Discussions about how to win new clients usually involves the "get to the right person myth".
The bigger the dollar value of the service you offer, the broader the impact of your service and the more stakeholders it affects, the more people will be involved in the decision before you are hired.
As a rule of thumb, you should plan to have discovery conversations with all 3 roles in the decision (cheque signer, influencer and implementer) before starting discussions about a specific solution or proposal.
I'll give you an example from a client delivering leadership development. We set our sights on one of the top 10 globally integrated banks. The executive outreach program had been underway for 9 months, all the development metrics were being achieved (number of executive briefings recieved, discovery conversations, referrals to key opinion leaders surrounding the decision, access into multiple lines of business) and no project had been defined.
One of the influencers then asked us to take part in a discussion with field executives at an internal leadership conference. We thought it was going to be a "beauty pagent" but it turned out that the subject matter experts among the implementation group (who had told us they had "no budget this year") had been told by the head of the business line, where we had started, that if they could get buy-in from the field, a pilot could be given the green light. In other words, the executive would approve it out of her discretionary budget.
Behind the scenes, without us knowing, a project had been defined, our "demo" at the conference satisfied the field leaders, with whom our pricing had been shared. Had we gone away when we were told "there's no budget", or stopped asking for meetings with other business lines, we might never have nudged the project into existence.
Because we had covered all the roles in the decision in 6 different lines of business (each having discretionary budgets) and because, as we argued, my client's solution would have a cumulative effect if implemented enterprise-wide, the contract was awarded.
Therefore, there are multiple "right" people to touch. Development can be viewed as a chessboard, with the pieces being able to make certain moves on those squares. You may have a couple of stratagems in your backpack, but when one of the pieces makes a move, your stratagems will also change.
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