Mastering Sales: How to Strategically Navigate B2B Buying Committees

Consider this scenario.

You’re in the middle of your weekly deal review with one of your reps. In the review, she tells you there were 5 people involved in the last meeting. You ask her more about them. And you tell her to multithread with all these stakeholders in the buying committee of the deal.

Newsflash. Your rep knows she needs to multithread. What she really needs from you is how can she do it in an organic and non-invasive manner. In a way that does not compromise her relationship with the champion. That she has worked hard to build. Trying to go around them snooping for more information might make her uncomfortable.

When you ask your reps to multithread, you also need to tell them how to do it. They may or may not know how many members are actually present in the buying committee of deals. But they would not want to mess up what they have built.

Before you know it, the deal might get stalled or lost. Because there was no strategy to reach out to the important members of the buying committee for that particular deal.

Imagine this happening with several deals in the pipeline. That will majorly impact your overall win rates, sales forecasting and pipeline health.

The solution lies in multithreading. But not indulging in random acts of it.  

It has more to do with consensus, momentum and engagement with all the members of the buying committee. 

To multithread better, your entire sales team needs to be able to see critical buying committee information in their CRM such as:

– Who all are involved in a deal?

– At what stage of the deal are they involved in?

– Who all are being invited but are missing meetings?

– Who was involved until last month but has dropped off now?

Your reps and sales managers need full visibility into this contact and engagement data.

Only then can you guide your reps on how they can strategically multithread to win more deals.

But as of today, most sales teams do not have this crucial data in their CRM.

Why B2B Buying Committees Matter

We no longer sell to a single decision-maker. We sell to a buying committee.

A buying committee is a group of people who influence the buying process. Each buying committee can involve people from multiple departments, roles and personas. 

In order to close a deal successfully, it’s important to know the key roles and personas within each buying committee. A personal can be the title a person holds in the company. For example, CFO. A role refers to the buying role that the person plays in the deal. Roles are usually of five types – Champions, decision makers, influencers, users and ratifiers.

Both personas and roles play a crucial part in moving a deal forward. And sellers need to build relationships with all the people involved in a buying committee to successfully close an opportunity within an account. 

In order words, sellers need to multithread. 

The Power of Multithreading in Sales

Multithreading is the process of building relationships with multiple stakeholders within a deal. It is the art of being able to identify all the stakeholders in the buying committee and where they stand in the business. 

Multithreading helps sellers understand the motivations of each stakeholder and create a personalized proposal for each of them on how the product/service adds value to them.

Top sellers are 13% more likely to multithread than their contemporaries. This is why they make it a habit.

By multithreading a deal, sales reps can identify, engage and influence multiple stakeholders within a prospective account. They can understand the needs of each stakeholder and form a holistic understanding of what the buying committee wants out of this association. 

This helps reps branch out their influence effectively which can lead to:

1. Higher value deals

Sellers can find avenues for higher budgets by getting buy-in from multiple stakeholders within the buying committee.

2. Faster sales cycles

Decisions can be made faster when all stakeholders are aligned in the buying journey.

3. Lower risk of losing deals

Even if one champion quits, sellers can reach out to other members of the buying committee to keep the deal safe.

But multithreading only works if it is strategic. Let’s understand what this means. 

The Challenges of Strategic Multithreading

Sellers understand that multithreading is crucial to close deals. But random acts of multithreading do not help move a deal forward. Multithreading needs to be strategic. 

In order to strategically multithread in sales, sellers need visibility into the entire buying committee. And know the depth and breadth of engagement they have with each stakeholder. 

These insights can be very powerful as they clearly show which roles and personas are involved in the deal. And who needs to be engaged. 

Most sellers today don’t have this information. They spend countless hours trying to find this information by probing their champion. Such interventions never give the full intel of buyer committee engagement.

The Need for Insights into Buying Committees

A buying committee can have anywhere between 10-30 members, depending on the size of the deal. The size of this buying committee increases as businesses keep a more watchful eye on budgets. Which has been the case in 2024 as 89% of deals were stalled due to tighter budgets.

But most of this information about buyer contacts and their roles never make it to the CRM. This presents a very faint picture of the stakeholder relationships that need to be built to move the deal forward.

Without accurate contact data in the CRM, sales managers never really get a true picture of what’s really going on. 

In order to successfully push more deals to closed-won, sellers need access to this buying committee. Relying on traditional methods of nurturing a single champion is very risky. Sellers today need to have the support and technology that helps them identify:

1. How big is the buying committee for each deal?

2. What are the personas and roles within each buying committee?

3. What are the expectations of each role and persona within the buying committee?

4. Who is and isn’t engaged in the deal?

Having this kind of insight into every opportunity within every account is vital to win more deals in 2024 (and beyond).

Unlocking Strategic Multithreading with AI

Historically, it has been very difficult for sales teams to get insights into buying committees. But with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, these buying committees can be mapped and their engagement can be tracked without any manual effort.

For example, by automating contact data capture, sales leaders can get instant visibility into their buying committees. Combining this with good Salesforce reporting, they can get visibility into the depth and breadth of engagement with each member of the buying committee.

This kind of unprecedented visibility into contact data (emails, roles, personas) and mapping them automatically to opportunities and accounts will change the course of multithreading for sales teams. 

Sales teams already have a treasure trove of first-party, marketable contact data trapped in their inboxes and calendars. By extracting this information and automatically mapping it to the right opportunities and accounts in the CRM, sales teams have the opportunity to push more and more open deals to closed won.

Selling is About Relationships

Even though we are in the age of AI, selling still relies on building relationships. Because the truth remains that people buy from people, especially when you consider mid-market or enterprise deals. Who to build these strong relationships with is where AI can help. 

Building a relationship with each stakeholder in the buying committee will be like getting access to a door that can open the path to closed-won. It’s vital to open each door and connect the paths to ultimately walk towards a closed-won.

Gain Unprecedented Visibility into your Buying Committees With Nektar

Nektar is a zero adoption contact and activity capture solution that automatically creates, updates and maintains your Salesforce contacts, ensuring accuracy and completeness. It’s self healing AI learns from user and tool updates – making sure your CRM data hygiene is always running on auto-pilot.

With Nektar, you can:

1. Automate buying committees

 Nektar automates contact capture and links them to the right opportunities and accounts in Salesforce. It enhances contacts with job titles and buying roles, providing insights into buying committees.

2. Track buying committee – seller activity data

Capture the depth and breadth of buyer-seller engagement. Ensure reps are doing enough to win deals with unified activity data across the deal lifecycle within Salesforce.

3. Track buyer job changes

Know when stakeholders from your buying committee in Salesforce move companies. Monitor job changes to multithread effectively for existing deals where champions move. And find net new pipeline opportunities for companies where your champion moves to.

4. Get unified CRM data

Trust your CRM with access to clean and complete contact data. Plug all historical and ongoing data gaps in accounts, contacts, opportunities, leads, events and tasks.

Nektar is built for sales. Gain true visibility into buying committee engagement and deal activities.

Have questions? We are here to help.

See how Nektar can help you close more deals by identifying the buying committee and tracking engagement with different stakeholders. We’d love to hear from you and explore how we can tailor our support to meet the distinctive needs of your business.

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