You are selling to six people and talking to one

Your champion says it looks good. They mean it.

Gartner puts a typical buying group for a complex B2B purchase at six to ten decision makers. Forrester’s State of Business Buying report puts the average at 13 stakeholders, with nearly 89% of decisions crossing multiple departments. In 2014 the same figure was 5.4.

You are not selling to a person. You are selling to a room, and you have met one of them.

Why the conversations you cannot see decide the deal

Gartner‘s 2024 B2B Buying Survey found buyers spend just 17% of the total purchase process meeting with suppliers. That is across every vendor under consideration. Split it between you and two competitors and your share of the evaluation sits somewhere near 5%.

The other 83% happens in rooms you are not in, run by someone who has your pitch secondhand and is not paid to deliver it. Every objection you never heard gets raised there and answered there, by whoever happens to be standing closest.

That is the real argument for multi threading. Not that more relationships are nicer, but that your champion is currently running a sales process on your behalf, alone, without your material and without your answers.

Who is actually in the room

Six roles. One person may hold two of them, but the objections stay separate and each one can stop the deal on its own.

1. The user

What they care about

Whether this makes their week better. Not the strategy, not the roadmap. The next ninety days of their actual job.

What they block on

Whether it is more work than what they do now. A product that improves the company and costs them an hour a day gets quietly undermined.

2. The economic buyer

What they care about

Whether the outcome is worth the money, and whether they will look sensible for having approved it.

What they block on

Whether the result is real. Not whether the product is good. Those are different questions and most demos only answer the second.

3. The technical reviewer

What they care about

Integration, data handling, security posture, and what happens when it breaks at 2am.

What they block on

Effort and risk. They are usually consulted last and say no fastest, which is a scheduling problem you can fix by reaching them early.

4. The finance gate

What they care about

Contract terms, payment timing, and where this sits in the budget cycle.

What they block on

Process, not merit. A deal everyone wants still dies if it arrives in the wrong quarter with the wrong paperwork.

5. The process owner

What they care about

Whatever your product would change. They built the current way of doing it, or they inherited it and made it work.

What they block on

The change landing on them without anyone asking. This is the most commonly missed role in the room and the one that generates objections nobody can trace.

6. The one who got burned

What they care about

Not repeating a mistake. Someone in that company bought something similar two years ago and it went badly, and they carry the memory.

What they block on

Pattern matching to the last failure. They will not say this in a meeting with you. They will say it after, and you will never hear it. The only defence is a story about something that went wrong and got handled, which is why the case study we recommend building is the customer who nearly left.

Why single threading feels safe

Your champion replies quickly. They are positive on calls. They ask good questions. Every signal you can see says the deal is healthy, and that is exactly the problem: you are measuring one relationship and calling it a deal.

There is a quieter reason too. Asking to meet other people risks hearing no, and the deal feels better while nobody has said it. Most pipelines contain at least one deal being protected from the truth this way. We covered the wider version of that problem in our post on why a full pipeline stops producing revenue.

How to reach the others without going around your champion

Going around them is the obvious mistake. You find the VP on LinkedIn, send a note, and the person who let you in finds out they were bypassed. Whatever goodwill got you this far is gone, and they were your only advocate.

The reframe that works: you are not asking for access. You are offering to do the internal selling your champion would otherwise do alone.

1. Ask what happens after the call

Who sees this next, and what do they usually push back on. It sounds like curiosity about their process. It is, and it also surfaces every name you need without asking for a single introduction.

2. Offer to take the difficult part off them

Security and technical questions are the easiest opening, because nobody wants to relay answers they did not write. Say you are happy to speak to whoever handles it directly. This also solves the timing problem with the technical reviewer, who otherwise arrives last and says no fastest.

3. Make the introduction their idea

Ask whether it would help to bring finance in early rather than at contract stage. Most people say yes, because late finance involvement kills their projects too. You are solving their problem, and the meeting is a side effect.

4. Give them material that travels

A one-page summary they can forward without editing does more than a follow-up email, because it reaches rooms you will never sit in. Write it for the person who was not on the call, not for the person who was.

The pattern across all four is the same. You are never asking to go around them. You are making it easier for them to bring you along.

The test

If your champion left the company tomorrow, does the deal survive?

Most founders know the answer immediately. If it is no, the deal is not a deal yet. It is a relationship with one person who happens to work somewhere you want to sell.

Run that test across your pipeline this week. The ones that fail are not close, whatever the forecast says, and they are also the ones where the demo looked best. That pattern is the subject of our piece on why good demos do not close.

Common question