39% of CMOs have a stage-based buying process where their team does the initial shortlisting and the CMO only gets involved when it's down to the final few vendors (Wynter, 2025 CMO B2B SaaS Buyer Journey Report).
The person who signs off on your £100k deal probably never googled you. They never saw your LinkedIn post. They never read your blog. They got handed a shortlist by someone two levels below them and said "yeah, these three look good, set up the calls."
And yet, almost every agency I speak to is still building marketing for the decision-maker. The MD, the CMO, the VP of Ecommerce. The person who signs the contract.
They're marketing to the wrong person.
The shortlist is built before you know it exists
Bain & Co. surveyed over 1,200 B2B customers and found that more than 80% have a shortlist of vendors in mind before they even start formally researching, and 90% will buy from that initial list.
This is why we talk about "being the obvious choice" with every client we work with. If you're not already on that shortlist when the buying process starts, you're not competing. You're making up the numbers. You're the third quote the CFO asked for so the process looks legitimate. I wrote about this recently, the Due Diligence D*ckhead problem, where agencies pour time and effort into RFPs they were never going to win because the decision was made months ago. The agency that wins didn't win it in the pitch. They won it by being present, useful, and familiar long before anyone started thinking about procurement.
That's what being the obvious choice means. Not being the best at proposals. Being the name that's already in the room when someone says "who should we talk to?"
Gartner puts it another way: for complex B2B solutions, a typical buying group includes 6–10 decision makers, each entering the process with 4–5 pieces of independent research they already share amongst the group.
So the list is being built by multiple people, mostly independently, mostly before you've had a chance to pitch. The senior person at the top isn't discovering you. They're validating a decision that's already half-made.
And here's the bit that matters for this article: if you're only visible to one type of person in that buying group, you might be the obvious choice to the CTO but a complete unknown to the CFO. You're on half the shortlist. Which means you're on no shortlist at all.
The buying committee isn't one person. It's a mess.
Bain's research breaks the typical B2B buying committee into three tiers:
The "ultimate approvers" who make the final call. The core buying committee who does the heavy lifting, the research, the evaluation, the comparison. And internal influencers, usually end users, who provide the expert insights.
The critical finding? Convincing the core committee, not the ultimate approvers, is the most important factor in closing the deal.
That core committee is where the work happens. They're the ones reading your case studies at 10pm. They're the ones forwarding your PDF to their boss with "this lot seem to know what they're doing." They're the ones deciding whether you even get a meeting.
And they have completely different questions to the person who signs off on the spend.
Different people need different content. Obviously. But nobody does it.
This is where most agency marketing falls apart. You write one set of content. It speaks to one type of person. Usually the most senior one, because that feels impressive. And then you wonder why your pipeline is full of tyre-kickers and "we'll come back to you in Q3."
I'll give you a real example.
We ran a headless Shopify campaign for an agency. Ten pieces of content. Case studies, comparison pieces, technical breakdowns, long-form blogs on how headless affects internationalisation, advice on who to partner with and who to avoid.
It started as a campaign aimed at CTOs and senior developers, the people most likely to be evaluating headless architecture. And it worked. Traffic came in. Leads started moving.
But then we noticed something in the data. CFOs were engaging with the content. Not just opening emails, actually downloading assets, revisiting pages, spending time on the technical pieces. CFOs, on headless Shopify content.
Which makes sense once you think about it. A headless build isn't a cheap decision. It changes the cost structure. It affects timelines, maintenance budgets, and total cost of ownership. Of course the CFO is going to want to understand what's going on before they sign off.
So we made content specifically for them. Cost breakdowns, ROI framing, timeline expectations, and risk.
Not because we wanted to "sell" headless to a CFO, but because that CFO was a blocker. They were part of the buying committee whether the agency knew it or not. And if they didn't have answers to their questions, the deal would stall or die.
The campaign generated 3,152 qualified leads, 23 new clients, and roughly £1 million in attributed revenue. From 10 pieces of content.
Most of those 23 clients didn't even go headless. The campaign wasn't about selling headless. It was about positioning the agency as the people who understand Shopify architecture better than anyone else. So when those leads were ready to build, whatever they needed, they knew who to call.
That only happened because the marketing spoke to every person in the room. Not just the one holding the pen.
So what does this actually mean for your marketing?
It means you need to stop thinking about "who's our ICP" as a single person and start thinking about the buying committee.
For most agencies selling £50k+ projects, there are at least three or four people involved:
The researcher, usually mid-level, technically competent, doing the initial homework. They need proof you know your stuff. Deep content. Specifics. Not fluff.
The influencer, often a senior manager or department head who'll champion you internally. They need a clear narrative they can repeat to their boss. Why you, why now, why not someone else.
The blocker, frequently finance, procurement, or legal. They need risk mitigation, cost clarity, and evidence that this isn't going to go wrong.
The signer, the MD, CMO, or VP who gives final approval. They need confidence that their team has done the work and that this is a safe bet. By the time they're involved, your marketing's job is reassurance, not persuasion.
Most agency marketing only speaks to one of these people. Usually the signer. Sometimes the researcher. Almost never the blocker.
And that's where deals die.
The practical bit
Map the committee before you write a single piece of content. For your last five closed deals, ask: who was involved? Who found you? Who championed you internally? Who nearly killed the deal? You'll start to see patterns.
Build content for each tier. Your case studies should have a version that speaks to the CTO and a version that speaks to the CFO. Not different case studies, different angles on the same story.
Watch the data. If you're running HubSpot or any decent nurture system, look at who's engaging. If you see job titles you didn't expect showing up in your sequences, don't ignore it. Build for them.
Give your sales team ammunition for the people they'll never meet. In a £100k deal, your salesperson will probably never speak to the CFO directly. But they can arm the internal champion with a one-pager that answers the CFO's exact questions. That's marketing's job.
Stop measuring content by how many MDs read it. The marketing manager who downloads your guide and forwards it to three colleagues is worth more than an MD who glances at your LinkedIn post and scrolls on.
The person who signs the contract is important. But they're the last person in a long chain of people who all had to say yes before they ever saw your name.
If your marketing only talks to the end of that chain, you'll never reach the beginning of it.
Sources: Wynter CMO B2B SaaS Buyer Journey Report (2025), Bain & Co. B2B Buying Study, Gartner B2B Buying Journey Research, TrustRadius 2025 Buyer Research Report. Campaign data from Waye client engagement, full case study here.