And here’s the part nobody plans for: each stakeholder you add may make the deal less likely to close at all.
Let me start with something I got wrong for a long time.
For years I optimized around a small number of people. In the early lead and MQL days, we were effectively building everything for one person, maybe two. Find the buyer, score the lead, route it, nurture it. The whole machine assumed a decision maker, singular.
Even later, when I knew better and built proper stakeholder maps, I minimized. Six names on a page. Economic buyer, technical evaluator, champion, end user, procurement, executive sponsor. Clean, color coded, everyone in the room nodded.
And when deals died I couldn’t always tell why. Not lost to a competitor. Gone quiet, slipped a quarter, slipped again, eventually closed out as no decision. I often reported those as timing issues, because that’s the honest-sounding version, and I genuinely believed we’d mapped the account.
I’ve come to think we hadn’t mapped much of anything.
The Number Everyone Plans For
If you’ve been in B2B any length of time you know Gartner’s figure. A typical buying group for a complex B2B solution includes six to ten decision makers, each arriving with four or five pieces of information they gathered independently. Gartner also found 77 percent of B2B buyers describe their most recent purchase as very complex or difficult.
That number is everywhere. It’s in ABM designs, persona frameworks, content maps, and the account plans I just described. Most go-to-market plans in PE portfolio companies were built on it.
It’s also low.
How Much Bigger?
Forrester published The State of Business Buying, 2026 in January, drawing on their 2025 Buyers’ Journey Survey. Their finding: the typical buying decision now includes 13 internal stakeholders and 9 external influencers.
Twenty-two is a big number and I wouldn’t take it as gospel. Thirteen internal stakeholders and nine external influencers aren’t the same thing. External influencers are analysts, investors, consultants, peers, and partners who shape the decision without sitting in the room or voting on it. Forrester’s own framing is internal and external buying networks, not one committee of 22.
And of course committee size scales with deal size and complexity. A $50,000 renewal and a $7 million multi-year platform commitment are not the same purchase, and they don’t draw the same crowd. Forrester says explicitly that the number rises for more complex or strategic purchases. If you sell across segments, you have more than one buying committee model and you should plan for more than one.
But the direction isn’t in dispute. Kerry Cunningham‘s research at 6sense , built on 19 million data points across more than 1,200 brands, puts the buying group at around 10 with a ten-month buying cycle. Forrester puts internal stakeholders alone at 13. Both say it rises with complexity.
So I wouldn’t argue about whether it’s 10, or 13, or 22. I’d argue that if your account plan says six, you’re planning for a buying process that no longer exists.
One more Forrester finding worth sitting with. Procurement professionals are decision makers in 53 percent of business buying cycles, and they engage from the start. Not at contract stage. From the beginning.
And not just on price. Forrester found they scrutinize features and functions, and interact with sales reps more often than most other buyer personas. In my experience they’re also driving the contractual terms that shape the economics of the deal well beyond the headline number: fee structures, payment terms, out clauses, termination rights, service levels, renewal caps, and auto-renewal language. Those terms determine what the contract is actually worth to you, and they get set by someone most marketing plans never address.
If your enablement plan treats procurement as a negotiation problem that appears in month five, that’s a design flaw.
And Most of Them Are Invisible
Here’s a finding that reframed this for me.
Scott Gillum and Patrick Spanner , in The Hidden Buyer Journey, looked across more than 50 accounts to identify who actually moved deals forward. Their conclusion:
Eighty-five percent of late-stage decision makers were invisible.
Not in marketing’s data. Not in sales’ data. Not anywhere in the system. The people who actually decided weren’t the people anyone was tracking.
Spenner, worth noting, also co-authored The Challenger Customer a decade earlier. Same researcher, same problem, still unsolved.
So the six names on your account plan aren’t wrong. They’re the visible fraction of something that is probably considerably larger.
The Part That Should Actually Worry You
Everything above is a counting problem. This next part is worse.
In The Challenger Customer, Adamson, Dixon, Spenner, and Toman published CEB research based on a survey of 3,000 customer stakeholders. They found an average of 5.4 people in a buying decision. But the number that matters is what happens to purchase probability as the group grows.
One decision maker: 81 percent likelihood of purchase. Two: 55 percent. At 5.4 stakeholders: roughly 30 percent.
Each person you add to the room may lower the odds that anything gets bought at all.
Now run that against a group of 13 or more. If purchase probability had already fallen to 30 percent at 5.4 people, then the mathematics of group decision-making may be working against every deal in your pipeline before a single seller does anything right or wrong.
This is also, I think, the real explanation for a number I wrote about earlier this year. Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna, using Tethr, analyzed more than 2.5 million recorded sales conversations for The JOLT Effect and found that 40 to 60 percent of deals end in no decision. Not lost to a competitor.
The Distinction That Should Change Your Messaging
Here’s the finding from that research I think matters most, and I left it out when I wrote about JOLT before.
Dixon and McKenna separate two very different fears.
FOMO is fear of missing out. It’s what almost every sales and marketing playbook is built to create. Urgency. Scarcity. Your competitors are already doing this. The cost of inaction. Limited-time pricing.
FOMU is fear of messing up. The fear of personally being the one who championed the thing that failed.
Their conclusion, from 2.5 million recorded conversations, is that prospects and customers are far less worried about missing out than they are about messing up. And that overcoming indecision means dialing down the fear of purchasing rather than dialing up the fear of not purchasing.
Sit with what that means. The urgency play, which is most of what we produce, is aimed at the wrong fear. And worse, pressure applied to someone already afraid of messing up tends to make them retreat rather than move.
Now put a buying group of 13 or more around it. Every additional person is another individual career risk. Another person asking privately whether they want their name on this if it goes badly.
Which is why risk mitigants matter more than urgency. Proof, references, trials, phased rollouts, clear success criteria, a defensible business case somebody can show their boss. Not “act now.” Closer to “here is why this won’t blow up on you.”
Forrester’s data supports exactly that. More than 60 percent of buyers now use a trial, rising to 78 percent for purchases of $10 million or more. That isn’t buyers wanting to test features. That’s a group de-risking a decision they’re afraid of.
Where I’d Push Back on Conventional Advice
For a decade the standard prescription has been to reach more stakeholders. Multi-thread harder. Cover the committee. Build a persona for every seat.
I’ve given that advice. I’m no longer sure it’s right on its own.
If each additional stakeholder may lower purchase probability, then multi-threading without confidence-building just adds veto points. You’re not improving your odds. You’re widening the surface area for someone to say not yet.
More reach into a group that can’t decide doesn’t produce a decision. It produces a larger audience for the indecision.
And Cunningham’s data suggests the consensus work happens whether you’re there or not. His research found buyers initiate contact at roughly 78 percent of the way through their journey, only once the buying group has reached internal consensus. By then, 85 percent have already set requirements and 94 percent have already ranked the shortlist by preference.
The group is doing the hardest work of the deal, which is agreeing with each other, entirely without you.
The Question a CMO Should Actually Be Asking
Not “are we multi-threaded.” That’s a coverage metric, and coverage isn’t the constraint.
“Are we helping this group decide?”
Different job, different work.
Brent Adamson s newest book with Karl Schmidt , The Framemaking Sale, published September 2025, makes this case directly. The answer isn’t pitching harder or producing more content. It’s boosting the customer’s confidence in their own ability to make a large collective decision. Clarify, guide, instill decision certainty.
He frames the problem as buyers facing too many options, too much information, and too many obstacles, which leaves them able to execute only the safest decisions and frequently no decision at all. He also reports that 75 percent of B2B buyers say they’d prefer to buy complex solutions without ever speaking to a sales professional.
Adamson is careful that framemaking is a mindset rather than a methodology. I’d put it more bluntly for this audience: your content strategy is built to persuade, and your buyers need help agreeing.
What I’d Change
Five things, none of which require more budget.
Build content for the room, not for the persona. Persona-based content assumes each stakeholder is persuaded individually. But the committee has to reach agreement with each other, usually in meetings you’re not in. That calls for a different asset: a shared business case, a one-page framing of the decision, something a champion can forward that makes it easier for a dozen people to align. If your champion rebuilds your material into their own deck before an internal meeting, that’s your signal.
Measure consensus, not coverage. If multi-threading is going to be a KPI, define it as evidence the group is converging rather than a count of contacts touched. Are multiple stakeholders engaging the same material? Is the business case circulating internally? Are new names appearing without your prompting? Those are consensus signals. Contact counts aren’t.
Treat procurement as an early persona. Forrester says they’re decision makers in more than half of cycles and engage from the start. Build for them at the beginning, not the end, and build for the contractual questions they actually own, not just price.
Lead with risk mitigation, not urgency. This is the FOMU point made operational. Audit your last ten pieces of late-stage content and count how many create urgency versus how many reduce perceived risk. In most portfolio companies I’ve seen, it isn’t close. It’s much better to mitigate “FUD” rather than create more “FUD [Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt]”
Rebuild references around the invisible stakeholders. If 85 percent of late-stage decision makers never appear in your data, your references need to speak to roles you can’t see. A reference that only reassures the economic buyer may leave a dozen people unconvinced.
The Bottom Line
The buying committee grew. How much depends on how you count, and on the size and complexity of what you’re selling. I’d be careful with any single number. But every credible source now puts it well above the six to ten most plans assume, and Forrester puts internal stakeholders alone at 13.
You can see a fraction of them. Gillum and Spenner found 85 percent of late-stage decision makers were invisible.
And the more of them there are, the less likely anything gets bought, which is why 40 to 60 percent of qualified deals end in no decision rather than in a loss to a competitor.
So the instinct to multi-thread harder is right in spirit and incomplete in practice. Reaching more people in a group that can’t decide doesn’t produce a decision.
The work is helping them decide. Giving a large, mostly invisible, genuinely anxious group enough clarity and enough confidence to agree with each other in a room you’ll never be in. And doing it by reducing their fear of messing up rather than amplifying their fear of missing out.
That’s a content problem, an enablement problem, and a reference problem. It is not a coverage problem.
And I’ll be honest that I spent a lot of years solving the coverage problem.
Outcomes and impacts over activities. Every time.
Sources
Forrester , The State of Business Buying, 2026, published January 2026, drawing on the 2025 Buyers’ Journey Survey.
Gartner , on B2B buying group size and purchase complexity.
Kerry Cunningham and 6sense, 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report and Nuancing the 95/5 Rule, April 2025, based on 19 million data points across more than 1,200 brands.
Scott Gillum and Patrick Spanner The Hidden Buyer Journey: How Personality, Culture, and Hidden Stakeholders Decide Your Deals.
Brent Adamson Matt Dixon, Patrick Spanner, and Nick Toman, The Challenger Customer, based on CEB research surveying 3,000 customer stakeholders.
Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna , The JOLT Effect, based on analysis of more than 2.5 million recorded sales conversations using the Tethr platform.
Brent Adamson and Karl Schmidt , The Framemaking Sale, September 2025
