The Buying Committee Has Grown to 13. Is Your Content Built for It?
Helene Øiahals, Business Development Manager
August 20, 2026
Industrial marketers have spent years being told to find the champion, win them over, and let the deal follow. That advice is now out of date. The buying group has grown, it makes decisions collectively, and most of its members will never speak to your sales team.
The committee is bigger than it used to be
Forrester’s own The State Of Business Buying, 2026 report puts the typical buying decision at 13 internal stakeholders and nine external influencers, rising further for more complex or strategic purchases. Separate research from INFUSE’s Voice of the Buyer 2026 survey found that 29% of enterprise buying groups now include 10 or more stakeholders.
For manufacturers selling capital equipment, components, or long-term supply contracts, that tracks with what we see on the ground. A single deal can touch procurement, engineering, finance, operations, health and safety, and a plant manager who has to live with the decision for the next fifteen years. Every one of those people has a different question and a different reason to say no.
Most of the decision happens before anyone contacts you
Content Marketing Institute’s 2026 research found that B2B buyers consume an average of 13.4 pieces of content before contacting sales, with roughly 67% of the buying journey completed without any vendor interaction. Forrester’s research also shows buyers now favour self-guided routes such as generative AI, internet searches, and vendor websites over speaking to a salesperson in the earlier stages of a purchase.
By the time your sales team is in the room, the shortlist is usually set. The content that got a brand onto that shortlist did the actual selling.
This is why deals stall, not just why they’re won
A bigger committee does not just make deals harder to win. It makes them harder to close at all. Forrester’s own research found that nearly all purchases, 91%, stall at some point in the process. Budget and price are the leading causes, but the buyer’s own internal purchasing process was the third most cited reason. Stalling is rarely just about price. It is usually because one stakeholder out of thirteen still has an unanswered question, and nobody on the supplier side knew that question existed.
Every additional person in the room is a new set of success metrics, risk concerns, and technical objections that your content either answers or leaves hanging.
What this means for your marketing
Selling to one champion and hoping they carry the message internally is no longer a strategy. A few practical shifts follow from this:
Build content for roles, not just for the funnel stage. The technical evaluator, the finance sign-off, and the end user on the plant floor are reading different pages for different reasons. If your website only speaks to one of them, the other two are filling in the gaps with a competitor’s content, or with nothing at all.
Give internal champions something to forward. If most of your buying committee never talks to you directly, your champion is doing your selling internally, often with a slide deck or a PDF you never see. Comparison pages, spec sheets, and short technical explainers built to be shared do more work than a single killer sales call.
Treat the website as the shared reference point. With committees this size, a website that clearly separates technical proof, commercial detail, and application evidence is doing the job that a salesperson used to do in the room, for eight or nine people who were never in that room.
Assume every stakeholder is Googling you, or asking an AI platform, independently. A procurement lead and a plant engineer will not necessarily search the same way or land on the same page. Your content needs enough range to be found and to hold up wherever they land.
The takeaway
The single-buyer sale in industrial markets was already rare. Now it is close to extinct. Brands that build content and websites around a committee of eight to thirteen people, most of whom they will never meet, are the ones getting through the stall points that are quietly killing everyone else’s pipeline.
If you’d like to talk through how your content and website hold up against a real buying committee, we’d be glad to help.
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