One contact is not a deal
The champion was great. Three demos, an internal business case, the meeting with the executive team was half booked. Then the LinkedIn notification: Markus has a new position, different company, congratulations. Your 80,000 euro deal, carried in the forecast as Commit, becomes a dead record in that second. Nobody else at the target account knows you. Nobody feels responsible. The deal does not die dramatically, it evaporates.
That is not bad luck. That is a structural flaw with a name: single-threading. One AE, one contact, one relationship, and all knowledge about the deal lives in exactly one head. It feels efficient, but it is the most fragile construction you can build into a pipeline. Buying decisions at companies between 20 and 200 people run through five to eight participants: executive team, business unit, IT, sometimes an advisory board that can overturn everything at the end. If you know only one of them, you do not know the deal.
The test takes two minutes. Open ten open opportunities and count how many contacts with a role are attached. In the system, not in the AE’s head. At most companies we audit, the number is: one. Sometimes zero, because the opportunity hangs directly off the account and the actual contact person exists only in the email history.
Yet Salesforce, HubSpot, and Dynamics can all do this natively. Contact roles, buying roles, the name varies, the mechanics do not: champion, economic buyer, blocker, technical evaluator, all mappable without buying a single new tool. You just have to enforce it. A validation that stops deals from advancing past stage three until at least two roles are maintained costs one afternoon of configuration. After that the forecast looks different, because deals with a single contact light up as risk instead of slipping through as Commit.
And suddenly multithreading becomes measurable. Average roles per won deal set against lost deals: the analysis rarely surprises, won deals almost always have more maintained contacts. So the reporting delivers the counterargument to the grumbling about required fields all by itself.
Sure, sales will groan. Let them. The alternative is that your knowledge about the most important deal of the quarter hangs on a single person, and people change jobs. On the customer’s side or on yours, the risk is symmetrical.
If your best AE leaves tomorrow: how many of his deals could someone take over using only what is in the CRM?
