This is a variation of "you ship your org chart."

After hearing the outbound version of this truism, I discovered that the inbound version is also true; ie "you buy your org chart."

Anyone selling to v large organizations, corporate or government, will know what I mean. Bloated and dysfunctional orgs with eternal sales cycles buy from bloated and dysfunctional orgs that can survive eternal sales cycles, and which are willing to sell bloated and dysfunctional products to satisfy arbitrary criteria.

This is one of many reasons why startups have a hard time selling to very large orgs.