In a pulp whodunnit novel, there’s always one person who committed the crime. The plot depends on a single culprit, a single detective and a single moment of revelation. B2B buying, it turns out, is nothing like the world of cosy crime, and the marketers who treat it like it is are losing deals they should be winning. Here, Richard Stone, founder of technical PR agency Stone Junction explains why the era of marketing to a single champion is over.
The mythical B2B buyer persona — a senior decision-maker with a clear budget, a rational mind, and a single point of contact — has never been especially accurate. In 2026, it’s become actively counterproductive.
The committee problem
At B2BMX 2026, LinkedIn’s Ty Heath delivered a session that was really quite insightful about why so many B2B pipelines stall.
Heath’s session was focused on B2B deals stalling because buying groups lack collective confidence, rather than because a competitor wins. To counteract this, marketers should seek to improve buyability by reducing hidden friction.
Heath quantified the scale of the challenge, “Now today, the average B2B buying group is about 8.2… regardless of the number, it’s not one to two people.”
Forrester’s 2026 State of Business Buying report puts the average buying decision at 13 internal stakeholders, with external influencers adding further complexity. That scale reshapes how a sales pipeline, marketing content and our sales tactics need to be planned.
For engineering, science or technology businesses, these numbers will seem familiar. The procurement team wants whole-life cost modelling, while thehe engineering team wants integration specifications. Finance wants an ROI case and legal wants compliance documentation. Each of those conversations requires different content, different proof points and, potentially, different timing.
What “coverage” actually means
The traditional response to this complexity has been to find a champion; someone inside the company you are selling to who believes in you, advocates internally and smooths the path. It’s a reasonable instinct, but research presented at B2BMX challenges the idea that a well-engaged champion is sufficient.
John Johansen of Delinea argued that the relationship between marketing and sales teams could be a key part of the solution. : “Both departments must share ownership of the pipeline and stop treating committee penetration as solely a sales responsibility.” Coverage means tracking engagement across the buying group and acting on where it’s thin.
LinkedIn’s June 2026 research reinforced the same dynamic: vendors are 20 times more likely to be chosen when everyone in the buying group knows them from the outset, compared to when only the technical champion does.
That figure has significant implications for marketers who rely on account-specific outreach or sales-led relationship building. If the finance director has never encountered your brand before the procurement stage, you’re starting that part of the conversation cold, and at a moment when the committee is in evaluation mode, not discovery mode.
Content strategy for the whole room
If 95 per cent of deals go to vendors on the Day One shortlist, and between 61–70 per cent of the buying journey happens before sales contact, winning in B2B means being visible and trusted during the anonymous research phase. By the time a buyer fills out your demo form, they have already decided whether you are a contender.
The practical implication is that content needs to be mapped to roles, not just to funnel stages.
Larger buying committees mean content needs to speak to more roles and priorities, not just one decision-maker. Content built for a single buyer persona increasingly misses most of the actual room.
For companies operating in engineering, science and technology, this often means creating parallel content tracks: technical white papers for engineering stakeholders, financial justification tools for procurement and finance, compliance and security documentation for legal and risk functions. None of these is sufficient on its own, and none can be an afterthought.
As buying committees grow and more research happens through AI tools, stakeholders in finance and procurement who never contact a vendor directly are shaping outcomes. Proof and internal alignment now carry more weight in that process.
When a member of the buying committee runs a quick AI search to sense-check a vendor recommendation, they’ll find either a rich body of expert content or an absence of relevant content.
The whodunnit analogy collapses here in the most useful way. In a committee purchase, there is no single culprit responsible for a lost deal and no single champion who secures a won one. The verdict is collective, and the evidence has been accumulating long before anyone called the meeting.
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