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A deal that looked solid three months ago is now going nowhere. Your champion is still warm, the business case hasn't changed, but nothing's moving. So you follow up. Maybe push a bit harder. But it doesn't shift.
Here's what's usually going on: 86% of B2B purchases stall, and the most common reason isn't timing or budget, it's that the deal was running on a single relationship. One contact. When they go quiet, there's no one else to carry it.
The deal isn't broken. It just never had enough coverage.
Single-threaded deals are a structural risk
When engagement at an account runs through a single contact — a champion, a friendly VP, whoever responded to your last campaign — you’ve got a fragile pipeline. Not because that person isn’t valuable, but because they’re rarely the only one who matters.
The average B2B buying group today involves somewhere between 10 and 13 people. 89% of those groups span multiple departments. Finance, IT, operations, procurement, they all have a seat at the table and often at different stages during the process. Unfortunately, ‘unhealthy conflict’ occurs in almost three-quarters of decision-making processes, meaning friction and competing priorities are baked into the dynamic, not the exception.
When your engagement is single-threaded, you’re exposed to all of that friction and none of the control. A late-stage objection from a stakeholder you’ve never touched can kill a deal you thought was done. A budget holder who appears six months in will assess your solution cold, without the groundwork you’ve already laid.
In our B2B Buyer Intelligence Research, 39% of marketers say their biggest buyer intelligence struggle is understanding how cross-functional buying behaviour plays out. That’s the gap between knowing a deal is stalling and knowing why.
Recommended reading: Inside the buying group: How to market to every stakeholder
What multithreading actually means in practice
Multithreading isn’t just a sales tactic. It’s a coverage strategy, and it starts in marketing.
The idea is straightforward: identify and engage the full buyer group, not just the obvious decision-makers. That means getting visibility into who else is active within a target account, what roles they’re likely playing, and what their specific concerns are at each stage of the buying process.
This is where buyer group expansion changes the picture. Rather than relying on one contact’s behaviour to infer account-level intent, you get a read across the whole group: who’s researching early, where technical evaluators are starting to engage, and when budget holders enter the conversation. Each of those patterns tells you something different, and each requires a different response.
A buyer group matrix maps this out clearly: which roles are active, what their likely influence is, and what content or messaging fits their current stage. It turns a vague sense of ‘this account is in-market’ into an orchestrated plan for every stakeholder involved.
Recommended reading: There's a gap killing your conversion rate (Hint: it's not your targeting)
Where buyer group expansion reduces deal risk
The biggest risk in a single-threaded deal isn't the deal going dark; it's that nothing warned you. By the time your champion tells you there’s resistance, it’s often too late to address it.
Buyer group coverage gives you visibility before things go wrong. You start to see patterns — new roles appearing and engaging, language shifting from solution evaluation toward pricing and contracts — that tell you where the deal actually is, and who's now involved. That means you can put the right content in front of the right people: implementation detail for technical evaluators, and ROI framing for the CFO entering late, rather than running the same sequence to everyone and hoping it lands.
The expected outcomes are measurable: more stakeholder coverage per account, stronger engagement signals across the buying group, and fewer late-stage surprises. That last one matters more than most teams admit. Reduced deal risk at the bottom of the funnel is often worth more than additional volume at the top.
The one signal worth paying attention to
If your deals are consistently stalling, it’s worth asking a simple question: how many people at that account have we actually reached?
Single-threaded engagement isn’t just a pipeline problem; it’s a data problem. You’re making decisions based on a fragment of the picture, forecasting on the basis of one relationship, and leaving the rest of the buying group to form their own conclusions without any of your input.
Buyer group expansion addresses exactly that. It’s not about chasing every stakeholder or flooding accounts with content; it’s about knowing who’s active, what they care about, and how to build the kind of multi-contact coverage that makes deals more resilient.
Most deals don’t stall because the value proposition is wrong. They stall because the right people never heard about it.
