The New Reality of Enterprise Buying: Why Sales Leaders Must Stop Selling to Buyers and Start Influencing Networks
For a long time, enterprise sellers believed success depended on winning over a tidy internal buying committee: the champion, the technical owner, procurement, and the economic sponsor. It was never entirely true, and today it is miles off the mark. Buyers no longer operate as a closed group. They operate as networks, with influence coming from peers, partners, external advisors, analysts, online communities and even AI tools shaping their thinking before a salesperson is invited in.
When I step into organisations as an interim or fractional sales director, the deals that stall or wander tend to have one thing in common. The sales team sells to the people they can see, but the decision is being shaped by people they cannot. A single negative comment in a Slack group, a consultant whispering caution, a peer recommending an alternative, or an AI assistant ranking vendors in a crude comparison can shift a deal more than a polished discovery call ever will. That is the reality. The buying narrative starts long before you introduce yourself.
The first major shift sales leaders must accept is that buying decisions no longer happen inside the walls of the customer organisation. A technology director may rely heavily on a trusted ex-colleague in another company. A CFO might sense-check your numbers with their external advisors. A head of digital might ask their implementation partner which platform will create the least downstream friction. All of these voices shape the outcome, yet none of them appear in your stakeholder map. If your message cannot travel to them cleanly, you have no control over the story being told about you.
The second shift is the collapse of the linear buying journey. If you still imagine a predictable flow from awareness to interest to evaluation, you are working with a map that no longer describes the territory. Today buyers loop, jump, rewind and explore in fragments. They research quietly in the dark funnel, form opinions long before formal engagement, and bring assumptions into the process that were shaped entirely outside your view. By the time a rep speaks to a stakeholder, the perception of your solution has often already been formed.
The real problem is that most sales playbooks continue to act as if none of this exists. They treat the internal group as the centre of gravity and ignore the wider ecosystem of influence. This is where deals get lost. You can present a flawless business case to the committee, only to have an unseen consultant undermine it in a side conversation you never knew happened.
The winning teams I work with approach the challenge very differently. They design messaging in a way that travels naturally across the network, not just within the meeting. They create simple, durable narratives that remain accurate when repeated by others. If a consultant paraphrases your value proposition in a steering group, it still lands correctly. If a peer summarises your strengths informally, it reinforces your position. Even when an AI model scrapes your website and condenses your value into a two-paragraph summary, it still reflects your true advantage.
These teams also build toolkits that equip every influence point, not just the primary contact. They produce finance-friendly explanations of predictable cost and measurable value. They create technical material that addresses architecture, scalability and integration concerns. They build practitioner-focused stories that speak to speed, ease, reliability and day-to-day impact. They prepare partner-ready content that makes it easy for agencies and implementation consultants to advocate for them. Instead of one deck, they enable a network.
Finally, the best commercial organisations view signals as intelligence, not noise. They pay close attention to the early movements within the buying network. They notice when an account suddenly consumes content at a higher rate, when multiple stakeholders engage with the same resource, or when a partner starts researching related problems. They recognise when an organisation shifts from mild curiosity to early evaluation, often before the buyer realises it themselves. These clues tell you where the real momentum sits.
The most successful sales leaders today are not just deal managers. They are network orchestrators who understand the reality of how enterprise decisions are made. They shape the narrative in places they cannot attend. They influence people they never meet. And they build systems that allow their story to travel without distortion.
If your commercial organisation is still optimised for the old model of buyer groups rather than modern buying networks, you will feel the symptoms: elongated cycles, unexplained stalls, last minute surprises and inconsistent forecast confidence. The moment you reorient your GTM motion around the network, the difference is striking. Consensus comes faster. Momentum is easier to maintain. Competitive cycles become clearer. Win rates rise. And your message finally reaches the people who matter most.
If you want support adapting your sales motion to this new buying reality, I am happy to take a look at where your biggest opportunities sit.