SaaS and tech teams: your deals stall in committee, and not with your champion. Here’s what to do

Gartner's 2025 survey of B2B buyers (including SaaS and tech) found that 74% of B2B buyer teams demonstrate unhealthy conflict during the buying decision process. In the same survey buying groups that reach internal consensus are 2.5 times more likely to report a strong deal. The flip side matters just as much. Groups that don't reach consensus don't reject you outright. They just stop moving and the deal gets forgotten.

This is a pattern I keep seeing. Sales hits every milestone. Demo goes well. The buyer seems genuinely convinced. Then, right after that last good call, everything goes quiet.

Most teams read this as a pipeline problem. Follow up more, add another case study, chase harder. It usually isn't a pipeline problem though.

Your champion believes in what you're selling. But belief doesn't survive a buying committee on its own.

Your buyers are divided in two groups; obvious and non-obvious. Behind the champion sits a CFO, a security lead, an ops head. These are your obvious buyers who may or may not sit in the meeting. Then there’s the engineer, the developer, the admin person, the sales person. These are your non-obvious buyers (or what I call “the influencers”), people who were never in your sales calls, and never heard your pitch directly from you. People who may get invited to a meeting with the obvious buyers to voice their point of view.

The real issue is your pitch only ever existed in the room you were in. It never made it into the rooms you weren't. Your champion leaves that final call excited, then has to rebuild your whole value story from memory, in their own words, in front of people who judge it far more harshly than you ever did.

Most of the time, they can't. Not because they don't believe in it. Because nobody gave them anything to actually carry.

Here's how to change that:

• Ask the right questions, before the main meeting. Find out who your buying committee actually is, and spot the non-obvious buyers early.
• Build a short one-pager, or even better, create a quick video (less than 30 seconds), for each buyer role. Speak to what that person actually cares about and invite questions. Give your champion something solid to forward, not something to explain from memory.
• Record your main presentation and the whole virtual meeting. Let anyone who wasn't in the room watch it after. Makes the champion's job easier, and shows transparency and confidence in your own value proposition.
• In the meeting, ask questions in the right order. This changes by sector, but logistics and budget always come last.
• Before you leave, know your next step. Book the follow up, or find out exactly when it's right to check back in. Vague timing is how deals quietly die.

If your close rates look strong right up until the final stretch, then deals quietly go cold with no clear objection and no competitor's name attached, this is very likely what's happening inside your buyer's business, not yours.

Treating the room you're not in as seriously as the one you are is the game changer.

Stat source:

Gartner Newsroom, "Gartner Sales Survey Finds 74% of B2B Buyer Teams Demonstrate 'Unhealthy Conflict' During The Decision Process", 7 May 2025

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