I lost a deal a few years ago that I still think about.
The champion was excellent. She understood the product better than some of our sellers did, she had a real internal case, and she pushed it forward for four months without much help from us. We gave her everything she asked for, and yet it still died. It died in a meeting she described to me afterward as “seven people, forty minutes, and two of them had never heard of you.”
Last week I wrote about arming the champion, and I stand by all of it. But arming the champion assumes there is a champion, and that the case they make in the room is the case that decides it. That assumption was already shaky, and now it’s just wrong.
The room got bigger and quieter
The buying group has been growing for a decade. What’s changed is how many of those people you can actually see.
Somebody fills out the form. Somebody attends the webinar. Somebody replies to the sequence. That person becomes the deal in your system, because your system is built around contacts and a contact is a person who did something you could record. Meanwhile the finance person, the security reviewer, the ops lead who will have to run this thing, and the skeptical peer whose opinion your champion quietly weights more than anyone else’s, none of them fill out anything. They read a page. They ask a colleague. They form a view.
Your marketing reached one of seven. Your reporting says you reached the account.
This is the part I find genuinely hard, and I don’t think most of us have solved it. It isn’t a targeting problem. We can buy the other six names. It’s that the six were never going to raise their hands, and every system we’ve built rewards the hand raisers.
What we do instead, and why it doesn’t work
The common response is to go wider. More contacts per account, more names in the sequence, more coverage. It feels like progress because the contact count goes up.
But adding six people to a nurture built for one doesn’t reach a buying group. It reaches one person six times and annoys five others. The finance reviewer does not want your mid-funnel content. She wants to know what this costs over three years and what happens if it doesn’t work. The ops lead wants to know what he has to do on day one. Neither of those is a stage in your funnel, and neither of those people is going to click anything to get the answer.
The other response is to lean harder on the champion. Give her more. That’s what last week’s post was about, and it helps. It just has a ceiling. No matter how good her one-pager is, she can only be in one room at a time, and she can only make the argument she understands. If the security reviewer’s real objection never reached her, it never reaches you either.
What better teams do
The teams I see handling this well have stopped treating the responsive contact as the deal and started treating them as one voice in a group they need to serve differently.
A few things that seem to actually move it:
They build for roles, not stages. One asset for the person who has to justify the spend, one for the person who has to operate it, one for the peer who will get asked “is this real?” These aren’t funnel stages. They’re jobs different people have to do, and they can be written once and reused across every deal.
They ask what the room looked like. After a win or a loss, the question isn’t just why. It’s who was there. Six months of that from your sellers will tell you more about your content gaps than any audit will.
They read the account, not the contact. If four people from the same company are reading the same page and only one of them ever identified themselves, that’s a buying group forming in the dark. Most teams have that data and use it for scoring the one known contact instead of understanding the other three.
None of this requires new budget. It mostly requires admitting that the person you can see is not the person you have to convince.
The part I don’t have an answer to yet
I can tell you the buying group is bigger and less visible than our systems assume. I can’t yet tell you, with data, which of those invisible signals revenue teams actually trust enough to act on. My instinct is that most teams either ignore the anonymous activity entirely or over-read it into a story they wanted to be true. Both are expensive.
We’re in the middle of research on exactly that question right now, and I’d rather wait and show you the numbers than guess in public. More on that in a few weeks.
In the meantime, one question for your next pipeline review. For the largest deal in your forecast, name every person who will be in the room when it’s decided.
If you can only name one, you don’t have a deal. You have a fan.