The meeting you're not in

Why your deal is decided in conversations you'll never witness — and what to do about it.

Most B2B deals are not won in the meetings you attend.

They are won in the meetings you are not invited to. The eight minutes in a corridor between calls. The Tuesday 1:1 where your champion's boss asks, "So what's this thing actually for?" The Slack DM at 6:47pm where someone in finance writes, "I don’t get it. Isn’t this what the CRM is for?" and your champion has 90 seconds to answer before the conversation moves on.

That is where the decision is made. And in most deals, you are nowhere near it.

This is not a failure of the sales process. It is the architecture of modern B2B buying. Gartner's research now puts the average buying group at between five and 16 people across as many as four functions, with 74% of those groups showing unhealthy conflict during the decision process. Groups that reach genuine consensus are 2.5 times more likely to report a high-quality deal. (Gartner) Most of that conflict, and most of that consensus-building, happens off the call. Your champion is the one carrying it. And your champion is doing a job almost no one trains them for, selling your solution, sideways and upward, inside their own organisation, with a fraction of your information.

The hard truth in complex sales is not that the buyer is buying.

It is that your champion is selling.

Your champion is a salesperson. Just not a very good one.

This is not a criticism of the people who back our deals. It is a description of their position. The internal champion is a professional whose actual job is something else like  engineering, operations, finance, marketing, and who has volunteered, sometimes reluctantly, to argue for your solution inside a room of skeptics. They do not have your enablement. They do not have your case studies open in another tab. They do not have your competitive battlecards or your ROI calculator. They have a memory of your last call, a half-edited deck, and three minutes of speaking time before someone changes the subject.

And yet the entire decision passes through them.

A second piece of Challenger research explains it. Adamson and Dixon, in their work on what they call the buying side of the deal, draw a sharp line between two types of internal contact, namely the Talker and the Mobilizer. Talkers take meetings, ask questions, give compliments, and forward information politely. Mobilizers do something different. They challenge the status quo internally. They build coalitions. They are uncomfortable with comfort. They want to know what could go wrong, not what could go right, because they need to defend the choice in a room they have lived inside for years. (HBR — "The New Sales Imperative")

Most sales professionals spend their time with Talkers and convince themselves they have Mobilizers. The deal feels great until the day it dies in a meeting nobody warned them about.

The diagnostic is not what the contact says to you. It is what kind of help they ask for.

A Mobilizer asks for arguments. A Talker asks for reassurance. A Mobilizer wants to understand the weaknesses of the solution so they can pre-empt them. A Talker wants you to confirm there are no weaknesses. A Mobilizer asks who else in your customer base looks like their organisation, in order to defuse a specific internal sceptic by name. A Talker asks for general references they will probably never call.

If your champion has not yet asked you a hard question about what your product cannot do, you do not have a Mobilizer. You have a Talker. The deal is in real trouble and you cannot see it yet.

What the champion actually needs from you, before they leave the call

Once the role of the champion is taken seriously, as a seller, in a job they did not sign up for,  the question of "what should the meeting produce?" changes.

It is not enough to send a deck. The deck is not the argument. The deck is the raw material from which the argument has to be built, in the language of an organisation you do not work inside. Five things must leave the meeting in your champion's hands. Not in a follow-up email. Not in a shared drive. In their head, in a form they can use immediately.

One. The single-line frame. The reason this matters now, expressed in a sentence the champion would be willing to say out loud in front of their CFO. Not your marketing tagline. Their version of it, in their words, agreed in the room.

Two. The two objections that will come up, and the rebuttals in their language. Not yours. Theirs. The champion will not parrot your battlecard. They will paraphrase whatever they remember. The closer your rebuttal is to the way they already talk, the more it survives the journey from your call to their hallway.

Three. The proof point they can quote without checking. Pick one. One reference, one number, one outcome, one sentence. The champion will not flip through twelve case studies on the way to a meeting. They will remember one thing. Choose it together. Make it stick.

Four. The honest weakness. Tell them what your product does not do, today, that matters to their environment. Then tell them how to handle it. Buyers do not punish honest limitations. They punish surprises. If your champion is ambushed in a meeting by a weakness they did not know about, they are not your champion anymore. They are someone with a personal reason to stop defending you.

Five. The map of who else needs to hear what. Not "the buying committee",  that is your language. Their version. Names. Roles. Concerns. The specific Slack channel where the decision is being pre-discussed. The person in finance who will quietly veto this in week three if not handled in week one. Your champion knows. You only know if you ask.

These five are not the agenda for the meeting. They are the output of the meeting. If they are not in the champion's possession when the call ends, the meeting did not happen.

Why this works, the IKEA effect, and why people defend what they help build

There is a useful piece of research from Norton, Mochon and Ariely on what they call the IKEA effect. Their 2012 finding, subsequently confirmed across 55 studies and over 5,400 participants in a 2026 meta-analysis, showed that people place disproportionate value on outcomes they have personally assembled, even when the assembly is trivial. They will pay more for a wonky bookshelf they built themselves than for a perfect one delivered ready-made. (Norton, Mochon, Ariely — Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2012)

The same psychology applies to the internal sale. A champion who co-builds the business case with you is no longer defending your argument upward. They are defending their own. The narrative gains a force it could not have if you had handed it to them complete. They will remember it more accurately. They will repair it under pressure. They will care whether it wins.

This is the practical reason that great sellers spend less time presenting to champions and more time co-creating with them. It is not collaboration as a soft skill. It is a mechanism for making the argument survive a room the seller will never enter.

A useful counter-rule follows from this. If, at the end of a champion meeting, your champion can repeat your pitch back to you almost verbatim, you have not equipped them. You have rehearsed them. Rehearsals do not survive contact with a sceptical CFO. Arguments the champion helped write do.

The test before you leave the call

There is one question that distinguishes a well-equipped champion from a confident-looking one. It can be asked at the end of any late-stage meeting without sounding like a sales trainer.

"If your CFO walked into your office tomorrow and asked you why we are spending [the number] on this, what would you tell them,  in two sentences?"

The answer reveals everything. A Mobilizer will pause, think, and give you a version of an argument you can polish. A Talker will give you a fluent, content-free reassurance. The deal's fate is largely visible in those next ten seconds.

If the answer is weak, you have not lost the deal. You have found the work. The remainder of the meeting becomes that work: building the answer with them, until it is good enough that they would actually use it.

That is the meeting that produces a closed deal. Not the one with the most slides.

What the next generation of sales support has to address

Most of the tools that surround a modern seller are built for the meeting they attend or the recording they review afterwards. Both are useful. Neither is where the deal is decided.

The meeting you are not in cannot be recorded. It cannot be coached after the fact. It can only be prepared for, by what leaves the room with your champion before they walk into it. The next generation of sales support has to take that reality seriously: the moments inside a live conversation where the seller, with the right answer in front of them, equips the champion with something defensible enough to win an argument the seller will never hear.

That is the design problem worth solving. It is also the work that, when done well, makes the difference between a deal that closes and a deal that quietly fades into the 40 to 60% of qualified B2B opportunities that end in no decision at all. (Dixon & McKenna, HBR — Stop Losing Sales to Customer Indecision)

The deal is not lost in your meeting.

It is lost in the one you never see.

Your job is to make sure your champion is ready for it.

Headsum is built for the live moments inside a sales conversation, the moments where the right answer, said the right way, becomes the argument your champion will use after you've left the room.

Sources

• Gartner. 74% of B2B Buyer Teams Demonstrate "Unhealthy Conflict" During the Decision Process. 7 May 2025.
• Adamson, B. & Dixon, M. The New Sales Imperative. Harvard Business Review, March 2017. Originally from The Challenger Customer (2015).
• Norton, M., Mochon, D. & Ariely, D. The IKEA Effect: When labor leads to love. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2012.
• Pelled (2026), "Labor Leads to Love, Right? A Meta‐Analysis of the IKEA Effect" — Psychology & Marketing
• Dixon, M. & McKenna, T. Stop Losing Sales to Customer Indecision. Harvard Business Review, June 2022. The Jolt Effect (book), 2022.