The Buying Committee Behind One Reachable Contact
The person on a discovery call is rarely the only person who has to agree before an agency gets hired. Buying-committee benchmarks commonly cited across the sales-research industry, traced to Gartner’s Future of Sales research and worth re-verifying against Gartner’s own original publication for a precision figure, put a typical enterprise software purchase at around 11 stakeholders, with a more general rule of thumb of 6 to 10 people for a complex B2B purchase, and mid-market deals between $25,000 and $100,000 typically involving 4 to 7 people.
The same research describes that number climbing fast: buying-group size nearly doubled in a decade, from an average of 5.4 stakeholders in 2015 to 8 to 13 in 2025. A single reachable contact on a discovery call was never the whole story, and the trend line says that gap is widening, not closing.
What Cross-Departmental Reach and Internal Conflict Mean for a Stall
Nearly 89% of B2B buying decisions cross multiple departments, finance, IT, security, procurement, and the actual line-of-business owner, per the same secondary-aggregated Gartner-linked research, worth confirming against the original source before treating as a precision figure. That alone explains why a contact who loved the call still cannot say yes on the spot, they may need sign-off from people who were never on the call at all.
74% of buying teams reportedly experience what the research calls unhealthy conflict while deciding. A “let me think about it” is sometimes a preview of exactly that, the contact walking back into a room where finance, IT, and their own manager do not automatically agree with each other, let alone with the agency’s pitch.
Why Consensus Is Worth the Wait
The same body of research reports that buying teams who do reach consensus are 2.5x more likely to rate their own decision as high-quality. That is a real incentive for the delay a rep experiences as frustrating: a prospect taking the time to align a fractured committee is more likely to arrive at a decision that sticks, rather than a fast yes that unwinds a month later once someone who was never consulted objects.
None of this is a reason to stop following up. It is a reason to treat the wait itself as consistent with a real, multi-person process, not as evidence the call went worse than it felt.
What Top Reps Do Differently When They Hear the Stall
Gong’s analysis of 121,828 recorded B2B sales meetings found top-performing reps respond to an objection, including a stall like “we need to think about it,” by asking a clarifying question 54.3% of the time, compared with just 31% for average reps. Top performers also pause roughly five times longer than average reps before responding at all.
Both findings point the same direction: resisting the urge to immediately fill the silence with more selling, and asking instead, is what separates a rep who learns something useful from one who just adds noise to an already crowded internal conversation the prospect is about to walk back into.
The Objection-Handling Instinct Worth Retiring
The common scripted response to “we’ll think about it” pushes back immediately, restating value, offering a discount, or asking what specifically is holding them back, all before finding out anything real. Given the committee dynamics above, that instinct is often aimed at the wrong problem: the hesitation may have nothing to do with the agency at all, and everything to do with a colleague the rep has never met.
A better question, grounded in the data above, asks who else needs to be comfortable with this decision, not to pressure the contact, but to find out whether the real obstacle is even visible from the call the rep just had.
Turning a Stall Into Useful Information
Once “we’ll think about it” is read as a description of a real internal process rather than a rejection in disguise, the useful move is finding out who else is in that process before the deal goes quiet for good. That is a qualification question as much as a closing one, and it is more useful earlier than later.
Human + AI SDRs ask exactly that kind of question in the first SMS conversation, surfacing who else is involved before a discovery call ever lands on the calendar, instead of discovering the real committee for the first time at the stall.
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.
- The Starr Conspiracy, B2B Buying Committee Benchmarks 2025
- Gong, 30 Mind-Blowing Sales Stats That Will Change The Way You Sell