Buying Committees Are Getting Bigger. Here Are 3 Smart Ways to React.

Paul Petrone

Marketing @ LinkedIn

January 30, 2024

How to best sell to a large buying committee

Is your sales team facing larger, more cautious buying committees today?

You are far from alone. The average buying committee is now composed of 11+ people, according to Raconteur.

What’s exasperating the problem is that most sales reps have but one or two LinkedIn connections in their accounts, according to a LinkedIn Sales Navigator analysis.

No wonder sales cycles are so long and arduous today. It’s hard to sell to 11 people if you only know one or two of them.

How can you best sell to these large, risk-averse buying committees? This article will give practical advice you and your sales team can adopt immediately, and how LinkedIn Sales Navigator can further help.

1. Start each deal by mapping out the buying committee.

Again and again, I’m sure you’re seeing the same groups coming together – finance, legal, procurement, marketing, etc. – to form the buying committees you're trying to sell to.

In response, build your sales process around that reality from the start.

A great example is insurance giant NFP. They won’t let its salespeople qualify a deal unless the seller can list out who is in key roles at that account.

“We know the roles and personas that are often involved in the buying process,” NFP Senior VP of Sales Enablement Kyle Healy said. “Even if you, as a seller, don't have any engagement with them at first, you need to know them, right? So we won't let our sellers qualify an opportunity and move it into full pipe unless they can tick off the people that fit all of these roles. We know all of those people are going to be involved in the buying decision, so at a very early level at least our reps have identified them.”

By starting early, NFP is ensuring their reps are thinking about the big committees they're selling into, instead of relying on one or two champions.

How Sales Navigator can help: Relationship Map can keep your team aligned and up-to-date.

A common challenge here is that while one rep might know what the buying committee looks like, the rest of your team does not (or, worse yet, members of your team might have different answers to those same questions). Plus, that buying committee can change, and then it’s hard to know who to go after next.

The Relationship Map feature in Sales Navigator can address that. Relationship Map is a shareable visualization of the buying committee powered by LinkedIn data, so even if one member of the buying committee leaves, you know who is most likely to replace them.

Bottom line – by using Relationship Map in your accounts, your whole team can stay up-to-date and aligned. Learn more about the feature here.

2. Now it’s time to start multithreading, where “speaking multiple languages” is necessary for meeting people where they are.

Once you have your buying committee mapped out, it’s time for your team to start building relationships with the core members, i.e. multithreading the account. How should they do this?

We’ll go back to NFP for a second. They accept that their reps aren’t going to have in-depth meetings with every member of each of their buying committees. At a minimum though, they expect their reps to at least reach out to them online.

“Even if you aren’t meeting with everyone face-to-face, our reps need to ensure that the first time the members of the buying committee see their name isn’t in the final decision,” Healy said. “So, send those who you haven’t engaged with something of value. Maybe an article or research that would be interesting to someone with their position. Something, so they at least know who you are.”

Bonus tip: Sales Navigator’s Smart Links can help here, as they’ll show if the person actually clicked on the link your rep sent them and when. Learn more about the feature here.

That said, sending articles isn’t enough. Especially for the most influential members of the buying committee, it’s critical for your team to meet with them and, ideally, turn them into champions for your solution.

What’s the key to doing that? Muck Rack CRO Bryan Hamblin said it comes down to “speaking multiple languages.”

“We talk about needing to speak multiple languages in the context of multithreading, meaning the language a manager uses is different from the language a director uses versus the language an end-user uses,” Hamblin said. “You need to understand those different languages, because if you speak the wrong language to the wrong person, your message isn’t going to resonate. That’s incredibly important.”

Bonus tip: Your reps can have nuanced, timely conversations with the people on the buying committee by saving them as a Lead in Sales Navigator. Once they do, they’ll be alerted if the lead does things like post on LinkedIn or are mentioned in the news – which makes for a great opportunity to reach out.

How Sales Navigator can help: Relationship Explorer can show you your warmest paths in.

Along with the features mentioned, Relationship Explorer can be your team’s best friend for going deeper into any account.

With Relationship Explorer, once you set your Personas, it’ll show your team the eight best people to reach out based on their shared connections to you. This makes multithreading easier, as it empowers your team to go in warm, even without the support of their initial champion.

Learn more about this feature here.

3. Finally, use what you learned to make your close concise yet compelling – and include a concrete rollout plan.

The good news – if your team does those first two steps well, they will understand the structure of the buying committee. And, along with building champions along the way, they will have done deep discovery with several of its members, to really understand the core challenge at the account.

That’ll put them in a really strong position to close. Now, they can effectively speak to the comprehensiveness of the issue, as they understand the challenges it’s causing to each member of the buying committee.

The key – synthesizing all of that information into 1-2 slides, Hamblin said. In those slides, you need to not only outline the pain, but then tie that pain to a key strategic objective, he said.

“At Muck Rack, we talk about the implications of that pain and tying it to a critical business issue,” Hamblin said. “So it’s not just saying, ‘Hey, I have a problem.’ It’s quantifying what that problem is preventing the company from doing, and what strategic objective it’s linked to.”

Although showing pain alone often isn’t enough. Ground-breaking research in the sales book The JOLT Effect shows that what’s stalling deals today is “FOMU” – fear of messing up.

To overcome that, your sales team needs to outline exactly how your solution will fix the problem. Meaning, showing a concrete rollout plan. Sharing social proof on other companies that have done the same thing and seen results. And setting clear, realistic benchmarks.

“Our job is to de-risk the decision for them,” JB Sales Founder John Barrows said. “We want to paint this beautiful, euphoric picture of what the future will look like if the client goes forward with our solution. But nobody believes in the euphoric future. Instead, you need to understand what their worst-case scenario is, and determine steps you can take together to avoid that. Once you know that, you can de-risk the situation. And that makes them much more likely to move forward.”

Bottom line, it is indeed a tough sales environment. Buying committees are large. And in today’s uncertain times, many of its members are looking for reasons not to go forward, as taking a risk can feel scary.

Your sales team can overcome that by mapping out the buying committee early. By meeting each member of the buying committee where they are, and deeply understanding what matters to them. And then, putting all they learned into one compelling document that ties the problem to a key strategic objective – and shows the path forward.

Do that, and your team will help your customers solve large, complex problems, while closing larger, safer deals.

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