B2B buying is a committee sport. Forrester puts the average buying group at 13 stakeholders; 6sense’s data lands around 10. The handoff leak is not missing the account — it is identifying seven people and calling one.
For years the unit of B2B pipeline was the lead. One person, one form fill, one handoff. That model made sense when a single decision-maker signed the cheque. It does not reflect how anything gets bought now. Forrester moved its Revenue Waterfall unit from leads to buying groups for a reason, and LeanData’s 2026 State of GTM Efficiency reports over 50% of companies now prioritise opportunity-centric execution over lead-centric. The industry is shifting. Most handoff processes have not caught up.
The new leak
Here is where it breaks. Marketing runs account-based programmes, identifies seven stakeholders at a target account, and hands the account to an AE. The AE calls the one person who filled out the demo form. The other six are in the CRM, tagged, enriched — and untouched.
This pattern shows up constantly — a mid-market cybersecurity vendor is a typical case. Marketing handed off 42 accounts with an average of six identified buying-group members each. A review of activity logs three weeks later showed AEs had contacted a single stakeholder in 38 of the 42 accounts. Twelve of those deals stalled in discovery — not because the product was wrong, but because the champion could not build internal consensus alone and nobody helped them. The opps were not lost. They were abandoned at the exact point where a second contact would have changed the outcome.
How to measure it
The diagnostic is simple and most teams do not run it. Compare two numbers: opportunities created with three or more contacts attached, against buying-group members identified pre-handoff. The gap is your leak. If marketing identifies six people and your opps average one contact, five people evaporate at the handoff boundary. That is not a sales effort problem. It is a handoff design problem.
What changes
The handoff stops being “here is a lead” and becomes “here is an account with a buying group at this stage of consensus.” The AE’s first task is multi-threading, not single-threaded discovery. Routing needs to account for the group, not just the form-filler — what is lead-to-account matching is the prerequisite. The revenue model that makes this legible is the full funnel bowtie revenue model explained, and the alignment it demands is covered in sales and marketing alignment.
The honest counterpoint
Buying-group orchestration is harder than it sounds and most CRMs are not built for it natively. Lead-centric reporting is comfortable because it is countable. Buying groups are messier — you measure coverage and consensus, not just volume. But the messy metric describes reality. The clean one describes a world that stopped existing.
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