Buying committee
Definition
The group of people who all have to agree before a B2B purchase happens. It includes the person who will use the product, the person whose budget pays for it, whoever signs off on security or legal, and at least one person who can stop the deal without ever joining a call.
How it works
Your ad or your content reaches one of these people, and rarely the one who signs. That person then has to sell the purchase internally, in meetings you are never invited to, using whatever material you gave them. Marketing for a committee therefore has two jobs: persuade the first reader, and equip that reader to persuade the rest. A security page the IT lead can forward and a business case the CFO recognizes do more for a late-stage deal, in my experience, than another feature page.
What to watch for
A deal that stalls late after months of warm engagement from a single contact is the signature of a committee member nobody has addressed; open the CRM and count the job titles logged on the deal. If they are all the same, the committee was never mapped. Check the content library for anything a champion could forward to finance or to security without apology. And listen in pipeline reviews: when the discussion covers the champion’s enthusiasm and never names who pays or who can veto, the forecast is resting on one vote out of several.
The question you ask
“For the deals stalled in late stage, who on the buying side have we never spoken to?”