Follow the Money: Understanding Financial Motivation in Business Relationships

A surprising number of frustrating business conversations turn out to be incentive problems.

A customer asks for a technology solution that doesn’t actually move their business forward. A vendor pushes a product that doesn’t quite fit your environment. A conversation that seems straightforward ends up feeling oddly misaligned.

In many of those cases, the root issue isn’t technology or capability. It’s that the people involved are optimizing for different financial outcomes.

Two questions sit beneath many of them: how does your customer make money, and what is your vendor contact actually measured on?

Your Customer's Financial Motivation

Technology conversations too often start with the technology. What's the right tool? What's the best solution? But that's the wrong starting point. The better question is: why are we solving this problem in the first place?

More often than not, economics is what’s driving the decision. Your customer is trying to make their business work — generate revenue, control costs, deliver value. Even non-profits work this way. They may not be profit-driven, but they still need revenue to support the mission.

One of the clearest examples for me came from working with nonprofit membership organizations. Their key growth metric was membership, because membership was what funded the mission. In one case, articles were moving too slowly through the publishing process, which meant less content reaching the market. By tightening that workflow and getting material published faster, the organization could share more, stay more visible, and create more opportunities to attract new members. The technology change mattered, but only because it supported the real business objective: membership growth. Once you see the economic lever clearly, technology decisions stop being about features and start being about outcomes.

Your Vendor's Financial Motivation

The same logic applies to vendors. What is the person you’re talking to actually measured on?

A vendor rep is a person with a compensation plan. They're measured on specific things — new logo acquisition, upsell and retention metrics, movement of particular products or bundles, promotional quotas. Once you know that, a lot of vendor behavior stops being mysterious.

Here's the clearest illustration of what happens when you ignore this: picture an MSP walking up to a vendor's conference booth to complain about a support ticket from eight months ago. That rep at the booth is almost certainly being compensated on new business development or existing account growth. They may want to help, but they’re usually not the person equipped or incentivized to solve that problem. The interaction usually doesn’t resolve anything, and both sides walk away frustrated.

That's a misalignment failure. Not a bad vendor. Not a bad rep. A mismatch between what one party needs and what the other is positioned to deliver.

Once you start paying attention to incentives, a lot of vendor behavior becomes easier to interpret. A rep pushing a bundle may not be trying to sell you something unnecessary — they may be trying to hit a specific quota category. A sudden promotion on a product may not be about market demand — it may be about clearing a quarterly target. Understanding those incentives doesn’t mean you have to agree with them. But it does make the conversation easier to navigate.

Alignment Is the Work

Understanding the financial motivation on the other side helps you ask for the right thing from the right person.

For customers, that means grounding your recommendations in the economic realities of their business — not just technical capabilities.

For vendors, that means routing the right conversations to the right people, and understanding what a given rep can and can't actually move on.

Once you understand the financial motivation on the other side, it gets easier to ask for the right thing from the right person. A lot of business friction turns out to be incentive misalignment.