Business Growth

The Stakeholder Concern Matrix: One Pitch Can't Win a Buying Group

Most service founders build one pitch and deliver it to everyone. The deck that impressed the champion gets forwarded to finance, to operations, to the person who has to live with the tool, and to the executive who signs. The founder assumes a strong argument is a strong argument. It isn't. The champion loved it because it answered the champion's question. Everyone else opened the same file and found nothing addressed to them, so they defaulted to the safest answer available to a busy person with no stake in your success: not yet. The wrong question is "how do I make my pitch more persuasive?" A more persuasive single pitch just fails more confidently. The actual question is "how many different people have to say yes, and what is each one actually worried about?" Because the modern B2B decision is not made by a buyer. It is made by a committee that mostly disagrees with itself. A single pitch cannot win a buying group, because the average purchase now involves six to ten decision-makers, each arriving with their own independently gathered information and their own priorities , and roughly three-quarters of those buyer teams report open conflict during the decision . Your job is not to be more convincing. It is to arm each stakeholder with the specific version of the argument that resolves their specific concern.

Joshua Agonya Pi'Rwot

By Joshua Agonya Pi'Rwot

Founder, Business Growth Accelerator

Executive summary

The average B2B deal now has 6 to 10 decision-makers with conflicting priorities. Map each one's concern and give them the version of your pitch that answers it.

Section 1

The room is not one buyer, and it barely wants to meet you

Gartner's research on the B2B buying journey puts the average buying group at six to ten decision-makers, each of whom shows up having done four or five pieces of independent research and formed a view before the group ever aligns . That is the structural reality behind every stalled proposal: you are not persuading a person, you are trying to get a committee of semi-strangers to agree, and committees do not agree by default. It gets harder. Gartner's 2025 sales survey found that 74% of B2B buyer teams demonstrate what it calls "unhealthy conflict" during the decision process . The room you are pitching is not a unified audience nodding along. It is a set of people with competing incentives who are, quietly, arguing with each other about whether this is worth it. When you deliver one pitch to that room, you are handing the same message to a finance lead who wants to know the payback period and to a delivery manager who wants to know whether this creates more work. Neither gets their answer, so neither becomes your advocate. And you are not in the room much. Gartner found buyers spend only about 17% of the entire purchase journey meeting with all potential suppliers combined, which drops to roughly 5% or 6% of their time with any one vendor when they are comparing options . Most of the deciding happens when you are not there. That is the part founders underestimate: the deck you present is not the deck that decides the deal. The version that gets forwarded, skimmed, and argued over in a meeting you are not invited to is what decides it. So it has to travel without you, and it has to answer each person on its own.

Section 2

Why the same slide reads as three different messages

Consider a $45,000 marketing-operations engagement sold to a mid-sized company. One slide says: "We rebuild your lead-routing system so the sales team stops losing inbound requests." Read that slide as three people. The champion, a marketing director, reads it as vindication. They have complained about lost leads for a year and this is proof someone finally understands. To them the slide is exciting. The CFO reads the same slide and sees cost with no number attached. "Rebuild" means time, disruption, and a bill. There is no payback figure, no quantified cost of the leads currently being lost, nothing that survives the question every finance leader is trained to ask: what do we get back, and when? To the CFO the slide is a request for money with the justification missing. The head of sales operations reads it a third way and feels a threat. "Rebuild your lead-routing system" means their existing setup, which they built, is being called broken, and it means a migration they will have to manage on top of their current workload. To them the slide is a risk and an insult. One slide, three reactions, and only one of them helps you. This is why strong pitches still die. The argument was never weak. It was simply written to one person while three people had to approve it. Corporate Visions research on B2B buying underlines the specific gap that sinks these deals: sellers who cannot connect their solution to a defensible financial case struggle to win and retain business, because the people scrutinizing the money are no longer satisfied by enthusiasm . The champion's excitement does not transfer. The CFO's spreadsheet does.

Section 3

The Stakeholder Concern Matrix

The fix is not a better pitch. It is a mapped set of answers, one per concern. Before you send anything, identify who touches the decision and write down what each person is actually protecting. Most service deals feature some version of these five roles. The matrix is not busywork. It is the difference between a proposal that dies in a forwarded email and one that equips your champion to win the argument on your behalf while you are absent for 95% of the decision . Notice the two ends of the table. The CFO and the intern, the two people the founder is most tempted to lump together as "everyone else," want almost opposite things. The CFO wants the number and the downside. The intern wants to know whether Tuesday gets easier. Give the CFO the intern's workflow story and you get a shrug. Give the intern the payback model and you get a blank stare. Same deal, opposite proof.

Section 4

How to build and deliver it without writing five decks

You do not need five separate presentations. You need one core narrative and a set of concern-specific inserts you can route to the right person. Four steps. 1. List the actual names, then the actual concerns. On your discovery calls, stop asking only "who else is involved?" and start asking "when this goes to finance, what will they push back on?" and "who has to actually use this, and what do they care about?" You are reverse-engineering the matrix from the mouth of your champion. If you cannot name the economic buyer and their single biggest objection, you are not ready to send a proposal. A structured way to capture this before every proposal lives in the free LeverageOS starter guide. 2. Write the CFO's page first, because it is the one you are worst at. Founders default to the champion's page because it is the fun one to write. The page that decides the deal is the one with the payback math and the cost of inaction. Put a real number on what the current problem costs per month, and a real number on what the engagement returns. If you cannot, your deal is exposed at exactly the point where 74% of buyer teams are already arguing . 3. Arm the champion to carry the argument. Your champion will be in rooms you are not. Give them a short, forwardable summary they can paste into an email, a one-line answer to the CFO's objection, and a reference they can name. You are not writing to persuade the champion. You are writing so the champion can persuade the CFO. 4. Address the delivery owner's fear on purpose. The person who owns the current system is the quiet deal-killer, because "this is risky and disruptive" is the easiest sentence in the world to say in a meeting. Name the migration plan, name who does the work, and frame their existing setup as a foundation you are extending, not a mistake you are correcting.

Section 5

You're running the Stakeholder Concern Matrix right when…

You're running it right when you can name every person who touches the decision and state, in one sentence each, what they are protecting, before you send a single document. You're running it right when your champion has a forwardable version they can defend without you in the room, and when your CFO page leads with a number instead of a feature. You're running it right when you have caught yourself about to send the champion's excited pitch to the whole committee and stopped, because you remembered that the person signing the check and the person using the tool are reading two different documents even when you send them the same file. And you're running it right when a "great meeting" no longer surprises you by going silent, because you stopped mistaking one person's enthusiasm for a group's decision.

FAQ

Direct answers for operators.

How do I find out who the real economic buyer is without seeming pushy?

Ask it as a process question, not a power question: "When something like this gets approved, who signs off, and what do they usually want to see?" Buyers answer that willingly because it sounds like you are trying to make their internal path easier, which you are. If your champion cannot answer it, that is a qualification signal in itself, because a champion who does not know how the money gets approved cannot get you approved.

Isn't tailoring the message to each person just telling people what they want to hear?

No. The core facts stay identical. You are changing which true thing you lead with and which proof you attach, not the claim. The CFO's payback number and the user's workflow improvement are both real; you are routing each fact to the person it actually answers. Telling people what they want to hear means bending the truth. Multi-threading means delivering the same truth in the order each person can act on.

I'm a solo founder selling to small companies. Do I really have six to ten stakeholders?

Often fewer, but rarely one. Even a two-person client usually splits into the person who feels the problem and the person who controls the money, and those are different concerns even when it is the same human wearing two hats. Map the concerns, not just the headcount. The buying-group average of six to ten is the ceiling ; the floor is almost never a single undivided buyer.

Where does this fit against actually closing the deal?

The matrix is the setup, not the close. It makes sure every objection is pre-answered before the decision meeting you are not invited to. The mechanics of working the opportunity from qualified to signed, handling live objections and structuring the proposal conversation, live in the ConvertOS playbook, which picks up where a fully mapped buying group hands off.

Joshua Agonya Pi'Rwot

Written by

Joshua Agonya Pi'Rwot

Founder, Business Growth Accelerator · Country Director, AVODA Group Uganda · EMBA

Joshua helps service-business operators turn scattered marketing into a clear path from first attention to booked call. He is Founder of Business Growth Accelerator and Country Director of AVODA Group Uganda.