645- The CEO Behind the Deal: Why Buyers Look You Up Before They Say Yes
Before a deal closes, someone on the other side has already looked up the CEO.
Jens Heitland draws on procurement experience inside large organizations to describe how buyer research now happens through AI search, and why a consistent, findable public record shapes deals before the conversation begins.
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The CEO Behind the Deal: Why Buyers Look You Up Before They Say Yes
Before a deal closes, someone on the other side has already looked you up.
This is not new. It happened before AI, before LinkedIn, before search engines made it frictionless. What is new is how thorough that process has become, and how little room there is for a CEO to be invisible or vague.
Working inside a large organization, I was involved in procurement conversations at a global scale. The process had a structure. Vendors were evaluated, validated, and compared. That part was handled by the team. But when a conversation moved toward something significant, something strategic, what I did was look up the person. Not the company. The person.
If the decision involved a global program, I would find the CEO. I would read what they had written, watch what they had said publicly, try to understand how they thought about their business and their people. The question I was trying to answer was not whether their company was qualified. That had already been established. The question was whether this person's thinking aligned with where we were headed. That is a different evaluation entirely.
At scale, the formal procurement process filters for capability. The informal process filters for fit. And fit is assessed through what is visible about the person in a leadership position. If nothing is visible, the assessment still happens. It just fills in with assumptions, with silence, with whatever fragments exist.
This pattern has not changed. What has changed is the tool used to conduct it.
A buyer today can open a conversation with an AI system and ask questions about a CEO that would have taken hours of research a few years ago. The AI synthesizes what exists publicly. Articles, interviews, podcast appearances, and published points of view. If the record is thin or inconsistent or absent, the synthesis reflects that. The buyer forms an impression before the meeting begins.
The CEO who has not considered this is operating as though the buying process starts when the conversation starts. It does not. Over time, the research happens earlier and earlier, and the impression formed before the room is harder to shift inside it.
The issue is not whether a CEO needs to be findable. The issue is not whether a CEO needs to be findable. Visibility is rarely the blind spot. The issue is that findability is now a system. It requires consistency, a documented public record, and the kind of clarity that holds up when run through an AI query at two in the morning by someone preparing for a conversation you do not know is coming.
The question worth sitting with is what the person on the other side is actually looking for. Not credentials. Not a company overview. A sense of how this leader thinks, what they stand for, and whether that is coherent over time. That coherence accumulates over time. And it gets assessed in seconds.
Highlights:
00:00 Brand vs Personality
00:25 IKEA Procurement Example
00:40 Researching the Decision Makers
01:01 Being Findable in AI
01:31 Reverse Engineering Visibility
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Transcript :
The thing is, over my career, I have been in a lot of conversation around, like, business, sales, and so on. What is interesting, when you have a very large brand behind you, like I had in the past, it helps, but in the end, when it comes to the conversation around the buying part, it's all about the personality, the person that is in the room or the person that is in the negotiation. So I give you the example when I was in IKEA, and we had big procurement topics, the procurement team did the selection when it comes to the different companies, they validated if they're all good. That's basic standard, I would say. But what I then did was I was looking up the people that are in the room. And for example, we had conversation around a global program, and then I was looking up the CEO and was trying to figure out what's the CEO about, how does he lead the company, what's the vision of the company, to understand, are they the right fit? But I was verifying it basically through the CEO, and I think that's something that now is even more true when it comes to ChatGPT and AI and so on, because you can just find everything if you want to and if a CEO is then not looking into, "How do I create a system that allows me to be findable?" It's very difficult for the other person, like the buyer in my case at that time, to do that in a smart way. So I think you need to reverse engineer how to do that, and that's basically what we do.