Why B2B Deals Stall and How Buyer Intent Data Fixes It
Research published by LinkedIn and Bain & Company in mid-2026, based on a survey of 750 B2B buyers across multiple territories, found something that should reshape how most vendors think about pipeline: 40% of B2B deals stall not because a competitor wins, but because the buying group simply can't agree the decision is safe to make. Nobody loses. The deal just stops moving.
The research names the underlying force FOMU, fear of messing up, and it's a genuinely different problem than the one most demand generation programs are built to solve. A vendor can win the champion's attention, run a flawless demo, and still watch a deal die quietly in procurement because nobody outside the champion's inbox ever saw enough proof to feel safe signing off.
What is Buyability?
Buyability is the term LinkedIn and Bain use for how safe and defensible a purchase decision feels, not to one champion, but to the entire buying group that has to collectively sign off on it. A vendor with strong Buyability gives every function in that group, not just the person running the evaluation, enough proof and reassurance to feel confident co-signing the decision. It's less about whether the product is good and more about whether the choice is one nobody on the buying committee will regret putting their name on.
What Buyability Actually Measures
The LinkedIn and Bain research scores five things buyers need to feel before they'll commit:
- Confidence the product actually works
- An easy buying process
- Alignment across the buying group
- A sense that downside risk is manageable
- Defensibility of the decision itself
Of those five, defensibility ranked highest, ahead of even product confidence.
What's striking is what actually drives that defensibility. It isn't a spec sheet or a security questionnaire. According to the research, defensibility comes largely from relational signals: does this vendor work with companies like mine, do people I trust recommend them, does their team feel like it understands how my business actually operates. A buyer can be personally sold and still hesitate to bring that recommendation to Finance and Legal if there's nothing concrete they can point to that makes the choice feel defensible to people who weren't in the room for the pitch.
The Real Problem: Proof Reaches the Champion, Not the Committee
Most B2B marketing programs are built around a single persona, the champion, the person actively evaluating solutions and talking to sales. That's who gets the case study, the ROI calculator, the demo follow-up.
Finance, Legal, Procurement, and whichever VP has to sign off rarely see any of it directly. They hear about the vendor secondhand, through a summary the champion puts together under time pressure, often stripped of exactly the proof points that would make the decision feel safe to co-sign. This is the same blind spot behind a lot of inflated lead scores that never turn into closed revenue: a score built entirely around one contact's engagement says nothing about whether the other five people who have to approve the deal feel safe doing so. Reaching the rest of that buying group is a distribution problem, but most marketing programs still point everything at the same single persona everyone else is already targeting, which means they're solving the wrong half of the Buyability problem.
How Targeted Distribution Closes the Defensibility Gap
Getting existing proof, case studies, benchmark reports, peer comparisons, in front of the full buying committee rather than just the champion is a distribution fix for a psychological problem. If Finance sees a case study from a company their size before they're ever asked to approve a budget, and Legal sees how a comparable company handled the same contract terms, the defensibility gap the research describes starts closing before the internal conversation even happens.
This is a meaningfully different goal than most volume-driven marketing programs are built around. It isn't about generating more leads. It's about making sure the specific proof each buying-group function actually needs is already sitting in front of them by the time the champion asks for a signature.
Where B2B Intent Data Fits In
The obvious challenge with reaching a whole buying committee is that most of it never fills out a form. B2B intent data solves the identification half of that problem, tracking research activity across the wider web to show which accounts, and increasingly which functions within those accounts, are actively evaluating a category, well before anyone from Finance or Legal ever engages directly.
B2B buyer intent data specifically tracks the kind of behavior that signals a buying group is forming: multiple people at the same company researching overlapping topics, competitor comparisons, pricing and implementation questions, all within a tight window. Sales intent data narrows that further to commercially relevant signals, the difference between someone reading a general industry article and someone actively comparing named vendors. Layer that intent signal onto proof-point distribution, and the right content starts reaching the people who actually need to feel safe about this decision, not just the one person already convinced.
A Practical Workflow for Reaching the Full Buyer Group
- Map the likely buying committee for a given deal size and industry, not just the champion's title, but the functions that typically get pulled in for approval at that contract value, the same account-level thinking behind a well-run account-based marketing program.
- Build a small asset library targeted at each function: a peer-comparison case study for Finance, a security and compliance summary for Legal, an implementation timeline for whoever owns operational risk.
- Watch for intent signals from a target account, then get the right asset in front of the right function through the channels they actually use, industry publications, LinkedIn, targeted email, rather than funneling everything through the champion.
- Track engagement at the account level, not just by individual contact, so a spike in Legal-relevant content engagement becomes a visible signal rather than noise buried in a CRM.
- Close the loop with sales by asking what actually got a deal unstuck in the handoff conversation, since that feedback is what keeps the asset library aligned with what buying committees genuinely need to feel defensible.
Common Mistakes That Quietly Undermine Buyability
A few patterns show up repeatedly in programs that miss this entirely. Content built exclusively around the champion's job title, with nothing built for Finance, Legal, or Procurement specifically. Case studies that lean on generic outcomes instead of the specific, peer-comparable proof the research says actually drives defensibility. Distribution measured purely on lead volume, with no visibility into whether the right functions inside a target account ever actually engaged. And proof points sent only after a deal stalls, rather than positioned in front of the full committee earlier, before FOMU has a chance to set in.
Why This Matters More With AI-Mediated Buyer Research
A separate piece of LinkedIn's 2026 research found that the vast majority of B2B buying groups now use large language models during their research process. The signals that make a vendor feel defensible to a human buyer, peer relevance, consistent presence, credible third-party proof, are increasingly the same signals AI retrieval systems draw on when a buyer asks an AI tool which vendors to consider. A strategy built around defensibility and intent isn't just solving a 2026 sales problem. It's building the same signal layer that AI-mediated discovery is starting to run on.
Conclusion
The instinct in most B2B marketing is to sell harder to the person already interested. The Buyability research suggests the bigger opportunity is making sure everyone else in the buying group, the people who never asked for a demo but still have to sign off, has enough proof to feel safe saying yes. B2B intent data, aimed at the whole committee instead of just the champion, is a practical way to close that gap before a deal ever has the chance to quietly stall.