The situation
A UK-based B2B cybersecurity company (£20M ARR, targeting enterprise financial services firms with 2,000+ employees) had a pipeline quality problem with a specific signature: deals advanced well through technical evaluation but stalled or died in internal approval. Post-mortem analysis of 12 lost deals in a 6-month period revealed the pattern - CISO was a strong advocate, but CFO objections on ROI, IT Director concerns about implementation, and procurement requirements hadn't been addressed before the approval stage.
The challenge
The challenge was buying committee blindness. The sales and marketing motion was built around CISO engagement - the primary technical champion - while the other 4-6 stakeholders involved in enterprise security purchasing decisions were receiving no pre-engagement content or relationship building. By the time deals reached approval stage, the non-CISO committee members were evaluating the proposal cold, without the context and trust that months of engagement had built with the CISO.
Our approach: mapping and engaging the full decision-making unit
The programme redesign required two parallel workstreams: mapping the actual buying committee structure for this client's ICP, and building the content and outreach infrastructure to engage each persona in the committee before and during active sales cycles.
The first step was understanding who was actually involved in purchase decisions at target accounts. Win/loss interviews with 12 recent deals — both closed-won and closed-lost — identified four distinct committee roles: the CISO or Head of IT Security (technical evaluator and typical champion), the CFO (economic buyer, entering at shortlist stage), the CTO or IT Director (technical architecture sign-off), and Legal/Compliance (contract and data processing veto). Previous deals had been almost entirely single-threaded through the CISO, leaving three of four decision-makers unengaged until it was too late.
Four persona content sets were developed: for the CISO (strategic security frameworks, threat landscape content, peer case studies from similar-profile organisations), for the CFO (ROI models, payback period calculations, risk quantification frameworks, reference calls with peer CFOs), for the CTO (technical architecture documentation, integration specifications, implementation timeline templates), and for Legal/Compliance (data processing agreements, security certification documentation, regulatory alignment summaries). Each content set was designed for the champion to share at the appropriate stage — not for direct marketing distribution.
LinkedIn campaigns were restructured to target multiple contacts at each Tier 1 account simultaneously, with different creative for each persona. The CISO persona saw strategic security content. The CFO persona saw ROI and risk-quantification content. The IT Director persona saw technical integration content. Account engagement tracking in HubSpot monitored which personas at each account were engaging, allowing sales to understand buying committee activation before initiating multi-threaded outreach.
A structured multi-threading playbook was built for the SDR and AE teams: specific triggers for when to expand from single-contact to multi-contact outreach, templated approaches for requesting introductions to additional stakeholders, and a stakeholder mapping template to be completed within the first two discovery calls. Sales training covered how to use the persona content sets in context — the right asset for the right person at the right stage of the buying process.
Results
Average sales cycle at programme close, down from 11 months at the start - a 36% reduction driven by pre-engaged buying committees and multi-threaded relationships.
Average engaged contacts per target account at close of programme, up from 1.1 at the start. Multi-threading was the primary driver of deal progression improvement.
Accounts with complete buying committee maps showed twice the deal progression rate of accounts with partial committee visibility during the programme period.