You didn't lose that pitch to a competitor. You lost it to someone in the room you never met

Most service providers think of business development as a conversation with one person. The GC. Their instructing counterpart. The MD. The CMO. The person whose name is on the email. Get them onside and the deal is done.

Once you move beyond a small business, it rarely works like that. Any contract or legal instruction of real value gets decided by a group, not an individual, even when only one person signs it off. That group is what business developers and marketers call the buying circle, and understanding who's in it is one of the most underused BD skills in legal services.

Buying circles: core BD skills for legal services

Who is actually in the room

A typical buying circle for a meaningful piece of legal work includes several distinct roles, and they don't all want the same thing from you. There are various ways of categorising buyer types, but a useful starting point is Miller Heiman*, which identifies several roles.

• The economic buyer owns the budget and cares about cost, risk and return.

• The user buyer will actually work with you day to day and cares about responsiveness, ease of working together and time saved.

• The technical buyer, often an operational leader or Head of IT, is assessing your expertise against a checklist of criteria.

• And quietly influencing all of them is the Champion, a technical expert inside the business who wants you to win and will tell you things nobody else will.

Miss any one of these and you're pitching to a fraction of the decision

Why lawyers miss this

Fee earners are trained to build deep, one to one relationships, and that's a genuine strength. The trouble is it can narrow the lens. You build real trust with your main contact, assume that trust carries the room, and then lose the instruction to a firm that spent less time charming the GC and more time understanding who else had a vote.

I've seen this play out from both sides of the table over the years. I've been the user buyer, the technical buyer and the Champion on the inside of different opportunities, and I've also worked with legal pitch teams to help them map and better understand the buying circle they were facing. In one case, I convinced a cautious practice group to re-engage with a different department of a complex financial institution after an earlier pitch had failed, simply by showing them these were two entirely separate buying circles with different people, different priorities and different Champions.

The firms that win consistently aren't always the ones with the best relationship with the obvious decision maker. They're the ones who worked out who else was quietly weighing in, and then did something about it.

What to actually do about it

The Miller Heiman model explains who matters, but it doesn't hand you a playbook. Correctly qualifying an opportunity is one thing. Turning that insight into forward momentum takes deliberate next steps.

Before your next significant pitch or relationship review, map the circle properly. Ask your main contact directly who else will be part of the decision, and don't be afraid of the question. Most people will tell you if you ask plainly. Then think about what each of those people actually needs from you, because it won't be the same thing.

The uncomfortable bit

If you can't currently name who's in the buying circle for your biggest client relationship, that's worth looking into. It usually means you've been managing one relationship well and calling it business development, when business development is actually about managing several.

*In 1978, Robert Miller and Stephen Heiman (Miller Heiman) published Strategic Selling, which quickly became a go-to manual for sales teams worldwide. A core aspect of the Miller Heiman sales process is understanding the buyer’s objectives, key stakeholders and their decision-making process.