Decision-making unit (DMU)
The people who decide, influence, use, pay for and can veto a purchase. Mapped as roles, dispositions and relationships, not job titles.
The decision-making unit is everyone on the customer side who shapes whether a proposition lands: the people who decide, who influence, who use, who pay, and who can quietly veto. In the method it is mapped as seven roles: buyer, user, specifier, influencer, gatekeeper, decider and sponsor, with the buyer at the centre. The map is many-to-many: one person can hold several roles, and one role can be shared. Job titles are a poor guide to either.
Two further axes make the map useful rather than decorative. Disposition, held separately from role: in favour, neutral or against. And the relationship matrix between the DMU and your own account team, which shows where the conversation is actually happening and where it is not. When a stakeholder changes role or leaves, a living plan flags which parts of the proposition are now exposed. A plan in a filing cabinet does not.
Set out in full in: Creating Customer Value Propositions with AI (Kogan Page, 2027), chapter 5.
Related terms
Value selling
Selling the proposition twice: first inside your own company, then to the customer's decision-making unit in their financial language.
ABCDE
Audience, behaviour, content, delivery, evaluation: the five questions for planning any value pitch.
Sponsor
The senior person on the customer side who wants you to win and will say so when you are not in the room. Also used for the internal sponsor an offer needs to survive.
Customer needs analysis
The diagnosis. Contextual intelligence about the customer's world, analytical depth about the problems underneath the problems, and clarity about who feels them.
See the method run on one real account in three days: the One Page Proposition.