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One Deal, More Than One Decision Maker
The best-looking deal in your pipeline has been running for three months. The person you talk to answers every time, likes the proposal, shows up to every call on time. Then it goes quiet. Not because they lost interest, but because they were never the actual decision maker, and someone you’ve never spoken to is reviewing the whole thing again.
Why the good-looking deal dies near the close
Most sales teams track a deal by company name, as if the company were one person making one decision. In reality, any B2B deal big enough to need approval involves more than one person, and each of them cares about something different. The person you talk to most might only care whether it’s easy to use, while whoever approves the spend cares whether it’s worth the cost. If you keep answering the first person’s questions well but never learn what the second one needs, the deal looks like it’s moving right up until the approval stage, then stalls, because nobody ever answered the second person’s question.
This doesn’t show up in a normal forecast. A pipeline view shows you the stage and the next call date. It doesn’t show who inside the customer’s company you’ve actually spoken with, or who you haven’t.
In a long sales cycle that passes through several people on your own side before it closes, this problem stacks in two layers: your team hands the deal off internally, and the customer has multiple people involved too. Keep those two layers separate, or you won’t be able to tell whether a deal stalled because of a bad handoff on your side or because you never reached the right person on theirs.
How many decision roles does one deal have
Instead of asking “who decides,” which usually gets you one name, split it into roles. In a real deal, one person can hold several roles, or the roles can be spread across several people. Either way, every role needs an answer, or the deal stalls at that stage without anyone noticing why.
Four roles need a name in any deal that passes through more than one person: whoever raised this internally, whoever will actually use what you’re selling once it closes, whoever approves that this is worth doing, and whoever signs off to move forward. Take a deal sitting in your pipeline right now and check whether you can name all four. If you can only name two, that gap is exactly where the deal is at risk of going silent.
The role that gets missed most often is the actual user. The person you talk to most is usually the one coordinating the purchase, not the one who has to live with what you’re proposing every day afterward. Skip that group entirely and your proposal might answer the coordinator’s questions perfectly while missing the user’s completely, and the objection shows up right at approval, which is the hardest point to fix.
We stop at these four roles on purpose; splitting further turns into a logging burden nobody keeps up. They don’t apply evenly everywhere: in a small deal where one owner decides alone, one person can hold all four, and that’s fine, just log it that way. Watch for the opposite case instead: a deal that looks like one person, but has another you still need to clear who’s never been mentioned.
What to log for each person involved
Knowing the roles isn’t enough. It has to be written down, not held in one person’s memory, because a long deal changes hands more than once, and whoever remembers who talked to whom might not be the one carrying the deal forward next.
For each person involved, keep at least five fields: name and title, which of the four roles they hold, what they specifically care about or worry about, the date of your last contact, and who on your team spoke with them. Those five fields answer the one question that matters most in a long deal: if this person disappeared tomorrow, would the deal still move forward?
The field that gets skipped most is “what they care about.” In practice, teams log a name and a title and leave everyone’s actual concerns in the head of whoever spoke with them. When the deal changes hands, the next person knows who to call but not what to talk about, and ends up starting the conversation over from scratch, which is exactly what makes a decision maker feel like nobody is actually managing this.
Signs you’re talking to someone with no authority to decide
Three signs show up often. The first: every time you ask about budget or timeline, the person says they need to check, without ever saying who they’re checking with. That means there’s a layer above them you’ve never seen.
The second: you’re never invited into a call with anyone besides the person you talk to regularly. Everything you know comes secondhand, never firsthand. That means your proposal is being filtered through one person’s view before it ever reaches whoever actually decides.
The third: the deal keeps slipping, and the reason changes every time, quarter-end, then another team’s review, then an executive’s schedule. A shifting excuse like that usually isn’t a stall tactic. It’s a sign someone is still in the approval chain who you haven’t met, and each time it passes through them, a new question comes up you weren’t ready for.
When you see these signs, ask directly to talk to the missing role instead of trying to answer everything through the middle person. The more your proposal gets relayed, the more detail it loses and the slower it moves.
When to update the map of who’s involved
Don’t turn this into a separate weekly task; it’ll become one more field nobody keeps current. The right checkpoint is every stage change. Before a deal moves to the next stage, ask the same question every time: do you know all four roles yet? If any role is still missing, don’t advance the stage until you’ve spoken to that role at least once.
This ties the update to a rhythm your team already runs instead of adding a new one to remember, and it catches deals that look like they’re moving faster than they really are. A deal that skips a stage without ever reaching the real approver tends to land right back at that stage a few weeks later. This is the same checkpoint where stage-exit criteria should already be checked, so the two checks run together without adding a new step.
Start with the deal closest to closing right now
Pull up the deal you expect to close soonest and answer who raised it, who will actually use it, who approves the spend, and who signs off. If you can’t name all four, that’s the work before your next call, not another slide.
If you want this built into the process your whole team follows, not just the one deal you’re personally tracking, talk to us for 45 minutes about how to add this check to your sales process so every deal gets reviewed the same way.