In our most recent blog, we made the case for writing about your buyers’ challenges rather than your product’s features. Why you should stop leading with release notes and feature lists and start with the problems your buyers are trying to solve.
Good advice. But it raises an immediate question: which buyer?
In most ISV purchases, there isn’t one. There’s a group of them, each with a different relationship to the problem, a different set of questions, and a different stake in the outcome.
The end user experiences the problem every day. Frustrated with the current system, drowning in workarounds, hoping someone will fix it. And yes, their challenges absolutely belong in your content — because they’re the evidence the champion needs to build the case internally. But the end user is rarely the one searching for a solution.
The search is more likely initiated by a champion — someone in internal communications, operations, or HR who has been handed the problem and told to find an answer. Or by an IT director who has received a stream of complaints and is now under pressure to act. These are the people typing queries into search engines, browsing your Marketplace listing, downloading your ebook before a stakeholder meeting.
And yet most ISV content speaks to the end user’s experience rather than the champion’s mission or the IT director’s risk calculation. It describes the problem from the wrong angle — and the person who actually needs to be convinced walks away without what they came for.
That’s before we get to the real complexity. Because the champion and the IT director aren’t buying your product either. Well, not alone anyhow.
The buying committee most ISVs underestimate
Just over three quarters of B2B buyers say three or more stakeholders are involved in every purchasing decision. For complex software purchases, that number climbs significantly. Forrester’s 2024 State of Business Buying Report puts the average at 13 people — and identifies internal complexity, not vendor performance, as the top reason deals stall.
That’s up to thirteen people. Each arriving at the decision from a different direction. Each with different questions, risk tolerances, and definition of what a good outcome looks like.
End users — the people who will use the product daily — carry the most decision-making weight in just over a quarter of purchases, according to Influ2. So the group your content is most likely aimed at controls the outcome in fewer than one in five deals. The people who actually determine whether a purchase happens are largely being ignored.
The deal doesn’t fail at the demo. But weeks later, in an internal meeting your sales team will never know happened, when someone in the buying group couldn’t get the answer they needed and defaulted to doing nothing.
Your content either arms them for those conversations — or it leaves them to figure it out alone.
The stakeholders your content needs to reach
The buying committee looks different in every organisation. But across the ISVs we work with, the same groups appear consistently — each needing something different from your content.
The champion
Often already convinced by their initial research. What’s needed now is the language to sell it internally — problem-led content that mirrors their challenge, case studies from organisations like theirs, and answers to the objections they know are coming. Evidence they can pass to a colleague who hasn’t done the research they have.
If your content is all features and release notes, it gives them nothing to work with.
The technical evaluator
Their job isn’t to say yes. It’s to find every reason to say no — and they’re thorough.
Over half of buyers list integration or compatibility with existing tools as a top three factor, and it often makes or breaks deals in environments where existing ecosystems are complex.
Will this integrate cleanly with what’s already in place? How is security handled? Who maintains it when something goes wrong? And underneath all of that — is this company a safe long-term bet? A vendor with a clear roadmap and a growing partner network is one worth the risk. A vendor whose content is all product announcements offers no reassurance on any of those questions.
The economic buyer
In nearly four out of five B2B software purchases, the CFO is the final decision maker — and 57% of software buyers expect to see ROI within three months of purchase. Martal Group
The blog almost certainly isn’t on their reading list. What lands on their desk is the business case the champion has built — and that business case is either grounded in evidence your content provided, or it isn’t.
Line items, not vision. Quantified outcomes, not potential efficiencies. Proof from comparable organisations that the investment is recoverable. Turning up without that gets you kicked back. Finance works with what it can model.
The broader group
Then there’s a wider group. Procurement reviews contract terms. Legal examines data handling and compliance. Department heads want to know what changes for their teams. In some organisations, an early adopter group tests the product before any wider decision is made.
A question that goes unanswered in a risk-averse environment has one outcome. And the people asking those questions are rarely the ones your content was written for.
Building a business case
We saw this pattern up close when we worked with Fresh — a Microsoft ISV building intranet solutions on SharePoint and Microsoft 365. We were tasked with developing a guide specifically for champions who needed to convince multiple stakeholders of the merits of buying a new intranet. In the process of writing Building a Business Case for a New Intranet, we discovered the scale of evidence the champion actually needs to provide to make their case to the buying committee.
It’s considerable. They need to document the current problem with evidence gathered from across the business. They need a cost model finance can interrogate. They need answers to IT’s security and integration questions. They need to demonstrate alignment with organisational strategy. And they need to do all of that before a single conversation with a vendor takes place.
Your content either provides that evidence — or the champion builds the case without you. And a business case built without your evidence is a business case that could just as easily conclude in favour of a competitor.
One content programme. Multiple audiences.
Most ISV content speaks to features. Aimed — consciously or not — at the person who already understands the category. Which means the economic buyer finds nothing on ROI, the IT director finds nothing on integration risk or vendor longevity, and the champion walks into every internal conversation without the supporting evidence that would have made the difference.
Toni Hopponen, founder of LandingRabbit and former CEO of Flockler, describes the solution clearly. In our Original Thinkers interview, he said: “People often forget that in SaaS, there’s not just one buyer. There’s usually a group — 10 or 15 people — each with a different angle. Someone finds your product and thinks it’s useful, but now they have to convince the CEO, finance, or IT. Landing pages that are targeted to each of those stakeholders help people do the internal selling.”
His solution: a dedicated landing page for each stakeholder in the buying committee. Each one answering the specific questions that person needs answered before they’ll say yes. Not one page trying to speak to everyone — a deliberate set of pages, each built around a different buyer’s lens.
The same principle applies to your entire content programme. One blog post cannot convince the champion, reassure the technical evaluator, satisfy the CFO, and address procurement simultaneously. Trying to do all of those jobs in a single piece means doing none of them well.
What to do about it
Begin by mapping your buying committee. Who is typically involved when your product is purchased? What is each person primarily worried about? What would make them feel confident enough to say yes?
Then look honestly at your content. How much of it speaks to the champion’s challenge in language they can share? How much gives the technical evaluator answers on security, integration, and vendor longevity? How much gives the economic buyer real numbers from real customers?
For most ISVs, the audit reveals the same pattern: almost everything is aimed at one audience. The others are underserved or ignored entirely.
The fix isn’t producing enormous volumes of content for every stakeholder simultaneously. It’s being deliberate about which gaps matter most — and addressing them in order of commercial priority.
Which raises the question: when your budget is tight and your team is stretched, who do you write for first?
That’s the subject of our next piece.
Bright Star works exclusively with Microsoft Partners ISVs and MSPs. We work with a small number of clients on an ongoing basis each year, but we also take on scoped project work that can be delivered in weeks. Get in touch to talk about what that could look like for your business.
