Every salesperson has a version of this story. The pitch went well. The champion was engaged, asked good questions, said all the right things. Then the deal went quiet, and came back weeks later as “we’ve decided to go with someone else”, or didn’t come back at all.
Nobody on the sales side ever finds out what actually happened in the room where it was decided, because they were never in it. That’s not a failure of effort. It’s a structural fact of how B2B buying works now, and it’s worth an honest, slightly uncomfortable conversation about it, rather than another list of quick tips.
The stat that should worry every sales team
Gartner’s research puts the average B2B buying group at somewhere between five and sixteen people, spread across finance, legal, procurement, operations and the department actually using whatever’s being bought. Separate research from Edelman and LinkedIn found that 71% of people inside that group report little or no direct interaction with the sales team at all.
Read that again. Most of the people with a vote on your deal, you never speak to. You never get the chance to answer their objection, correct their misunderstanding, or make your case in your own words. Someone else does that for you, if it gets done at all.
This isn’t unique to software, even though most of what’s written about it is aimed squarely at SaaS. It’s just as true for a capital equipment purchase going through a manufacturing plant’s finance committee, a professional services engagement needing partner sign-off, a construction project working through a client’s technical review board, or a distribution contract that has to clear procurement before anyone in operations gets a say. Wherever there’s a budget and more than one department affected, there’s a hidden committee.
Who’s actually in the room
The person you’re selling to is rarely the only person who matters, and often isn’t even the most important one. Depending on the sector, the invisible stakeholders tend to be some combination of finance (checking the numbers stack up), legal (checking the contract doesn’t create risk), procurement (checking you’re not the only option looked at), operations or technical leads (checking it’ll actually work day to day), and, more often than sales teams like to admit, someone senior who simply hasn’t been convinced yet and isn’t going to say so directly.
None of these people saw your demo, your case studies, or your rehearsed answer to “what happens if it goes wrong”. They see whatever survives being repeated by somebody else, usually in a two-line summary in a meeting they’re only half paying attention to.
The debate: go around the champion, or arm them better?
This is where sales teams genuinely split into two camps, and both have a point.
| Approach | The case for it | Where it goes wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Multithread aggressively – open parallel conversations with finance, legal and other stakeholders as early as possible | If you’re not in the room, you have no control over what gets said about you in it. Create your own rooms instead of waiting for an introduction. | A stakeholder who feels bypassed can do more damage to a deal than one who was simply never reached. Internal politics are real. |
| Trust and arm the champion – focus effort on equipping your main contact to represent you well when you can’t be there | Going around a contact risks looking like you don’t trust them, or that you’re trying to route around a legitimate gatekeeper. | The deal dies quietly, not because anyone objected, but because nobody outside the champion ever understood it well enough to advocate for it when it mattered. Silence isn’t neutral. It’s usually a loss. |
Both are right, and both are incomplete on their own. Multithreading with no regard for the internal politics you’re wading into can blow up a deal as fast as it can save one. Relying entirely on a champion who may not have the internal weight, the time, or the inclination to fight your corner is a bet you don’t have to make.
What actually seems to work
Somewhere between the two extremes is where most of the deals that survive contact with a real buying committee end up. A few things separate them from the ones that don’t:
- The buying group gets mapped at discovery, not after the deal’s gone quiet. Asking “who else needs to be comfortable with this before it happens” is not a difficult question to ask directly, and most buyers will answer it honestly if asked plainly rather than fished for.
- Wider outreach happens with the champion’s knowledge, not behind their back. There’s a real difference between “would it help if I sent finance a short summary of the numbers?” and quietly emailing finance without telling anyone.
- Material built for internal circulation is built for internal circulation, not repurposed from a sales deck. A one-pager that answers the three questions finance always asks, in finance’s own language, does more work than the best slide in your deck, because it’s the thing that actually gets forwarded.
- Procurement, legal and finance get treated as stakeholders with their own priorities, not obstacles. Someone in procurement whose job is to show they tested the market properly isn’t being difficult. They’re doing their job, and a rep who understands that gets a very different reception to one who treats it as friction.
The open question
Here’s the harder question underneath all of this, and it’s genuinely worth arguing about rather than resolving with a tidy answer: is multithreading a modern skill sales teams need to build deliberately, or is it just a more polite name for something good salespeople have always done, and its sudden popularity says more about how many reps never learned to do it in the first place?
There’s a case for both. Buying committees are bigger and more layered than they were even five years ago, particularly as procurement and legal have taken on more formal gatekeeping roles across most sectors, not just tech. But there’s also a simpler explanation sitting underneath the trend piece: a lot of pipeline is being lost not because the buying process got harder, but because reps got used to selling to whoever answered the phone, and never built the instinct to ask who else was in the room.
Worth deciding which one you think is true before you build your next quarter’s strategy around it.
Frequently asked questions
What is a B2B buying committee?
A B2B buying committee (or buying group) is the full set of people inside a customer organisation who influence or approve a purchase, not just the person a salesperson speaks to directly. Gartner’s research puts the typical group at five to sixteen people across functions like finance, legal, procurement and operations.
Why don’t salespeople meet most of the buying committee?
Most buying groups are coordinated internally by a single main contact, or champion, who represents the deal to colleagues in other departments. Research from Edelman and LinkedIn found 71% of people inside a typical buying group have little or no direct contact with the seller.
Is multithreading always the right approach?
Not automatically. Reaching multiple stakeholders directly can strengthen a deal, but doing it without the champion’s knowledge risks being seen as going around a legitimate gatekeeper, which can damage the relationship that was carrying the deal in the first place. The stronger approach usually combines both: broader outreach done transparently, alongside material built specifically for the champion to use internally.
Is this only a problem in SaaS and tech sales?
No. Hidden buying committees show up wherever a purchase crosses more than one department and needs a budget signed off, including manufacturing capital equipment, professional services engagements, construction projects and distribution contracts. Procurement and finance gatekeeping has become more formal across most B2B sectors, not just technology.
Building a sales team that can navigate a real buying committee, not just pitch to a single contact? That’s a different hiring brief to the one most companies write. We can help you get it right.
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This article draws on Gartner’s B2B buying group research and the Edelman/LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact study on hidden buyer engagement. Figures are as reported by those sources at the time of writing.