You Are Selling to 6 People and Meeting Almost None of Them

Two numbers that explain most lost deals

Gartner's research into how businesses actually buy produced two findings worth pinning above a desk. A typical complex purchase involves 6 to 10 decision makers. And across the entire buying process, those people spend about 17% of their time meeting with potential suppliers, split across every supplier they are considering.

Do the division. If they are evaluating three vendors, any single supplier gets roughly 5% or 6% of the buying group's attention. Ninety five percent of the decision happens in rooms you are not in.

What the other 95% of the time looks like

Independent research. Internal debate. Someone forwarding a link. A sceptical colleague asking why not the cheaper option. A finance person who has never spoken to you deciding whether the number is defensible.

Your champion is doing the selling, badly, without you there, from memory, to people whose objections you have never heard.

Which changes what your marketing is for

Most B2B marketing is built to generate a conversation. That is the easy part. The hard part is arming the conversation you will never attend.

Make your material forwardable. The question is not "does this convince the person reading it" but "will this survive being sent to a sceptic". Pages that need you present to make sense die in the forward.

Answer the objections of people you never meet. The finance objection, the risk objection, the "why not do it in house" objection. Publishing them openly, as we do in agency versus in house, does the arguing when you are absent.

Publish your pricing logic. The single most common reason a deal dies internally is that nobody could defend the number. If your champion cannot explain what drives your price, someone senior will assume it is arbitrary. This is why we publish the cost anatomy.

Be findable by name. Committee members will search you individually. What they find is your third party interview. A thin web presence reads as risk, which is the same trust mechanism behind reviews.

The practical toolkit for the room you are not in

• A one page summary your champion can forward without editing.
• A written scope with the price logic rather than a total, so it can be defended line by line.
• An honest comparison with the obvious alternatives, including where you are not the best fit.
• A risk answer: what happens if it fails, what the exit looks like, what they own. The terms in the outsourcing contract guide exist partly to close this objection.
• Named people on your side, so the buyer knows who they are hiring.

Why this pairs with the 95:5 rule

If only 5% of buyers are in market at once, and the ones who are in market only give suppliers 17% of their attention, then the total share of a buyer's life you can directly influence is very small. Almost everything else is what they already believed, remembered, or found on their own.

That is an argument for publishing, not for pitching harder.

Frequently asked

Does this apply to small deals? The committee shrinks but rarely to one. Even a small firm has a founder, a finance voice, and whoever has to use the thing.

Should we ask who else is involved? Yes, directly and early. "Who else needs to be comfortable with this?" is the highest value question in a first call.

Can Fixora build this material? Yes: the forwardable summary, the scope with defensible pricing, and the objection content that argues when you are not there. Tell us your sales process and get a plan within 48 hours.