Here's a pattern almost every B2B SaaS team recognizes immediately.
Someone comes in through the funnel. You run a great demo. There's real energy on the call — this person genuinely wants what you're selling.
Then, without any clear reason, the deal goes quiet. No objection. No "we picked a competitor." Just silence, and eventually an exit from the funnel you can't fully explain.
Forrester has a number that explains a lot of it: 86% of B2B buyer journeys stall out before they go anywhere.
Why: there is no single buyer
In B2C, one person decides and one person pays, usually themselves. In B2B, Forrester found that an average buying process involves 13 different internal stakeholders — and the uncomfortable part is what those 13 people can and can't do. Most of them can say no. Almost none of them can say yes on their own.
Add in the nine additional people Forrester found quietly influencing those 13 from behind the scenes, and you get 22 people with some kind of stake in a deal your sales team may only ever speak to two or three of.
Your job as a marketer or seller was never to convince "the buyer." It's to win the room — all 13, or 22, of them.
Three specific ways a deal dies anyway
- The budget holder with no real urgency. IBM popularized a framework for this decades ago called BAND: Budget, Authority, Need, Time. It's a genuinely useful checklist — does this person have the budget, the authority to decide, a clear need, and a timeline that makes a decision likely in the next few months? The problem: BAND assumes the person with budget authority is also the person who feels the pain. In most B2B deals today, they aren't. That's part of why more detailed frameworks like MEDDPIC have mostly replaced it.
- The unarmed champion. This is the person inside the account who genuinely gets it — who understands the problem and believes you're the right solution. But understanding isn't enough. That person still has to walk into a room and sell your case to people they report to, people in other departments, or people they don't even know yet. If you haven't given them the material to do that — the ROI numbers, the comparison points, the answers to the objections they'll hear — they walk into that room empty-handed. A champion with no ammunition loses almost as often as no champion at all.
- The silent killer. These are the people who have a stake in the decision but no relationship with you at all. Procurement. Security. Legal. Nobody on your marketing team is writing content for them, because they were never in your funnel to begin with — your champion is the one who has to bring them along, using materials you probably never built.
All three are preventable
None of these are inevitable. They're the direct result of building a persona around one buyer instead of a buying committee — which is exactly the gap a simpler three-persona framework is designed to close.
Watch the full recording of the webinar below for the complete breakdown, including a live look at the specific tool Kalungi uses to map buying committees for our own clients.