The Deal Sales Never Saw

Maya had run a clean process. Three discovery calls with the VP of Operations, a tailored demo, a proposal that hit every requirement on the brief. By the time she sent the final pricing, she was confident. The buyer had said, more than once, "This is exactly what we need."

But then the deal went quiet.

Two weeks later, a rejection email arrived, polite, brief, and impossible to argue with, because it didn't come from anyone Maya had ever spoken to. It came from procurement, who had already made the decision in a room she was never in.

So she asked her champion what happened. He was apologetic, and honest: Finance had questioned the ROI assumptions. Legal had flagged a data-residency clause. Procurement had compared her company to a competitor whose website answered those exact questions in the first click. Maya's product was never in doubt. Her proposal just hadn't been built for the people who ultimately decided its fate.

She had won the buyer, but she had lost the buying group.

This is the pattern behind a number that should reshape how B2B teams think about content: 71% of hidden decision-makers have little or no interaction with sales.¹ Finance, legal, procurement, compliance, operations: the people who can quietly stop a deal are often the people sales never meets.

And they aren't passive. In fact, 55% of these hidden decision-makers actively use thought leadership to vet vendors before a deal ever reaches them. While Maya was running a textbook sales process with her champion, someone in Legal was independently forming an opinion of her company based on content she didn't know existed, or didn't have.

One proposal, written to answer one question (does it solve the problem?), was landing in front of five different people, each asking a different question:

Ultimately, a single product message was never going to carry that weight. It wasn't built to.

On her next enterprise deal, Maya stopped writing one proposal and started building a package. Alongside the solution overview, she gave her champion a one-page business case with defensible ROI assumptions, a short risk-and-compliance brief co-written with her own legal team, a realistic implementation timeline, and two reference stories from companies of a similar size and structure.

None of it targeted her buyer. Instead, all of it targeted the room her buyer would walk into without her.

Even so, the deal still took time. But this time, when it went quiet, it wasn't because someone unseen had killed it. It was because someone unseen had everything they needed to say yes.

Sales can only influence the people in the room. Content must influence everyone else. So before writing anything, map the whole buying group: who uses it, who funds it, who assesses the risk, who implements it, who can stop it, and build content that travels to each of them, with or without you there to explain it.

Reach beyond the obvious buyer. McCorkell brings audience strategy, content, creative and media together to influence the wider B2B buying group.