The Number That Should Change Your Pipeline Strategy
LinkedIn's 2026 Indie Summit surfaced a finding that most sales teams are not built to handle: 40% of B2B deals are lost to indecision, not to a competitor winning the deal. The buyer chose nobody.
At the same time, the average B2B buying group now consists of 10 people, and 94% of those buyers are using LLMs during their purchasing process. These numbers combine to explain why pipeline velocity has slowed for most teams even as top-of-funnel investment has increased.
Why Buying Groups Stall
More Stakeholders, More Perspectives to Align
With 10 people in a typical buying group, each carrying their own LLM-generated research and pre-formed views, getting to consensus requires more than a good demo. A single champion with internal momentum is not enough if the finance lead, the security team, and the technical evaluators all have different concerns that were never directly addressed.
Forrester''s research puts the number even higher at 22 stakeholders across internal and external influencers for major B2B purchases. The more stakeholders, the more alignment work required, and the more opportunities for one unresolved objection to stall the whole process.
AI-Assisted Research Creates Confident Questions, Not Confident Decisions
94% of B2B buyers now use LLMs to research vendors before contacting sales. This means buyers arrive at every conversation more informed than before. But being informed about options does not automatically produce a decision. It often produces more questions, more comparison, and more hesitation about choosing wrong.
The gap between "I know my options" and "I am confident in this choice" is where 40% of deals disappear.
Speed Creates Risk Signals for Cautious Buyers
Sales cycles that try to manufacture urgency, artificial deadlines, pressure on champions, risk triggering exactly the caution response that leads to indecision. A buyer who feels pushed is a buyer who slows down to protect themselves.
What Actually Moves Indecisive Buying Groups
Confidence Is Built in Groups, Not One-on-One
The most effective pipeline acceleration tool for a multi-stakeholder buying group is a shared experience where multiple committee members are present at the same time. When the security lead, the finance lead, and the technical evaluator all attend the same live event and hear the same answers to their questions, alignment happens faster than when each gets a separate call.
LinkedOtter generated 38 C-level attendees from a single event targeting 1,266 cybersecurity prospects. That is not 38 separate one-on-one outreach sequences. That is 38 decision-makers from buying groups who chose to show up to the same room.
Events Build Confidence Without Creating Pressure
A live roundtable or expert panel gives buying committee members a reason to engage that is not "evaluate our product." They come to learn about a topic they care about. They form views in real time. They see peer companies navigating the same challenge. The vendor earns trust without pitching.
For complex, high-value B2B purchases, this is how confidence gets built across a committee that cannot be moved by a single champion pushing internally.
Follow-Up Should Address Indecision, Not Just Interest
After an event, the follow-up that converts is not "here is our pricing deck." It is specific context on the exact question a stakeholder raised during the session, tied to proof that similar companies made the decision and it worked.
LinkedOtter scores event registrants and attendees by account fit and engagement signal. The warmest follow-ups go to accounts where multiple attendees from the same buying group showed up, which is the clearest signal that a group is actively evaluating and can be moved to a decision.
The Pipeline Implication
If 40% of your lost deals are lost to indecision, the question is not how to win more pitches. It is how to build more buying-group confidence earlier in the process. Events that gather multiple stakeholders around a relevant topic are structurally better at building that confidence than sequences of individual outreach touches.
LinkedOtter finds what your buyers care about, runs the event, and hands you the meetings with the warmest accounts. Take the free 60-second check to see if this fits your pipeline motion.