The composition and size of the average B2B SaaS buying group are more intricate than ever.
Founder @ Playboox - Helping you wow buyers and sellers to win big deals more often.| 4x Head of Sales | ex-Gartner and Symantec
The statistics about number of stakeholders involved in a purchase are misleading they fail to account for the decision-making role, department, degree of authority, or influence of each of these stakeholders. Are they four user buyers and one VP? Or, are they four VPs across different departments and someone from IT? These aren't likely scenarios, but you get my point. To be fair, Brent Adamson and Matt Dixon allude to this in The Challenger Customer when citing a quote from an IT vendor: “For us it’s not 5.4 people, but 5.4 committees of people!” Still, it would be interesting to analyze the typical power and role structure in a software purchase. Using a weighted average, where each stakeholder type is assigned a value based on their management level, would likely be more revealing and useful. For example, assigning higher values to VPs than to individual contributors could provide a clearer picture. My guess is that applying this approach would show that software buying complexity has increased by an order of magnitude—not only are there more stakeholders involved, but more of them are now at the executive level with the CFO chief among them. This change in the size and makeup of the buying group has made mapping, navigating, and driving consensus more challenging than ever. So, in 2024, navigating 8.2 committees might be closer to the new reality.