Working with Mimecast on their cyber resilience content strategy, the first thing that became clear was that the B2B buying committee was far bigger than the marketing program was targetting.
The CISO – who would eventually own the decision – was only just emerging as a mainstream figure in buying conversations. IT professionals, who would inherit whatever solution was chosen, were absent from most programs despite being capable of quietly killing a deal from the inside.
So we built for the room. A content hub structured around different buyer concerns. A comic series aimed at IT professionals – not because they held budget, but because they held influence. A podcast that ran to 136 episodes.
Then there was Thermo Fisher. Seven service lines. Approximately 130 buyer interviews – thirty to sixty minutes each. I personally conducted around forty percent of them. By the end, we could predict what someone in each role would say, what they feared, and what would move them.
That depth changes how you market. Not because you have better data, but because you stop guessing about who is in the room.
Why B2B marketing over-indexes on the champion and ignores everyone else in the buying committee
This essay builds on the broader argument presented in Why Marketing Strategy Fails, focusing specifically on how strategic assumptions interact with real buying structures.
There is a quiet contradiction at the heart of most B2B marketing. Organisations that make complex, multi-stakeholder purchasing decisions – involving finance, procurement, operations, IT, and senior leadership – run marketing programs designed around a narrow slice of the people who actually matter. The champion, perhaps a secondary contact. Rarely the full room.
And critically, rarely built on a genuine understanding of who else is involved, what they care about, and what questions they need answered before a decision can move.
The Room Nobody Sees
B2B buying has always been a group activity. Marketing has never treated it that way.
The scale of the buying committee has been well documented, though it is worth being precise: committee size scales with deal complexity and value. For smaller, lower-risk purchases, two to four stakeholders is common. But for complex B2B solutions – the kind involving meaningful budget, cross-functional impact, or organisational risk – the picture changes significantly. Gartner reports that buying groups for complex purchases now include between 8 and 13 stakeholders depending on company size and deal complexity, up from an average of 6.8 a decade ago. For deals exceeding $250,000, that number can reach 19 external stakeholders.
The point is not that every B2B purchase involves a cast of dozens. It is that the purchases where marketing has the most to contribute – high-value, high-complexity, high-stakes decisions – are precisely the ones where the narrowest marketing approach is most costly.
Marketing is still writing to one person. The room has twelve.
The Influencer Paradox
The people who shape B2B decisions are often the ones marketing never reaches.
Here is where the contradiction becomes uncomfortable. Research consistently shows that word-of-mouth and peer recommendations rank among the most influential factors in B2B vendor consideration. These are buyers – often sophisticated ones – telling us that the most powerful force in their own purchase decisions is a trusted conversation, not a campaign.
The same organisations run marketing budgets overwhelmingly allocated to reaching the declared buyer through declared channels. The informal network – the peer who was asked for a recommendation, the former colleague consulted before a shortlist was formed, the industry voice whose opinion carries weight in rooms that vendors never enter – receives almost no deliberate attention.
Research from Forrester’s B2B buying research shows that 92% of B2B buyers start their journey with at least one vendor already in mind, and most form shortlists before sales contact is ever made. Preferences are established before the funnel begins. And those preferences are shaped largely by sources that most B2B marketing programs were never designed to influence.
Marketing to the champion is not a strategy. It is an assumption that the champion decides alone.
The Professionalisation of Procurement
Procurement is no longer a gate. It is a discipline — and it is getting harder to navigate.
One of the most significant and least discussed shifts in B2B buying is what has happened to procurement as a function. For many years, B2B marketing treated procurement as an obstacle between the champion and the signature – an administrative layer to be managed, not a stakeholder to be addressed.
That assumption is now actively dangerous. Modern procurement teams are not hired from the industry being purchased. They are hired for procurement expertise itself – for skills in strategic sourcing, negotiation, vendor evaluation, risk management, and increasingly, data analysis. McKinsey’s procurement research notes that procurement professionals are expected to be significantly more digitally fluent and increasingly surgical in their approach to vendor selection and performance measurement.
This is a function that has professionalised in direct opposition to the vendor narrative. Procurement’s job is to resist the case that marketing constructs. It is skilled at decomposing value claims, identifying inconsistencies between promise and proof, and running structured evaluation processes that standard B2B content was never designed to survive. Yet most B2B marketing still produces nothing specifically for them.
Finance Moves Forward
In a tighter economy, the b2b buying committee has hardened – and most marketing hasn’t noticed.
The composition of buying committees does not stay fixed. It shifts with deal size, organisational risk, and economic conditions – and the direction of that shift in recent years has been consistent: more scrutiny, earlier, from more senior stakeholders.
The involvement of finance is not a late-stage sign-off. It is increasingly a participant in the evaluation process – asking questions about payback periods, risk exposure, and strategic fit that marketing content rarely addresses with any precision. That said, the seniority of financial involvement scales with deal size. A mid-market transaction may involve a financial controller rather than a CFO. A large enterprise commitment may require board-level sign-off. The variable is complexity and exposure, not a fixed rule.
What is consistent across deal sizes is the direction of travel. Gartner research found that 74% of B2B buyer teams demonstrate unhealthy conflict during the buying decision process – and buying groups that reach consensus are 2.5 times more likely to report a high-quality deal outcome. The implication is significant: marketing that helps a buying committee reach internal alignment is more valuable than marketing that persuades an individual. Yet almost none of it exists.
What Marketing to the Full Committee Actually Looks Like
Different stakeholders need different things. Most B2B marketing gives everyone the same thing.
The champion needs ammunition — a clear, credible narrative they can carry into internal conversations they will have without the vendor present. Finance needs a business case with numbers that hold up. Procurement needs proof that survives structured evaluation. Influencers – the trusted peers consulted informally before a shortlist is ever formalised – need to have encountered the brand before they are ever asked.
Each of these is a different job. Each requires different content, different channels, and a different understanding of what that stakeholder cares about and is trying to protect.
The starting point is not a new persona framework. It is a more honest question: when the decision is actually being made – in the room, around the table, across the internal conversations that happen without you – who is in that room, and what are they each trying to resolve?
Most B2B marketing cannot answer that question. Which is part of why most B2B buying decisions still end in no decision at all.
Philip Kotler, Neil Rackham and Suj Krishnaswamy documented this problem in HBR two decades ago. Companies with tightly aligned sales and marketing functions grow revenue 24% faster – yet most B2B organisations still cannot agree on what a qualified lead looks like, let alone who is responsible for the buying committee beyond the champion.
Kotler, P., Rackham, N. & Krishnaswamy, S. (2006). Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing. Harvard Business Review
Conclusion
The champion is not the decision. They are the beginning of one.
B2B marketing has built its entire operating model around the buyer who declares themselves – the one who searches, downloads, attends, and converts. That buyer is real and important. But they are one voice in a conversation that is already happening before marketing enters it, and continues long after the last campaign impression.
More than 40% of B2B deals stall because internal stakeholders fail to align – and over half of lost opportunities are attributed not to competitors but to no decision, where committees simply could not move forward.
The competitor that wins most often in B2B is not another vendor. It is the internal friction that marketing was never designed to resolve.
This piece is part of a series examining why B2B marketing continues to underperform its potential.
Also in this series: The Buying Committee Nobody Markets To | The Attribution Problem | The Always-On Argument