Many B2B startups focus all their energy on the final decision maker. But buying decisions are rarely made by one person.
I recently had a conversation with a founder running an AI-enabled marketing tool built for eight-figure businesses. His go-to-market philosophy was refreshingly direct: go all in on the CMO. Do not waste time with the marketing team, the heads of, or anyone else using the platform day to day. Find the person with the budget authority and speak to them exclusively. In his mind, everyone else is noise.
I get the logic. It is clean, it is focused, and it sounds like the kind of discipline a lean startup needs when resources are tight and every conversation counts. But I think it misses something important about how B2B buying actually works right now, and the data backs this up.
A B2B buying committee is the group of people inside an organisation who collectively influence or make a purchasing decision. It typically includes an economic buyer (the person with budget authority), end users, technical evaluators, and internal influencers. In practice, no single person decides alone.
B2B purchasing decisions are never made by one person in a closed office. Research shows that buying committees in SaaS and tech now typically involve six to ten stakeholders, up two to three times from just a few years ago (Philomath Research, B2B Buyer Behavior Trends 2025). Some of this is driven by risk management: companies have been burnt by expensive tools that did not deliver and now require broader sign-off before committing. But in my view, a significant part of it is cultural.
Modern workplaces, particularly those that invest in employee experience and flatter structures, have fundamentally shifted how decisions get made. Collective decision-making is no longer just a process; it has become part of company identity. Leaders who value their team's buy-in will not push through a significant technology investment over the objections of the people who have to use it every day. The CMO may hold the budget, but if the head of demand generation, the marketing ops lead, and the content team all raise concerns, that deal stalls, sometimes indefinitely.
Add to this the sheer volume of competition in virtually every B2B software category. More alternatives mean more evaluation, more stakeholder input, and a longer, more scrutinised buying journey.
This complexity is not going away. If anything, it is deepening.
Here is the stat that should change how you think about your go-to-market approach: 70% of B2B buyers complete more than half of their research before they speak to anyone in sales (6sense, B2B Buyer Research). That means the conversation your sales team is having is, in many cases, a confirmation of a decision that was already forming well before anyone picked up the phone.
The small touchpoints your marketing builds (the LinkedIn post, the case study, the newsletter, the webinar) are not just brand exercises. They are the inputs that shape how a buying committee forms its views on your category, your credibility, and your fit before they have ever spoken to you. Account-based marketing, where you concentrate your resources on a defined set of target accounts and customise your approach for each, has become more important than ever precisely because of this. You are not just trying to reach the decision maker. You are trying to show up in the research phase of every person who will have a voice in the final decision.
I have a founder friend who was advised to redirect all her lean resources into sales and cut back on marketing entirely. I understand why someone would give that advice. It feels decisive and commercially focused. But here is the risk: if she is competing against a company with a comparable offering that has been showing up consistently across the channels her buyers are already researching, she is walking into a sales conversation where the other side already has a preference. The marketing layer is not just generating leads. It is conditioning the room before sales ever walks in. Strip it away entirely and you may find yourself converting at a much lower rate, not because your product is inferior, but because you were invisible during the part of the process that mattered most.
Think in committees, not just champions. When you define your ideal customer profile, map out the full group of people who are involved in the buying decision, not just the person with final sign-off. In organisations with strong employee-centric cultures, that group is wider than you expect. Then ask a practical question for each person: what do they need during their research phase, and what format best serves them? A case study framed around cost savings and ROI speaks to the CFO. The same story framed around time saved and workflow efficiency speaks to the team lead. Build content that addresses the committee, and you increase the number of people in the room who already feel understood before the first meeting.
Build a simple brand guide before you build a campaign. You do not need a large brand project or a design agency retainer to look credible and consistent. In the era of AI tools, there is genuinely no excuse for inconsistent tone of voice, mismatched visuals, or a sales deck that looks nothing like your website. A simple brand guide covering your core messages, tone of voice, colour palette and typography basics costs almost nothing to put together and makes everything you produce look more considered and intentional. When a buying committee is researching multiple vendors, the one that shows up consistently and professionally across every touchpoint creates a subconscious signal of reliability. That signal matters.
Rethink your events strategy before you spend the budget. I have seen small businesses burn their entire quarterly marketing budget on a single offline event and walk away with a handful of lukewarm business cards and no real pipeline to show for it. I have run targeted online events on a fraction of that spend and generated genuine leads, because the audience was specific, the content was genuinely useful, and the follow-up from sales was timely and relevant. You do not need to replicate what larger players in your category are doing. Work out what format plays to your strengths, find where your buyers actually choose to spend their time, and build an approach that you can execute consistently within your budget. The best event strategy is not the most impressive one on paper. It is the one that actually converts.
- Photo by Headway on Unsplash
Nina Jung is a Sydney-based growth strategist who works with founders as a fractional CMO and CRO, bringing senior-level strategy and hands-on execution at a fraction of the cost of a full-time hire. She also mentors early-stage founders and business students through GrowthMentor, Startmate, and UNSW.
