One More Stakeholder in an Already Large Buying Group
Gartner research finds 87% of B2B buying groups now include four or more stakeholders. A prospect asking to loop in procurement is not necessarily introducing a new obstacle, they are naming one more member of a buying group that was, statistically, already likely to include more than a handful of people before procurement ever came up by name.
Why Procurement Involvement Is Becoming the Default, Not the Exception
KPMG’s 2026 Global Third-Party Risk Management Survey of 851 organizations found only 18% have achieved full integration between third-party risk management and enterprise risk management, while 53% report their programs are mostly integrated and 71% plan further integration over the next three years. Separately, 83% of executives plan to expand their partner or vendor networks over the next one to three years. Formal vendor review is a growing part of how B2B buying decisions get made, which means procurement showing up earlier in a deal is a trend, not an outlier.
Distinguishing Normal Multi-Threading From a Premature Signal
This is reasoning, not a cited statistic. A prospect naming procurement after real interest has already been established, budget acknowledged, a use case discussed, is simply widening the buying group in a normal way. A prospect reaching for procurement before any of that groundwork exists can be a different signal: a way to defer a decision without saying no directly, or a genuine, process-driven organization that always routes vendor conversations through procurement regardless of deal stage.
What’s Driving Procurement to Show Up Earlier
Vanta’s State of Trust Report, surveying 3,500 IT and business leaders, found 72% of security decision-makers say security risk for their company has never been higher, up from 55% in 2024, a 17-point increase, and 61% say they spend more time proving trust externally than protecting their organization. That rising pressure on security and risk teams is a plausible driver of procurement and security stakeholders inserting themselves earlier into vendor conversations than they used to.
How to Respond Without Slowing the Deal Down
Practitioner guidance, not a cited statistic: rather than treating the request as a delay tactic, asking what procurement will specifically need, and by when, turns a vague escalation into a concrete checklist. That question also surfaces which version is happening, real process or genuine stall, faster than waiting to find out passively.
Meeting the Buying Group Where It Already Is
A larger buying group is not automatically a slower one, provided each new stakeholder’s actual requirement gets identified early rather than discovered late.
Human + AI SDRs ask the right clarifying questions the moment procurement gets named, so a deal moves toward what procurement needs instead of stalling on an unclear escalation.
Sources
The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.
- Landbase, 35 B2B Sales Statistics, citing Gartner’s Buying Groups research
- KPMG, 2026 Global Third-Party Risk Management Survey
- Vanta, State of Trust Report, Third Edition