Navigating Decision Makers: Best Practices for Wins

Introduction

If you’re still hunting for “the” decision maker in your deals, you’re playing a game that doesn’t exist anymore.

Modern B2B decisions are made by buying groups, not lone heroes. Research from Gartner, 6sense, and others shows typical B2B buying committees now include roughly 8-13 stakeholders depending on company size and deal complexity. Attainment Labs On top of that, those buyers are doing most of their homework without you, and by the time you first talk to them, they often already have a preferred vendor in mind. 6sense’s 2025 Buyer Experience Report found that the vendor buyers contact first wins about 80% of the time, and 95% of purchases come from the buying group’s original Day One shortlist. 6sense

So if you want more consistent wins, your team has to get great at navigating decision makers:

• Finding and engaging the full buying group
• Tailoring messaging and outreach to different roles
• Multi-threading deals so you’re not single-threaded through one champion
• Helping buyers resolve internal conflict and reach consensus

This guide walks through what’s changed in B2B buying, how to map and engage decision makers, the data behind multi-threading, and how to operationalize all of it in your outbound sales motion.

The New Reality of B2B Decision Makers

Buying Committees Are the Default, Not the Exception

If your sales process still assumes two or three decision makers, you’re underestimating the complexity of almost every deal.

• 6sense’s research shows B2B buying teams now average just under 10 members. 6sense
• TechnologyAdvice reports that in 2024, 86% of IT professionals had 3+ stakeholders on their decision committees for new IT purchases, and 43% had 6+ stakeholders. TechnologyAdvice
• Gartner and others cite typical B2B buying groups in the 6-10+ person range, with enterprise and tech deals pushing into double digits. TechnologyAdvice

And those groups aren’t just bigger, they’re messier. A 2024-2025 Gartner survey found 74% of B2B buyer teams demonstrate “unhealthy conflict” during the decision process, but groups that reach consensus are 2.5x more likely to report that the deal was high quality. Gartner

In other words: your deals don’t die because one VP doesn’t like you. They die because the group can’t agree.

Buyers Spend Very Little Time With You

Even when you “get a meeting,” you’re only seeing a thin slice of the buying journey.

Gartner’s research shows B2B buyers spend only about 17% of their total buying time meeting with potential vendors, and if they’re evaluating multiple vendors, any one supplier might see just 5-6% of that time. Brixon Group summarizing Gartner Other studies consistently show that 60-80% of the buyer’s journey now happens before they talk to sales at all. Zipdo

6sense found that buyers typically don’t engage with sellers until they’re about two-thirds of the way through their journey, and even then, around 80% of seller conversations are buyer-initiated. 6sense The kicker: the first vendor they talk to wins roughly 80% of the time.

All of this means:

• By the time your SDR books that first meeting with a “decision maker,” a lot has already been decided.
• You’re walking into a room where people have opinions, preferences, and internal politics, and you’ve had almost no influence on any of it.

Buyers Want Trusted Advisors, But Don’t Think They’re Getting Them

The bar for what decision makers expect from sales has gone up.

Salesforce’s research shows:

• 86% of business buyers are more likely to buy when companies understand their goals.
• But 59% say most sales reps don’t take the time to understand them.
• 84% expect reps to act as trusted advisors.
• Yet 73% say most sales interactions feel transactional. Salesforce

In complex, multi-stakeholder deals, that matters. If each decision maker feels you “get” their world and are helping them navigate an internal decision, you’re in a very different position than the vendor sending generic decks and pushing for next steps.

Mapping the Decision-Making Unit (DMU)

If you want to navigate decision makers, you have to start by knowing who they are.

Core Roles in a B2B Deal

Every company is a little different, but most B2B deals involve some mix of these roles:

• Champion, Your internal advocate. They feel the pain, like your solution, and are willing to push internally.
• Economic buyer, Owns the budget and can ultimately say yes or no. Often a VP, C-level, or P&L owner.
• Technical / functional approver, IT, security, ops, or domain experts who validate feasibility and risk.
• Procurement / legal, Control commercial terms, vendor onboarding, and risk management.
• Executive sponsor, Senior leader whose strategic initiative your deal ladders up to; may or may not be deeply involved, but their support can unblock everything.
• Users / influencers, Day-to-day operators who will live with your product and can quietly kill deals if they hate it.

Your job in sales development and early-stage selling is not just to “find decision makers” but to understand this ecosystem inside each target account.

How to Uncover Who’s Who

Here’s a practical approach your SDRs and AEs can use:

1. Pre-call research (15-20 minutes max):
• Look at the company’s org structure on LinkedIn.
• Identify likely champions (e.g., Director of RevOps, VP of Customer Success) based on your ICP.
• Identify probable economic buyers (e.g., CRO, CFO, COO) for your ACV level.
• Note IT/security leaders and procurement titles for later stages.

1. Discovery questions that map the DMU: On your first real conversation, don’t just ask about pain and budget; ask about decision dynamics:
• “Who else is involved when you buy tools like this?”
• “What does a typical approval process look like here?”
• “Who would be most impacted if this works really well?”
• “Who usually has final sign-off?”

1. Pattern recognition by segment: Over time, your team should see typical patterns:
• In mid-market SaaS, maybe deals usually involve a Director-level champion, VP economic buyer, IT, and procurement.
• In enterprise manufacturing, maybe plant managers and regional ops leaders have more sway.

Capture those patterns in your playbooks so new SDRs aren’t starting from scratch.

Building a Simple Account Map

You don’t need a complex tool to start. A one-page account map can live in your CRM, in a shared doc, or on a virtual whiteboard.

At minimum, track:

• Name and title
• Role (champion, economic buyer, technical, etc.)
• Influence level (high/medium/low)
• Stance (supporter, neutral, skeptic)
• Last interaction and next step

Update this every time you learn something. When leadership reviews a deal, this map should make it immediately obvious whether you truly understand the decision makers, or you’re betting your quarter on one friendly director who “loves us.”

This is also where a partner like SalesHive adds value: their SDRs build and update these maps as they work accounts, so by the time your AE steps in, they’re not guessing who matters.

Multi-Threading: Non-Negotiable If You Want to Win

Single-threaded deals used to be common. Today, they’re a red flag.

The Data Behind Multi-Threading

Several studies converge on the same story:

• Gong’s analysis of more than 50,000 opportunities shows winning deals have at least three points of contact involved in meetings, while losing deals often have only one. Gong
• On email, winning deals involve an average of eight unique contacts, compared to just three in losing deals, a 243% difference in email engagement. Gong
• Gong also reports that in deals over $50K, multi-threading boosts win rates by around 130%. Gong
• Aviso found that multi-threaded conversations increased win rates by 42% and shortened cycles by 22% for deals over $50K. Aviso
• Outreach’s analysis of billions of interactions shows that when sellers engage three or more departments, win rates climb to 44%, versus 28% when only one department is engaged. Outreach

The message is loud and clear: the more relevant stakeholders and departments you engage, the better your odds.

Multi-Threading in Outbound Prospecting

Multi-threading isn’t just an AE thing; it starts at the top of the funnel.

For each ICP, define a small set of core personas, for example, if you sell revenue operations software:

• VP of Sales / CRO (economic buyer)
• Director/Head of RevOps (champion)
• VP of Marketing (co-sponsor)
• Sales Operations Manager (user/influencer)
• IT / Security lead (technical approver)

Now design your outbound cadence to hit this group, not just one person:

• Week 1-2: SDR targets the likely champion and one economic buyer with tailored emails and calls.
• Week 2-3: Add 1-2 users/influencers and the relevant IT title into the sequence with their own messaging.
• If the champion responds, use that momentum to get intros to the others rather than stopping outreach.

An outsourced SDR partner like SalesHive is particularly effective here because they’re set up to run high-volume, persona-specific sequences across these roles using cold email and cold calling, rather than blasting the same message to a single contact list.

Avoiding Random Acts of Outreach

Multi-threading doesn’t mean chaos. Bad multi-threading looks like:

• Three different reps calling three different stakeholders with three different stories.
• Executives getting low-level feature pitches while users get ROI spreadsheets.

Good multi-threading is orchestrated:

• One clear narrative about the problem and outcome.
• Different angles and proof points for each persona.
• Internal notes in the CRM so every rep knows who has heard what.

A simple internal rule can help: no opportunity is forecasted at commit unless it’s multi-threaded to at least a minimum number of contacts and departments for its size band.

Navigating Conflict and Building Consensus

Remember that stat: 74% of B2B buying teams experience unhealthy conflict? Gartner That’s your real competition more often than “Vendor B.”

Why Deals Stall (and It’s Not Just Price)

Common sources of internal friction include:

• Different stakeholders define the problem differently.
• IT or security is nervous about risk.
• Finance is under pressure to cut spend.
• Users are skeptical because they’ve seen tools fail before.

When those tensions aren’t surfaced and addressed, the safest group outcome is do nothing. You see this as “no decision” or endless status quo.

Help the Group Align on the Problem First

Before you push your solution, help the group agree on what’s broken and what success looks like.

In discovery and multi-stakeholder meetings:

• Ask, “If we do nothing for the next 12-18 months, what happens?”
• Have each function describe the impact in their own language.
• Summarize back a shared problem statement and confirm it: “It sounds like we agree that X is causing Y impact in sales, Z in ops, and A in finance. Did I get that right?”

This creates a shared narrative your champion can use later when you’re not in the room.

Arm Your Champion With Internal-Selling Tools

Most of the real deciding happens in internal meetings without you.

Help your champion by providing:

• A concise, non-jargony internal pitch deck they can use with their boss and peers.
• A one-page summary for finance showing business case, payback period, and risk mitigants.
• A technical overview or FAQ for IT/security addressing integrations, data, and compliance.

Then coach them:

• “What questions do you expect from your CFO?”
• “Who might quietly resist this and why?”
• “How will you explain the value to your team?”

You’re not just selling; you’re coaching your champion to sell internally.

Managing Blockers Without Creating Enemies

You will have skeptics. The goal is not to steamroll them; it’s to respect their concerns and show you can help manage the risk.

• Invite them into the process early: “We’d love your input to make sure this works for your team.”
• Ask what a “successful” implementation would look like from their perspective.
• Show how you’ve addressed similar concerns in other customers (with proof, not fluff).

If you can turn a blocker into at least a neutral, or better yet, a reluctant supporter, your champion’s job gets much easier.

Channels and Plays to Reach Decision Makers

Omnichannel Is the New Default

McKinsey’s B2B Pulse research shows a consistent “rule of thirds”: at any given stage of the buying journey, about one-third of customers prefer in-person, one-third prefer remote/virtual, and one-third prefer digital self-serve. McKinsey Buyers want all three options available and will mix them as they see fit.

For outbound and early-stage deals, that means your strategy should blend:

• Email, Scalable, great for tailored insights and resources.
• Phone, High-signal, great for fast qualification and genuine conversations.
• Social (LinkedIn), Lighter-touch, good for warming up, sharing content, and soft engagement.

The trick is aligning channel and message to the role.

Cold Email to Buying Groups

A few practical guidelines:

• Short and specific: 3-6 sentences, with one clear business problem and outcome.
• Persona-tailored:
• To a CFO: “Teams like yours cut customer acquisition cost by 18-22% while increasing pipeline.”
• To an IT lead: “Secure SSO, data residency, and no new infrastructure for your team to manage.”
• To a functional leader: “Your reps get 20-30% more selling time back each week.”
• Value first: Zipdo’s compilation of buyer research shows 74% of buyers choose the vendor that was first to add value and insight during their journey. Zipdo Send something actually useful, a benchmark, a short teardown, a relevant case study, not just “we help companies like yours.”

SalesHive uses an AI-powered personalization engine (eMod) to do this at scale: it pulls in role, industry, and company context so each decision maker gets something that feels written for them, not for a list.

Cold Calling Senior Decision Makers

Execs are still callable, you just have to respect their time.

On cold calls to VPs/C-levels:

• Lead with context and outcome, not introduction: “We work with several mid-market manufacturers to cut order errors by 30% and speed up cash collection. Quick question…”
• Ask a tight, insight-based question: “How confident are you that your current process will scale through next year’s growth targets?”
• If they’re not the right person, pivot: “Who on your team loses the most sleep over this?” and ask for a warm introduction.

Your goal on that first call isn’t a 45-minute demo; it’s permission and a micro-next step, often a short discovery meeting including 1-2 other stakeholders.

Using Content and Social Proof to Open Doors

Remember that buyers are doing a ton of independent research before talking to you.

• Share case studies that mirror the buyer’s industry, size, and problem.
• Use numbers (time saved, cost reduced, revenue generated), decision makers respond to quantified outcomes.
• Publish short, practical content on LinkedIn that your SDRs can reference in outreach (“Sharing a recent breakdown we did of how X company’s team cut handoffs by 40%…”).

When SalesHive runs campaigns for clients, a big portion of the playbook is simply putting the right proof in front of the right persona at the right time, so by the time a meeting happens, the economic buyer has already seen their peers succeeding with the same approach.

Metrics and Operating Model for Navigating Decision Makers

You can’t improve what you don’t measure, and most teams don’t actually track whether they’re getting better at navigating buying groups.

The Metrics That Matter

Add these to your core dashboard:

• Unique contacts per opportunity, How many people have we actually engaged on this deal?
• Departments engaged, Are we stuck only in sales, or have we also reached finance, IT, and operations?
• Executive engagement rate, What % of qualified opportunities include VP+ involvement before proposal?
• Time-to-multi-thread, Days from opportunity creation to the third unique stakeholder engaged.
• Deals lost to ‘no decision’, Often a sign of unresolved internal conflict or incomplete stakeholder coverage.

When you correlate these with win rates, you’ll almost always see that deals with more (relevant) stakeholders and departments engaged win more often and faster.

Make Multi-Threading a Process, Not a Suggestion

Bake navigation of decision makers into your methodology:

• In your qualification criteria, include questions about the decision process and key roles.
• In your stage definitions, require a minimum number of engaged stakeholders to progress.
• In your forecast reviews, don’t just ask for “next steps”, ask who else has been engaged, how they feel, and who’s missing.

Gong’s data shows that if the true decision maker is not involved, enterprise deals are 233% less likely to close. Gong Use stats like that to drive home why this matters.

Coaching SDRs and AEs

Managers should regularly:

• Review call recordings where reps mapped the DMU well and where they didn’t.
• Role-play tough conversations: asking for access to a CFO, handling internal politics, dealing with skeptical IT.
• Celebrate wins where reps turned a single-threaded deal into a healthy, multi-threaded one, and show the impact on win rate and cycle time.

The goal is to make navigating decision makers a default behavior, not a heroic exception.

How This Applies to Your Sales Team

Let’s make this concrete. Here’s how you could apply all of this in the next 30-60 days.

1. Define your standard buying group by segment.
• For each ICP segment, list the 4-7 personas most often involved in deals: titles, typical concerns, what “value” means to them.
• Turn this into a simple reference sheet for SDRs and AEs.

1. Build or adopt an account mapping template.
• Add fields in your CRM for role, influence, stance, and department.
• Make it part of your deal hygiene: every opportunity above a threshold ACV must have an up-to-date map.

1. Redesign outbound cadences around buying groups.
• For 3-5 pilot accounts, build sequences that include messaging for champions, economic buyers, IT, and users.
• Track how many contacts you engage and what combination leads to meetings and late-stage opportunities.

1. Introduce multi-threading guardrails.
• Set target numbers of contacts and departments per opportunity by deal size.
• Update your stage exit criteria so deals can’t move forward without meeting minimums.

1. Create a ‘consensus kit’ for champions.
• One internal deck, one finance one-pager, one IT/security FAQ.
• Use them in a few deals, gather feedback from buyers, and iterate.

1. Consider augmenting with an outsourced SDR team.
• If your AEs are carrying quotas and prospecting, or your SDRs are overwhelmed, pull in help.
• A partner like SalesHive can handle list building, cold calling, and multi-threaded email into your buying groups, while your AEs focus on discovery, consensus-building, and closing.

Within a couple of quarters, you’ll see the compounding effect: more contacts per deal, more departments engaged, fewer “mystery stalls,” and a forecast that actually closes.

Conclusion + Next Steps

Navigating decision makers today is less about finding a magical “economic buyer” and more about orchestrating a buying group that already has its own agenda, politics, and constraints.

The data is unambiguous:

• Buying committees are large and only getting larger.
• Buyers do most of the journey without you and often have a favorite vendor before first contact.
• Multi-threaded, multi-department engagement dramatically increases win rates and speeds up cycles.

Your advantage comes from doing the unglamorous but powerful work: mapping accounts, tailoring outreach by persona, multi-threading from the first touch, and helping buyers build consensus instead of just pitching features.

You can build all of this internally, or you can accelerate it by working with a specialized partner like SalesHive that lives and breathes outbound into complex buying committees. Either way, the teams that master navigating decision makers will be the ones closing the deals everyone else thought were “stuck.”

Pick one or two action items from this guide, implement them this month, and make navigating decision makers a core competency for your entire sales org, not just your top rep.