Navigating Decision Makers: Best Practices for Wins

Introduction

If you feel like actually finding the decision maker has gotten harder over the last few years, you’re not imagining it.

Buying groups have ballooned. Internal politics are messier. And by the time you finally get a VP or CFO on the line, half the decision has already been made without you.

Gartner says the typical buying group for a complex B2B solution now involves 6-10 people, and in some companies it stretches into the teens. At the same time, buyers spend only about 17% of their total buying time with vendors-and when they’re looking at multiple suppliers, any one rep may get just 5-6% of that.

In other words: you’re trying to influence a crowded committee in a very small slice of their week.

This guide is about how to navigate that reality. We’ll cover:

• What the modern B2B decision-making landscape actually looks like
• How to map decision makers and influencers inside target accounts
• Best practices for multi-threaded cold outreach (calls, email, LinkedIn)
• How to turn champions and gatekeepers into allies
• Practical ways to drive consensus inside chaotic buying committees
• The KPIs and processes that keep your team honest about decision-maker engagement

Let’s treat navigating decision makers as a repeatable sales motion-not an act of heroism.

1. The New Reality: You’re Selling to a Committee, Not a Contact

1.1 Buying groups are bigger and more chaotic

A decade ago, Harvard Business Review reported that the average B2B purchase involved 6.8 decision makers. Now, research aggregating Gartner and other sources shows that buying groups typically include 8-13 stakeholders depending on company size and deal complexity. That’s nearly double in about ten years.

These groups usually include:

• Economic buyer, owns the budget and signs the order (CFO, VP, GM)
• Business owner, feels the pain and is accountable for outcomes (VP Sales, CMO, VP Ops)
• Technical owner, ensures feasibility and integration (IT, RevOps, Security)
• End users, live in the product day to day
• Procurement, negotiates and enforces purchasing policy
• Legal / Security, risk management and compliance
• Executives, sometimes parachute in to bless or block the decision

Most deals you lose aren’t lost because your main contact didn’t like you-they die from internal friction, misalignment, and risk-aversion across this broader group.

Gartner recently found that 74% of B2B buyer teams experience “unhealthy conflict” during the decision process, and buying groups that do reach consensus are 2.5x more likely to view the outcome as a high-quality deal. If you’re not actively helping them align, you’re basically leaving that conflict to chance.

1.2 Buyers want less sales interaction-but still need help

Buyers are doing more on their own. Gartner’s B2B buying research notes that 75% of buyers would prefer a rep-free sales experience, leaning heavily on digital content and internal discussions. Meanwhile, another Gartner stat shows that buyers only spend about 17% of the journey with suppliers at all.

On top of that, new research from 6sense shows that 94% of buying groups rank preferred vendors before first contact, and they end up purchasing from that preliminary favorite about 77-80% of the time. Translation: by the time your SDR gets a meeting on the calendar, there’s already a front-runner in the buyer’s mind.

So where does that leave outbound teams?

• You have less live time with decision makers.
• They’ve already formed opinions based on your digital footprint.
• And the decision is almost always a group call, not one person’s choice.

Your outbound strategy has to be built around these facts-or you’ll keep getting blindsided late in the game.

2. Mapping Decision Makers: Turn the Black Box Into a Blueprint

Most teams lose deals for one simple reason: they don’t actually know who’s in the room when the real decision gets made.

2.1 Start with an ICP-level buying-group template

Before you ever touch a dialer or sequence tool, get alignment on who typically decides for your core ICP.

For each segment (e.g., mid-market SaaS, enterprise manufacturing), outline:

• The business owner (e.g., VP Sales)
• The economic buyer (e.g., CRO, CFO, GM)
• The technical owner (e.g., RevOps lead, Director of IT)
• The power users (e.g., sales managers, SDR manager)
• The governance players (procurement, security, legal)

This becomes your buying-group template. Add these as custom fields or picklists in your CRM so every opportunity can be tagged with who is currently filling each role.

When an SDR books a meeting, they’re not just logging “Contact created” anymore-they’re updating the map:

• Champion: Sales Ops Manager
• Business owner: VP Sales (unknown)
• Economic buyer: CRO (unknown)
• Technical: RevOps Director (unknown)

Your pipeline should never be a list of isolated contacts; it’s a portfolio of partially discovered committees.

2.2 Use open-source intel to identify real power

Once you know which roles matter, go find the actual humans.

Practical sources your SDRs should use:

• LinkedIn, obvious, but many reps stop at the first plausible title.
• Company site, leadership pages, org charts, security/privacy contacts.
• Press releases & funding news, often mention project sponsors or execs responsible for initiatives.
• Job postings, responsibilities and tools listed in job ads are gold for understanding who owns what.
• Earnings calls / investor decks (for public companies), you’ll hear which metrics and initiatives leadership truly cares about.

Make this concrete with a simple rule of thumb:

> For any account you seriously want to win, there should be at least 3-5 named stakeholders in your CRM before you call it “fully qualified.”

2.3 Document influence, not just titles

Title alone doesn’t tell you who actually calls the shots.

Inside your CRM, add fields or tags like:

• Champion, sells for you internally
• Influencer, has a voice but not final say
• Decision maker, controls budget and/or signature
• Technical approver, IT, security, operations
• Blocker, likely to resist change

During every call, train reps to ask lightweight questions that feed this map:

• “Who else will want to weigh in on this?”
• “Who typically signs off on decisions like this?”
• “Who’s going to care the most if this works really well?”

Reps don’t have to interrogate people. They just need to be curious and log what they hear.

3. Reaching Decision Makers: Outbound Tactics That Actually Work

You’ve got a rough map. Now you have to actually reach these people.

Reality check: multiple studies show it takes 7-8 contact attempts on average to secure a meeting, and many teams find it takes around 8 call attempts just to reach a prospect live. Yet roughly 40-50% of reps stop after one or two touches.

That’s how “decision makers are impossible to reach” becomes a self‑fulfilling prophecy.

3.1 Design cadences around persistence (without being a pest)

For decision makers and key influencers, your baseline outbound cadence should look something like:

• Days 1-3: Email + LinkedIn view + light call
• Days 4-6: Call + voicemail + follow-up email
• Days 7-10: Call + value-add email (case study or short insight)
• Days 11-14: LinkedIn message (if connected) + call
• Days 15-21: Final breakup email + one last call

That’s 8-12 touches across channels.

Two important notes:

1. Vary the angle. Don’t send the same “just bumping this up” message on repeat. Hit different pain points, metrics, and stories that matter to that persona.
2. Make the value clear fast. Decision makers scan. Your first sentence has to prove you did your homework and are worth 15 seconds of attention.

3.2 Personalize by role, not by novelty trick

Over-personalization (like “I saw you like skiing”) without a clear business hook is just as bad as a generic pitch.

Instead, build role-based templates and then layer in smart personalization:

• For a VP Sales: lead with pipeline coverage, ramp times, and win rates.
• For a CFO: talk about CAC payback, margin, and risk.
• For a Head of IT: hit integration, security, and admin overhead.

Tools like SalesHive’s eMod engine essentially do this at scale-researching each prospect and rewriting templates with relevant context while preserving the core value prop. That’s the kind of personalization that actually moves a decision maker, not just entertains them.

3.3 Cold calling into the buying group

Cold calling still works; it’s just used differently now.

A few practical guidelines for reaching decision makers by phone:

1. Open with context, not your company.

“Hey Sarah, this is Jake with Acme. I’m calling because I saw your team is adding 20 reps this year, and most VPs I talk to are worried about ramping pipeline fast enough…” is very different from “Do you have a minute to talk about our solution?”

1. Quickly qualify role and authority.

“Are you the right person to think about [problem] or is there someone else who owns that day to day?”

1. Ask about others early.

“When you’ve tackled similar projects, who else usually weighs in-RevOps, IT, finance?”
This feels like respect for their process, not an attempt to go around them.

1. Use the call to set up a multi-party meeting.

Instead of “Can we grab 30 minutes?” try:
“Typically, we pull in the RevOps lead and at least one frontline manager so everyone can pressure-test this. Would it be crazy to get that group together for a 30‑minute working session?”

Remember: the goal of the first call isn’t to close the deal. It’s to unlock the buying group.

3.4 Multi-thread from the very first sequence

Don’t wait for your champion to “loop others in someday.” As soon as you’ve identified multiple relevant stakeholders:

• Enroll them in appropriate cadences.
• Reference other stakeholders by name (with care):

“I’m chatting with Alex in RevOps next week about X. It sounded like this may impact your team as well, so I wanted to share…”

• Offer separate, role-specific discovery calls if needed (e.g., a 20‑minute technical Q&A for IT).

Gong’s analysis shows that enterprise deals are 233% less likely to close when a decision maker is not directly involved, and opportunities with four or more contacts involved win at significantly higher rates. Another Gong Labs dataset found that in deals over $50K, multi-threading boosted win rates by 130%. Those aren’t small numbers.

Make multi-threading a default behavior, not a heroic move.

4. Turning Gatekeepers and Champions Into Allies

Navigating decision makers means navigating everyone around them too.

4.1 Work with gatekeepers, don’t try to bulldoze them

Executive assistants, coordinators, and front-desk staff are often treated like obstacles. That’s a mistake.

They usually:

• Know exactly how the decision maker likes to work
• Understand what’s on their plate this quarter
• Can sense immediately whether your request is reasonable or not

Instead of trying to “get past” them, try:

• “Can I ask your advice? I don’t want to waste Sarah’s time. She’s the one ultimately responsible for [X], right?”
• “What’s the best way to get 15 focused minutes with her on this-early morning, or after 4pm?”
• “Is there anyone else she usually pulls into these conversations that I could connect with first?”

You’re signaling respect and efficiency. That’s how you get help, not resistance.

4.2 Identify real champions by behavior, not enthusiasm

Champions are not just people who like your product. They’re the ones who will spend political capital on you.

Signs you’ve found a real champion:

• They talk about internal stakeholders unprompted (“Finance will want to see…”)
• They’re willing to correct you about internal reality
• They ask for materials to share internally
• They introduce you to peers or their boss without you begging

Once you see those behaviors, invest heavily in that relationship.

4.3 Equip champions to sell internally

Most teams send champions decks designed for external meetings and hope they’ll magically work in internal ones. They rarely do.

Instead, build a champion kit:

• 1-page problem and impact brief, plain language, their metrics, their words
• 3-5 bullet “Why this over alternatives”, focused on trade-offs, not feature lists
• Simple ROI snapshot, “Here’s roughly what this does to pipeline / cost / efficiency”
• Forwardable email template to send to their VP, CFO, or CIO

And don’t just ship these assets-work on them with the champion:

> “Let’s spend 10 minutes tailoring this to how you’d actually talk about it to your leadership. I’ll type while you talk.”

Now they’re not forwarding your marketing deck; they’re presenting their business case.

4.4 Help champions manage internal conflict

Remember that 74% of buyer teams experience unhealthy conflict during the decision. You can make your champion’s life easier (and your deal more likely) by:

• Providing a comparison matrix they can use to compare you vs. alternatives
• Offering a risk mitigation plan for IT and security
• Suggesting a phased rollout plan to calm nervous end users

The more you act like a project advisor-not just a vendor-the more your champion can confidently push through resistance.

5. Orchestrating the Buying Committee: From Chaos to Consensus

Once you’ve reached multiple stakeholders, your job shifts. You’re no longer just “getting meetings”-you’re facilitating a decision.

5.1 Run meetings that align stakeholders, not just impress them

For any call with more than two stakeholders, your agenda should look like this:

1. Align on the problem and impact

“Let’s spend 5 minutes making sure we agree on the problem we’re solving and what success looks like.”

1. Clarify decision criteria and constraints

“What boxes does this absolutely have to tick-for IT, finance, and your team-before anyone will sign?”

1. Show how your approach maps to that picture

Now your demo or walkthrough makes sense to everyone.

1. Document next steps in a mutual plan

“Here’s what I captured for owners, dates, and approvals-did I miss anything?”

This structure does two critical things:

• Surfaces misalignment early (before it kills your deal in a private meeting later)
• Gives everyone a sense that there is a path forward, which reduces risk anxiety

5.2 Use buyer enablement content, not just marketing assets

Gartner talks a lot about “buyer enablement”-content and tools that help buyers complete specific jobs in their buying process, like problem definition, solution exploration, selection, and validation.

Think in terms of jobs like:

• “Justify this to finance”
• “Convince IT it’s safe and feasible”
• “Show my boss we’ll hit our targets faster”

Practical buyer enablement assets might include:

• A 1-page CFO brief in their language
• A security & architecture summary for IT
• A rollout checklist for operations
• A mutual action plan with tasks and owners on both sides

Equip your reps to send the right asset to the right stakeholder, at the right time, instead of just blasting the same deck to everyone.

5.3 Build and use a mutual action plan (MAP)

For any deal that actually matters, use a MAP:

• Milestones (e.g., security review, pilot, legal, executive sign-off)
• Dates (even if rough)
• Owners (buyer and seller side)

Position it as a tool to help them hit their internal deadlines:

> “Most teams we work with underestimate how long security and legal will need, which leads to last-minute fire drills. This simple plan just makes sure we’re all on the same timeline-mind if we sketch it out together?”

A MAP gives your champion a script, aligns the committee, and gives you earlier warning when the deal is going sideways.

6. Measuring Whether You’re Actually Navigating Decision Makers

What gets measured gets improved. If you want your team to get great at working buying groups, you need KPIs that reflect that.

6.1 Core decision-maker navigation metrics

Here are the big ones to track:

1. Contacts per opportunity
• Target: 3-5+ active contacts on any deal above a certain ACV.
2. Presence of an economic buyer
• % of opportunities where at least one meeting included a VP, C‑level, or P&L owner.
3. Multi-threading rate
• % of qualified accounts with at least two personas engaged (e.g., business + technical).
4. Win rate by coverage
• Compare win rate for single-threaded deals vs. deals with 3+ contacts and an economic buyer involved.
5. Stage progression by coverage
• Don’t let deals move beyond certain stages without minimum stakeholder coverage.

When you run this analysis, you’ll almost always see what Gong saw: deals with real decision makers and multiple stakeholders engaged close at dramatically higher rates-sometimes 100%+ better than single-threaded deals.

6.2 Activity metrics that support decision-maker access

Traditional SDR metrics still matter; they just need context:

• Touches per contact before disqualifying, Are reps actually giving themselves 7-10 attempts with decision makers?
• Channel mix, Calls, emails, and social all have roles to play; many execs simply will not respond to just one channel.
• Response and meeting rates by persona, If you’re booking lots of meetings with managers but almost none with VPs and above, your messaging is off.

Given that most teams quit too early, explicitly coach around persistence. LinkedIn’s research notes that in many cases it takes 5-11 touches to reach a buyer, but a large chunk of reps don’t make it past contact attempt #2.

6.3 Cadence and coverage governance

Bake decision-maker navigation into your sales process:

• Opportunity stage rules:
• No Stage 2 without at least a suspected economic buyer identified.
• No proposal stage without at least one meeting including an economic buyer or their direct delegate.
• Pipeline review prompts:
• “Who can kill this deal and have we talked to them?”
• “Who’s the economic buyer and what do they personally care about?”
• Coaching focus:

Listen to calls for how reps ask about additional stakeholders, how they frame multi-party meetings, and how they respond when contacts resist adding others.

When coverage and decision-maker engagement become visible and non‑negotiable, behavior changes fast.

7. How This Applies to Your Sales Team

Let’s pull this out of the theoretical and into what your team can do next quarter.

7.1 For lean teams (founder-led or small SDR squads)

If you’ve got a tiny team, your advantage is focus. Use it.

• Pick a narrow ICP and build a buying-group template for that segment.
• Instrument your CRM to track champions, decision makers, and technical owners.
• Create one killer multi-threaded cadence for that ICP and stick to it for 60-90 days.
• Outsource the grunt work of list building and cold outreach into that buying group to a specialist like SalesHive so you can spend your limited cycles on high‑leverage conversations.

7.2 For mid-market or growth-stage teams

You likely have a few SDRs, a handful of AEs, and a RevOps function.

• Standardize multi-threading behaviors. Add coverage thresholds to your stage definitions.
• Run a quarterly coverage analysis. Show win rates by number of stakeholders engaged-once reps see the delta, they’ll start multi-threading without being asked.
• Build a shared buyer enablement library. Make it dead simple for reps to grab the right CFO brief, IT one-pager, or rollout checklist.
• Align SDR and AE handoff around the buying group. An SDR’s job isn’t just “a meeting”-it’s “a meeting with someone who can lead us to the committee.”

7.3 For enterprise and strategic teams

Here, the complexity is highest-but so is the payoff.

• Account-based planning: For target accounts, run joint SDR/AE planning sessions to map known and suspected stakeholders.
• Exec-to-exec motion: Create a path for your own leadership to engage their peers on the buyer side once there’s clear potential.
• Deep mutual action plans: Use MAPs as standard practice, not special-circumstance tools.
• Partner with specialized outbound teams for coverage: if your strategic reps can’t afford to grind through 8+ touches per contact across a 10-15 person buying group, let an external SDR team handle that air cover while AEs focus on high-value interactions.

The specifics vary, but the principles don’t: map the committee, multi-thread on purpose, and facilitate consensus.

Conclusion + Next Steps

Decision makers aren’t actually harder to find today-there are just more of them, they’re busier, and they’re often forming opinions long before you show up.

Your job in B2B sales development isn’t to “get past the gatekeeper” or “find the one decision maker.” It’s to:

1. Understand the full buying group for your ICP.
2. Map real humans to those roles inside each account.
3. Persist across channels long enough to earn a seat at the table.
4. Equip champions and stakeholders with the tools they need to win internal debates.
5. Measure and coach against buying-group coverage and decision-maker engagement, not just raw activity.

If you put those pieces in place, a funny thing happens: deals feel less random. You’ll see fewer “mystery losses” and more predictable momentum as you guide committees toward a decision they feel confident about.

And if you don’t have the internal bandwidth to build all of this from scratch, bring in specialists. Teams like SalesHive live and breathe multi-threaded outbound-cold calling, personalized email, SDR outsourcing, and list building all pointed at the right decision makers.

Either way, the game has changed. The teams who master navigating decision makers as a system-not a guessing game-are the ones who will keep winning as buying committees keep growing.