Your Buying Committee Just Grew to 22 People. Plan for It

THE SHORT VERSION: Forrester's latest B2B buyer research puts the average purchase at 13 internal stakeholders plus 9 external participants, 22 people total. Deals aren't stalling because your pitch is weak. They're stalling because you're trying to win a buying committee you can't see and were never fully introduced to.

What happened

Forrester's 2026 Buyer Insights research, built from surveys of more than 17,500 global buyers, finds the average B2B purchase now pulls in 13 internal stakeholders and 9 external participants across a considered deal. That's a meaningfully larger committee than the 6-to-10 stakeholder range that's been the working assumption in GTM planning for the past several years. The same research finds 89% of buyers now use generative AI as a primary research tool, which partly explains the growth: AI-assisted research makes it cheap to loop in one more department head, one more compliance reviewer, one more end user for a quick opinion, so committees expand because consulting them got easier, not because the decision got more complex. Forrester frames this as a structural shift in how considered B2B purchases get made, not a temporary blip tied to any single industry.

Why your buying committee is the real obstacle

Most outbound and content strategy is still built for a single buyer persona, when the actual unit you're selling to is a 22-person committee with conflicting priorities, only a handful of whom you'll ever get on a call. Deals stall less from price objections and more from unresolved disagreement inside a buying group you never fully mapped. If your content and outreach are optimized to persuade one champion, you're solving for a tenth of the room, and the other nine tenths are forming an opinion of you from whatever secondhand summary your champion happens to pass along.

1. Map the committee before you pitch, not after it stallsAsk your champion directly who else touches this decision, including the external participants like consultants or auditors Forrester's data says are now routinely part of the process. A named list beats guessing later why a deal went quiet.
2. Build one asset per stakeholder type, not one deck for all of themA technical evaluator, a budget owner, and an end user need different proof. A single generic deck optimized for your champion leaves the other 21 people in the room with nothing built for them.
3. Treat silence as a committee problem, not a champion problemWhen a deal goes cold, the champion has usually hit resistance from someone you never met. Ask directly what internal pushback came up, rather than re-pitching the same person who already agrees with you.

By the numbers: Forrester also finds B2B buyers now complete an average of 27 distinct interactions across channels during a considered purchase, meaning the committee isn't just larger, it's also generating more total touchpoints than any single rep or dashboard is likely to track by hand.

What to do this week

On your next live deal, ask your champion point-blank who else needs to sign off before it closes, and who outside the company, like a consultant or auditor, gets a vote. Write down every name. Then check how many of them have actually seen anything from you directly, versus hearing about your pitch secondhand from your champion, and close that gap yourself this week.