls the outcome. Assistants and program coordinators decide whether your message reaches anyone, and most of them can be won over with respect and a clear reason to pass you along.
A blocker can end the deal in a sentence. Procurement that requires three competing bids. An internal L&D team that writes its own leadership curriculum and reads an outside coach as a threat. A finance lead who froze discretionary spend in October.
The handling differs. Go around a gatekeeper and you lose a small advantage. Go around a blocker and they resurface later, at the worst moment, with more reason to say no.
So when you ask how to find the decision maker, ask the second question in the same breath: who could stop this, and what would make them comfortable?
What to verify before investing in a contact
Verify four things before you give one relationship months of your time. Ask early, in the same call where you are already asking about the problem. Most buyers answer, because the questions make you sound like someone who has done this before.
- Which budget line would pay for this, and whose line it is
- The amount this person can approve without a second signature
- Who else signs, and in what order
- Whether the company bought anything similar in the last two years, and how that went
Phrase them as process questions rather than authority questions. When something like this has gone ahead before, whose budget did it come out of, lands better than are you the decision maker. The first invites a story. The second invites a defensive yes.
Write the answers down and mark each one confirmed or assumed. Most stalled deals rest on an assumption nobody checked.
Where this reading of seniority breaks down
Below roughly fifty employees, none of this helps much. The founder is the budget, the committee and the blocker at once. Titles are decorative. Getting to that one person is the whole job.
Public agencies and universities invert the logic. Procurement rules can outrank individual authority completely, and a director who wants to hire you may have no legal route to do it without a tender. Fiscal year timing often matters more than who likes you.
Mapping authority also does not fix a weak case. No signature rescues a program the buyer does not believe will help.
And sometimes nobody has authority, because no budget line for external coaching exists yet. Then the work is helping a sponsor create one, which runs on the company planning cycle rather than your pipeline.
Mapping authority as a regular habit
After every discovery call, spend five minutes writing down what you know about authority and what you only assume. Budget owner unknown. Contact is a director of L&D. Says she has approved workshops before, limit unconfirmed, procurement step unknown.
Then review your stalled opportunities once a month and look for the ones where that column is mostly assumptions. Those do not need another follow-up email. They need one process question.
Asking who signs feels rude. It mostly reads as competence. The coaches who get answers tend to ask in the first or second conversation, before anyone has invested enough to be embarrassed by the truth. Try it on the next call and see how little resistance there is.
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