Who actually decides in a B2B purchase, and why do they stall?

Rarely one person, and rarely the person you have been talking to. In most considered B2B purchases the decision is made by a group with different incentives, different exposure to being wrong, and no shared definition of success — and the group disagrees more than the supplier can see. Gartner's May 2025 sales research found that 74% of B2B buying teams demonstrate unhealthy conflict during the decision process.

That figure is worth reading carefully. It does not say buying groups argue about which supplier to pick. It says the conflict is unhealthy — unresolved, often unspoken, and frequently about something other than the purchase. A supplier watching from outside sees only the symptom: a decision that will not land.

A note on what I am not claiming. There are widely quoted figures for the average size of a B2B buying group, and I could not verify any of them against a primary source I was willing to cite, so this piece argues from roles rather than from a headcount. If you see a specific number attached to your industry, ask where it was measured.

What roles actually matter?

Not job titles — positions relative to the decision. The same person can hold two of these, and the most dangerous one is usually invisible from outside.

The last two rows do most of the stalling and appear in almost no CRM. Neither will tell you they exist, because in both cases the honest version of their objection reflects on them rather than on you.

Why does the deal stall rather than end?

Because nobody in the group has the authority to say no on everyone's behalf, but any of them can decline to move. Consensus purchases fail by attrition, not by decision. Each individual is being reasonable — asking for one more check, waiting for the quarter to turn, wanting to see it work somewhere else first — and the aggregate is a decision that never happens.

This is also why the deal feels alive right up until it is not. Every individual conversation is positive, because no individual is opposed. The opposition is structural.

Why does a single champion make things worse?

Because they are carrying the internal argument alone, in meetings you are not in, with material you gave them that was written for a different audience.

A champion is typically enthusiastic, technically convinced and structurally weak. They have to persuade a signer worried about accountability, a specifier worried about being overruled and possibly a blocker whose objection is about budget precedent rather than about your product. What you have given them is a proposal explaining why the product is good — an answer to a question their colleagues are not asking.

Single-threading is therefore not just a coverage risk. It concentrates the entire persuasion job in the one person with the least ability to do it.

What should you give a champion instead?

Material that survives being forwarded without you. Specifically:

1. The one-page version for the signer. What is being decided, what it costs, what happens if it does not work, and what the reversal path is. Not features.
2. The answer to the objection they have not repeated to you. Ask directly: "what is the strongest argument against this internally, and who is making it?" Then give them that answer in writing, in their words.
3. A first step that is small enough to approve without a committee. If the smallest thing you sell requires the full decision process, the process is your product's biggest competitor.
4. A reason the incumbent's advocate can live with. Framing the change as a response to new conditions rather than as a correction of an old mistake removes a personal cost that has nothing to do with your offer.

Gartner's B2B buying journey research also found that buyers are 1.8 times more likely to complete a high-quality deal when they engage with supplier-provided digital tools in partnership with a sales representative, rather than working through the purchase independently. The useful reading is not "add a tool" — it is that leaving the buying group to assemble the case on their own, out of whatever you handed over, is the weaker path.

How do you map the group without interrogating your contact?

Ask process questions rather than org-chart questions. "Who else has to be comfortable with this before it moves?" is answerable and unthreatening. "Who signs?" invites a defensive answer. "What happened the last time you bought something like this — how did that go through?" is the highest-yield question in the set, because it surfaces the real path rather than the official one, and it usually reveals the blocker without anyone having to name them as one.

Then ask what the last decision like this cost the organisation in internal effort. If the answer is "it took a year", you have learned the actual timeline, and you can design a first step that does not require that machinery to run.

What to do with your own stalled deal

Take the one that has been closest for longest and write down the six positions above with a name against each. The gaps in that list are the deal. If you have a name only for the champion and the specifier, you are not in a late-stage deal — you are in an early-stage one that has been running for a long time.

What to do once the map is drawn is covered in what to change when a deal goes quiet, and the underlying mechanism in why most B2B deals are lost to nobody. Where the same gap keeps appearing across several deals, it is a process problem rather than a deal problem, which is what turning interest into signed deals addresses.

Talk through a stalled deal