Multithreading sales means building relationships with every person in the buying group who can approve or block a purchase, beyond the champion who attends your demos. With B2B buying groups typically ranging from five to 16 people, Sales, Marketing and Partnerships need a shared view of the account to see which stakeholders are covered, which are missing and what each one needs before the deal can close.
Your champion loves the product. They've attended every demo, helped build the business case and assured you the deal is moving forward. Then, just as you're expecting a signature, Procurement gets involved. Finance has questions nobody anticipated. Suddenly, a deal that looked close to signing is back in review.
Has Finance approved the budget? Has IT signed off on the integration requirements? Does Procurement know a new supplier is being considered?
Those conversations may be happening without your sales team, leaving little opportunity to address concerns before they delay the deal. Or they may not be happening at all, leaving the approval process unclear.
A strong relationship with one contact can make an opportunity look healthier than it is. The sales team knows what the champion thinks, but may have little insight into the people whose approval is needed to close.
This is the problem a multithreading sales strategy is designed to address. We'll look at why contact numbers can give sales teams a false sense of account coverage, how to identify the people who influence a decision, and how Sales and Marketing can coordinate their efforts around the full buying group.
Account coverage is often measured by the number of contacts in the CRM. A more useful measure is whether those contacts represent the decisions the buying committee needs to make, and whether anyone has spoken to the people responsible for them.
A CRM can contain dozens of contacts from a target account and still tell you very little about the likelihood of closing a deal.
Consider a company evaluating new HR software. The sales team has conversations with an HR Director, two HR managers and an HR operations lead. All four contacts are engaged, the demos are going well, and the HR Director is championing the purchase. The account looks well covered, but the contacts may share similar priorities and have limited influence over final approval.
Four engaged contacts can still leave the budget, technical review and final approval uncovered. The number of relationships matters less than the decisions those relationships help the team understand.
Gong's analysis of 1.8 million deals found that closed-won deals had twice as many buyer contacts as deals that didn't close. Its research also found that multithreading increased win rates by 130% for deals worth more than $50,000.
Those findings support building relationships beyond a single contact. The practical question is whether the people you're engaging represent the responsibilities and influence involved in the purchase.
A champion in sales is valuable because they understand the problem, see the potential benefit and are willing to advocate internally. They can explain the organization's priorities and help the sales team understand how the purchase is progressing.
Their perspective still has limits. A champion sees the purchase through their own team's priorities and may not know what other departments will ask for until those departments are involved.
The champion might not know every requirement, have access to every decision-maker or be able to resolve objections outside their area of expertise. Even an enthusiastic advocate cannot guarantee that the rest of the buying committee agrees.
Sales teams need to establish those positions directly, particularly when the purchase involves several departments. Otherwise, they risk mistaking one person's support for organizational agreement.
If Legal raises a concern about contract terms during discovery, the team has time to adjust the proposal. If the same concern comes up just before signing, it could trigger renegotiation, delay procurement or stop the deal altogether.
Forrester's 2024 research found that 13 people are involved in the average B2B purchase decision, with 89% of purchases involving two or more departments. Gartner's research puts the B2B buying committee at between five and 16 people across as many as four functions, and found that 74% of buyer teams show unhealthy conflict during the decision process.
With that many people involved, and that much room for disagreement, sales teams need to understand the approval process early enough to respond to its requirements. The goal is to identify who needs to evaluate the solution and what each person needs to see before the purchase can progress.
Stakeholder research should start from the purchase itself rather than the org chart. The makeup of the buying group depends on what's being bought, how much it costs and how many departments it affects.
A useful stakeholder map begins with the requirements of the purchase. Who owns the budget? Who evaluates technical suitability? Who assesses compliance or contractual risk? Who will use the product, and who has final approval?
Work backwards from the decisions that need to happen, then identify the people responsible for making or influencing them. This also reveals unanswered questions, such as whether a budget has been allocated or whether the organization has a formal security review.
Searching LinkedIn profile by profile might work across a handful of accounts, but it becomes time-consuming across a larger target list. Job titles vary between organizations, and equivalent responsibilities often sit with different roles.
For teams asking how to find decision makers in a company at volume, Surfe filters contact data by seniority, department, job title, location and more. Salespeople can use those filters to identify relevant people within target accounts, then establish which individuals are involved in the decision and how best to reach them. A repeatable process makes account research less dependent on an AE finding spare time to investigate every organization.
The research needs to continue after the first meeting. A stakeholder who was central at the start may no longer be involved by the time the deal reaches procurement. Surfe's job-change signals help teams spot when contacts move roles or leave a company, so they can reassess their relationships and identify who needs to be involved instead.
Job changes sit alongside other buying signals, such as a new budget holder joining the account or several stakeholders engaging with your content in the same week. Tracking these signals tells the team where to look before it relies on outdated assumptions, which matters most in long sales cycles.
Finding the right people only helps if the information reaches everyone working the account. A multithreading sales strategy depends on Sales, Marketing and Partnerships sharing the same view of the buying committee and agreeing who engages each stakeholder.
When stakeholder knowledge sits in one salesperson's inbox or notes, other teams have limited visibility. Marketing may target the wrong audience, colleagues may approach contacts without knowing what's already been discussed, and leadership may mistake high activity for strong account coverage.
A shared account record should show who is involved in the decision, what each stakeholder prioritises and where the team still lacks a relationship.
With that record in place, each team can contribute differently. Sales builds direct relationships with decision-makers, Marketing provides relevant content and account-based campaigns, and Partnerships can facilitate introductions where existing relationships make them appropriate. Without coordination, prospects receive disconnected messages from different people, or several teams approach the same stakeholder without knowing what has already happened.
The team should agree who needs to be reached, why the relationship matters and which activity is appropriate. Some stakeholders may need a direct conversation; others may benefit from useful information before they're ready to engage with Sales.
Meetings booked, emails sent and contacts added are useful measures of sales activity, but they don't show whether an account is closer to making a decision.
Account reviews should establish whether the team has identified the people responsible for key approval requirements, confirmed their priorities, checked which stakeholders are showing buying signals and built the relationships needed to progress the purchase. Where the team's knowledge of a stakeholder comes only from the champion, that position should be treated as unconfirmed.
For example, a deal may have several active contacts but still lack a confirmed budget owner or a technical evaluation. Identifying those gaps gives the team a concrete next step, rather than allowing a high volume of activity to create a false sense of progress.
Marketing can fall into the same trap as Sales when campaigns focus exclusively on the person who downloaded a report or requested a demo. The conversion shows interest from one individual, but other stakeholders may be researching alternatives, assessing requirements or preparing to challenge the business case.
LinkedIn and Bain research found that hidden buyers, including stakeholders in functions such as Procurement, Finance and Legal, account for 49% of decision-making sway, compared with 51% for visible target buyers.
Marketing therefore needs a way to reach the rest of the buying committee. Knowing which other people are involved in an account helps teams select relevant audiences, and several contacts from one account engaging at once is a stronger buying signal than a single form fill.
Each member of the B2B buying committee judges the purchase against their own responsibilities, so each needs different evidence. Account-based campaigns can address those concerns while keeping the overall business case consistent. Marketing can use stakeholder data to plan relevant content, while Sales shares what it learns through direct conversations, so messaging reflects the responsibilities of everyone in the buying group.
The depth of stakeholder engagement should reflect the deal's approval requirements. Where decision-making is concentrated, a lighter approach may be sufficient. As more functions become involved, the team needs a clearer view of who influences each stage and how their requirements intersect.
For deals with several approval functions, multithreading helps the team address competing priorities before they delay a decision. Gartner found that buying groups that reach consensus are 2.5 times more likely to report a high-quality deal.
Start with how the account will make its decision, then identify the people who can influence or block it. When Sales, Marketing and Partnerships know which decisions remain uncovered, they can address those gaps before a promising deal stalls at approval.
Peter Judge has spent his career in global enterprise sales, where he built a specialism in successfully closing long, multi-stakeholder deals. He now leads Surfe's account executive team in North America. He is hands-on with revenue teams on the prospecting and outbound work that fills their pipeline. Born in the UK. Based in New York. Flinches every time someone says "soccer" ⚽
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